Topic: System of a Down related articles

Care to take a guess about who were talking about? If you guessed System of a Down you are absolutely right.
The LA based band SOAD has been setting standards in the Rock scene for several years now, they have inspired many of today’s top bands and new bands who are just starting out from their garage.
Armed with the ability to fuse rock, pop and world music all in one to create tunes that can restart a failing heart, System of a Down has become a legendary force to be reckoned with.

Quiet Riot Drummer Bites Back at System of a Down Drummer

In a recent interview with Drum! magazine, System of a Down drummer John Dolmayan made the following comment:

"I learned the second mistake by not making it. Bands would live way outside their means and squander whatever they made. Quiet Riot made $20,000,000 apiece, and now they're playing 500-seat venue shows to survive. That's sad to me. Surround yourself with the people that you grew up with that you trust. I maintain my relationships with the people I knew before SOAD became the juggernaut that it is."


Quiet Riot drummer Fankie Banali strikes back with the following response:

It would not be an understatement if someone called the year of 2005 the System of a Down Year for it really was the year that marked their triumphant comeback.
The year of 2005 was indeed an excellent and prosperous year for System of a Down and their fans. With the release of their double part album, ‘Mezmerize’ and ‘Hypnotize’, after a break of 3 years, the band has returned!

Somewhere near the end of 2004, the fans were thrilled to hear that they will be treated with not only one but two albums the following year. Talk about a SOAD treat! The albums were to be released 6 months apart.
The band explained that the decision upon the release of 2 albums was a necessity due to the fact that System of a Down found it hard to single out “the best 14” for one album and therefore decided to make it a double album.

In the spring of 2003, as the nation slouched towards the mother of all strategic blunders in Iraq, I was working as a producer for Fuse, a new rival to MTV. The mood in the country was ugly. Clear Channel, the conglomerate which owns 1,700 radio stations, had issued a banned song list which included John Lennon’s Imagine. Dixie Chicks CDs were being burned in large patriotic pyres.

One of the only mainstream bands to put it on the line was the eclectic metal band System of a Down, whose hit song Boom rang out:

Boom, boom, boom, boom,
Every time you drop the bomb,
You kill the God your child has born.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.

The band produced an unapologetic antiwar music video for Boom with Michael Moore, who at the time was finishing up Fahrenheit 9/11. Shot at the massive antiwar protests held around the world in February 2003, the video inter-cut protesters decrying the looming invasion with scenes of death and destruction. It was a well-produced, stirringly populist video for a popular song. But MTV and Fuse refused to play it. A Fuse executive told me that the network declined to play the video because the U.S. Army was a major sponsor of the channel – the people in ad sales didn’t want to piss off the generals.

'Hypnotize': All the Surprises You Expect!
Before Armenian American art-metal heroes System of a Down hit big with "Mezmerize" last May, political hard-rock albums were usually pretty insufferable, filled with dated rhetoric about the New World Order (we're looking at you, Rage Against the Machine) or formless railings against the Man (everyone else). "Mezmerize" was a revelation, settling the question of what Noam Chomsky would sound like if he fronted a faster, lumpier version of Primus.

System might not have had much new to say about the war in Iraq (the band's against it, in case you were wondering), but it has an absurdist streak to rival Captain Beefheart's and an unerring instinct for the jugular, and never before have such competing instincts been put to such good use.