NON-ALIGNED YET MILITANT: SYSTEM OF A DOWN USE THEIR POLITICALLY LACED HARD ROCK TO DRAW ATTENTION TO THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND TO THE CLASS CLEAVAGES OF U.S. MILITARISM
by MARK LEGPAGE, Freelance
The Gazette (Montreal)
August 29, 2005 Monday
Final Edition
“As the father of a dead U.S. serviceman…”
There’s a line no senator will ever utter. Remarkably, it doesn’t
offend the average American – it’s never mentioned in the press,
nor by the Sunday morning pundits – that no serving politician in
Congress has a kid on the line in Iraq.
System of a Down are not average Americans.
“Why don’t presidents fight the wars / Why do they always send the
poor? Why do they always send the poor?” howls Serj Tankian in BYOB
on the band’s latest album, Mezmerize. As full a hard-rock protest
album as will be released this year, it is also one of the very few
(name another) truly angry politicized albums of the decade.
This is disheartening. This should be a firing offense. The least a
band of musicians who’ve escaped serious employment could be expected
to do, you’d imagine, is engage the largest issue of their era.
Why do they always send the poor? “I think it makes a lot of sense
to send the poor if you’re affluent and have a lot to lose,” System
drummer John Dolmayan says. “You don’t look at people who have very
little money as having anything to lose.”
But “whether you’re a billionaire or working at McDonald’s, you still
have a life – and a right to it.”
Against all odds, System of a Down is a “successful rock band.” Its
2001 6-million-selling breakthrough Toxicity (with its crazed single
Chop Suey!) brought a mainstream (or at least mass) audience to a band
with a shared ethnicity whose singer is a vocal, neck-tendon-baring
dissident. As I credit Dolmayan for his band’s having launched itself
into the political arena so aggressively, he takes a small half-step
backwards.
“I don’t know if we’re as head-on as you think,” he says. “We’re not
necessarily (talking) just about this war, but about things that are
taking place on the planet on a daily basis.
“It takes a war to get people to pay attention to what’s happening,
when right here in America there are kids starving to death. There’s
poor people who can’t afford to eat or a decent place to sleep. These
are things that need to be addressed. It’s not just when you go to
another country and destroy their lives and uproot another civilization
that you need to start paying attention to things.”
He is, in fact, avoiding a label, not a stance. “I consider us to be a
‘non-party’ band” – by which he means “no affiliation,” not to a genre,
style or ideology. Anyway, “Definitely we’re outspoken against war.”
Sixteen shows into the current tour, Dolmayan seldom has a sense of
how the confrontational songs are going over during a performance.
What does it look like out there? “I see a blur from the stage,”
he says, “as my drumsticks are whizzing past my face.”
Small wonder. BYOB is one of 11 riff-bombs on Mezmerize (the first
in a two-album series – Hypnotize comes in November). Between the
opening fragment, Soldier Side, and the skewering, elegiac closer,
Lost in Hollywood, the band runs a tight prison-break through
mosh-happy guitars, skirling north-Middle Eastern melodic figures and
neck-violating dynamics – it’s a hard-rock diaspora of sound. BYOB
is itself three songs in one.
“That’s one of the reasons we didn’t release both albums at the same
time,” Dolmayan says. “We felt it would just be too much for people
to take.
“Some people wanna be safe, some people don’t have the capability to
do something … crazier.”
It is an oversimplification, but perhaps they had a sense that rock
‘n’ roll risks were minor-league. Bred in southern California, the
band – Tankian, Dolmayan, guitarist Daron Malakian and bassist Shavo
Odadjian – are all of Armenian heritage. Dolmayan insists this was
purely coincidental, but it is certainly crucial. That ethnicity
brings with it the shared consciousness of an ethnic rupture that
remains, unthinkably, a secret to general history – the Armenian
genocide. Denied to this day by its perpetrators, the Turks, the
events, begun in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire (1915),
constitute what Peter Jennings acknowledged was “quite simply the
first genocide of the 20th century.” Estimates of the dead range as
high as 1.5 million or “half of our population,” Dolmayan says.
“We feel it’s our responsibility to draw attention to it because most
people don’t even know it took place,” he says. Every Armenian is a
walking conscience. But Dolmayan doesn’t fetishize this. When the
amount of people killed then is contrasted, say, with the latest
offhand slaughter of 100,000 somewhere, he responds, “A hundred
thousand people is a vast amount of people! Are we really in a world
that’s so cynical that 100,000 people dead doesn’t mean anything?”
However: non-party band. The Armenian consanguinity is not just a
rallying point.
“We understand each other much better. Armenians are very
family-oriented people, even though we fight like a family sometimes.
Some of our best songs have happened after our best fights. I put
Daron in the hospital and he put me in the hospital on the same
night. Let’s just say we both had to get stitches.” So there’s more
than one way to tie a band together.