Los Angeles Times, CA
Dec 15 2007

‘Lost in Hollywood’ System of a Down | 2005

by Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 14, 2007

In the mid-1980s, Daron Malakian was a shy youngster living in an
apartment near the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine
Street, and his parents spent much of their time trying to shield his
eyes from the seedy parade of Hollywood’s sidewalks.

"From the playground of my school," Malakian recalled, "we would see
prostitutes and transvestites, guys holding hands, the homeless
people, all these things my parents really didn’t want me to see."

That playground was at the Rose and Alex Philibos Armenian School,
the same campus where two other future members of the metal band
System of a Down went to class. There, all of the boys were immersed
in the traditions of their shared Armenian heritage, but when they
rode their bikes home they passed through that chaotic asphalt
theater of Hollywood.

"It was only as I got older that I realized that not everybody grows
up like that," Malakian said.

His home life, meanwhile, was a study in artistic expression; he is
the only child of Vartan Malakian, a highly regarded painter who was
also a key choreographer in the 1970s dance community of his native
Iraq, and Zepur Malakian, a sculptor born in Iran. By 2005, Hollywood
was less scruffy, but those old memories lingered in the mind of
Malakian’s mind. By then, he had become famous to metal fans as the
guitarist and songwriter in System, the deeply eccentric L.A. band
whose sound veers from fever-dream mutter to wailing thunder, often
in the same song. "I wanted to write a song," he said, "about the way
Hollywood was." The result was the moody "Lost in Hollywood," which
he calls "the System song I’m most proud of."

I’ll wait here, you’re crazy Those vicious streets are filled with
strays You should have never gone to Hollywood They find you,
two-time you Say you’re the best they’ve ever seen You should have
never trusted Hollywood.

The lyrics are "about the broken dreams, all the people that come
here and don’t make it," he said, and it’s a collage of images
regarding the music industry, the vapid people who come to L.A. to
exploit others and the beautiful dreamers who are promised fame but
end up "out on a street corner, alone, smoking cigarettes."

As a kids, Malakian and his friends would scale a cement wall that
took them to a low rooftop with wood planks and a view looking south
on a corner of Santa Monica Boulevard. Years later, the shy boy wrote
with jagged emotions about that view from the past.

I was standing on the wall Feeling ten feet tall All you maggots
smoking fags on Santa Monica Boulevard This is my front page This is
my new age