Friday Review: MOSHPIT MASTERMINDS: Since when did nu-metal groups
talk about ‘infinite harmonies’, ‘imperialist realpolitik’ and
‘corporate enslavement’? Adam Sweeting meets System of a Down – the
band big on brains as well as album sales
The Guardian – United Kingdom
May 27, 2005
ADAM SWEETING
With his benign smile, tumbling ringlets and air of spiritual calm,
Serj Tankian could pass for a New Age healer. His bandmate Daron
Malakian is no less relaxed, content simply to light up another bong
full of aromatic weed and shoot the breeze. You’d never guess the pair
were frontmen for the Armenian-American heavy metal group System of a
Down, with a repertoire of cranium-smashing tracks called things like
BYOB (Bring Your Own Bomb).
“I’m lucky,” says Malakian, gazing up from under his floppy-brimmed
hat, “because I get to express my emotions, y’know? So many people
have no outlets, it makes them miserable, and they have to go to
therapy for it. But when I write something it gets it off my chest and
it makes me feel so much better.”
Malakian, it seems, has some hefty baggage to unload. System of a
Down’s music expresses a social and political awareness rare in heavy
metal, railing against corporate enslavement, media propaganda and, on
Mezmerize, pornographic TV and the death of American
democracy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the band enlisted Michael Moore to
shoot the dazzling people-have-the-power video for their anti-Iraq war
song, Boom!
More startling is the level of success SOAD have attained. Their music
is far from easy listening, even by heavy metal standards: its
constant episodic shifting leaves it sounding more like a particularly
angry brand of prog rock than the nu-metal bands they are routinely
lumped in with.
Theoretically at least, their vocal anti- Bush politicking seems
unlikely to do them any commercial favours in middle America. Yet
their second album, the stridently political Toxicity, reached No 1 in
the US in the same week as 9/11. It went on to sell a staggering 6m
copies. The following year, an even more politicised “companion
album”, Steal This Album, went platinum in the US.
The recently released Mezmerize – the first of two SOAD albums due
this year – is, if anything, less commercial than its
predecessors. Question! wonders what happens to us when we die. “The
song kind of asks you to ask the question,” says Tankian. “Please
question! To me, it’s been interesting – people who have had
life-after-death experiences that have been reported and written down
for scientific experiments with quantum theorists and what-not. I like
what I’ve learned about life after death.” You mean all that stuff
about seeing lights and crossing rivers? “It’s generally going into
some kind of tunnel of white light or some type of natural
crossing. Being confronted by non-judgmental beings in a world that’s
more green and musical than ours. Infinite harmonies abound. Knowledge
gained in an instant without a body to necessitate it.”
Listening to Tankian talk, the discrepancy between his karmic vibes
and the violence and ferocity of the band’s music feels
glaring. “Nothing’s written with the intention of starting a moshpit,”
says Malakian. “Me and Serj are completely different people, and
that’s what makes System what it is. Let’s just say that if Serj wrote
the bulk of the material, the chances are it wouldn’t come out that
heavy, because his influences aren’t in that kind of music.”
Malakian, on the other hand, grew up on punk, metal and classic rock,
though like his bandmates he also soaked up his fair share of
traditional Armenian music. A man with a knack for being able to pick
up almost any instrument and extract music from it, he says that when
the band was first conceived, “I was trying to write the songs that I
couldn’t buy at the store. I was trying to write the music for the
band I wanted to be a fan of.”
He’s the only one of the quartet born in the US – Hollywood,
specifically – and all of them remain powerfully connected to their
ancestry at the south-eastern edge of Europe. “The fact that we’re all
Armenian and in the same band is completely a coincidence,” says
Malakian. “It would be kind of freakish if we lived in Alabama, but
there’s a pretty big Armenian community in Los Angeles.”
It may be a trace of old Armenia you can hear in new songs like
Radio/Video, with its interludes of folk dance and polka, or Lost in
Hollywood, with its snaking minor-key melody. The band hoist their
shared roots up the flagpole with their annual Souls benefit concerts
in LA. One of its objectives is to gain official recognition of the
genocide perpetrated by Turkey against the Armenians in 1915. The US
and Britain are among those who haven’t acknowledged it, because – in
Tankian’s view – it would be politically and economically inconvenient
for them to antagonise Turkey. Tankian sees it as a microcosm of
imperialist realpolitik.
“It was a true genocide whose lessons should have been learned, and
all our grandparents and elders are survivors of it. Hitler got
pointers from it, because he saw that nobody was doing anything about
it. It opened a door for me. I thought: ‘I know this genocide is true,
but for political reasons it’s being denied by supposedly democratic
countries, so how many other lies are there?'”
Malakian’s motivations are additionally coloured by the fact that he
has a large number of family members living in Iraq, a near-neighbour
of Armenia. “I’m not an America-hater, absolutely not,” he says. “I
can’t deny the things I like that are so American, like baseball and
fast food. When we sing, “Why don’t presidents fight the war, why do
they always send the poor?” [in BYOB], we’re singing to the people who
back Bin Laden just as much as to the people who back George Bush. In
the United States there’s not a physical civil war, but there is an
ideology civil war, a civil war of ideas, and that’s just as
dangerous.”
No wonder Malakian hates System being typecast as a mere nu-metal
band, with its brain-dead connotations. “I don’t agree that we’re
anything – we’re System of a Down. I believe all music is one. The
only difference between Beethoven and heavy metal is the instruments
being used. I don’t know about time signatures or how to read music, I
just know how I want the music to feel.”
Mezmerize is out now on EMI. System of a Down play Brixton Academy,
London on June 3, then tour.