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(7/6/02 11:41 am)
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Las Vegas Review-Journal - Voice of Reason:
Las Vegas Review-Journal - Voice of Reason:
Politically minded System of a Down singer asks for peace with punishment
By DOUG ELFMAN - September 28, 2001
Original URL: www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/20...98303.html
On the same day that terrorists attacked the melting-pot capital of the world, the best-selling album in the United States was the product of a melting-pot band. "Toxicity" was the work of System of a Down, a hard-core rock quartet that has two members who were born in Lebanon, another member born in Armenia, and all four were raised in Southern California.
"It was hard to really enjoy (the album sales), because of what was going on. I wish it had happened at any other time," says System of a Down singer Serj Tankian, an Armenian-American born in Lebanon.
Tankian had the same reaction as many fellow Americans. He feared for friends and family in New York. He felt scared and helpless. And now he hopes military action will be accompanied by world peace, starting perhaps with a United Nations-led peace between Israel and Palestine.
"We should pursue (Osama) bin Laden and punish him, but at the same time, if we don't pursue setting up certain institutions of peace, in the long run, none of this will stop," he says. "Group visualization is what we need right now."
Tankian has a political background. An activist, he has lobbied the U.S. government to recognize the Armenian genocide, when Turks killed 1.5 million Armenians during and after World War I. Suddenly, he's also worrying that American freedoms will be constrained by war.
On a small but important level, his band has already been victimized by Clear Channel Communications, the largest radio-station chain in the nation. After the Sept. 11 attack, a Clear Channel program director distributed to peers a list of hundreds of songs that he said shouldn't be played on the radio.
System of a Down's hit "Chop Suey!" was on the list, possibly because of its theme about a "self-righteous suicide."
The Clear Channel list predictably included such apocalyptic songs as the Pretenders' "My City Was Gone" and violent gems such as Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe."
But the taboo roster also singled out an entire band (Rage Against the Machine), plus loads of harmless classics (Elton John's "Daniel") and peacenik anthems (John Lennon's "Imagine.")
Tankian seems irritated by his song's inclusion on the list, but he is aghast at "Imagine" being verboten.
" `Imagine' is on there? Oh my God. If there's one song that needs to be played over and over on every radio station in the country, it's `Imagine,' " he says.
Tankian, bearded and intense, says Americans should try to stem such backlashes, not to mention certain Americans' knee-jerk reaction to attack other Americans and immigrants who happen to be of Middle Eastern descent.
"It's the fear. Fear leads to hysteria, and hysteria leads to shooting down anything" through fanaticism, he says.
Tankian isn't certain how his band's heavy music will play in the new war atmosphere. System of a Down is a hard-core band, but the quartet isn't a violent, hateful group in the vein of their current tour mates, Slipknot and Rammstein.
Whereas Slipknot describes its music as something that punches people in the face and destroys them, System of a Down is a socially conscious band that tries to have fun while opining.
Tankian, a computerphile who was a dean's-lister in high school, rarely exhibits that Slipknot-vomit growl. Mostly he sings and bellows at about the tone and volume of Freddie Mercury's hardest stuff. Songs such as "Chop Suey!" even include acoustic guitar and soft piano interludes among their heavy bass lines, clever drumming and choppy guitar riffs. There are even subtle tribal rhythms and rare jazz breakdowns.
After the Sept. 11 attack, Tankian says he talked to the guys in his band and the players in the horror-masked Slipknot, who he claims are nice guys, and he believes now that he and his band just have to play their art the way they know how, regardless of the presence of war.
"Ozzy in his Black Sabbath day (sang violent material), and you have to realize that's his art and the mood he wants to portray, and he's not necessarily being literal about it. I want to honor that same umbrella of art."
System of a Down's art is most noteworthy for its thoughtful, easy-to-hear lyrics, which Tankian alternately sings, spits and rushes out in fits of commentary tempered by wit.
In "Psycho," Tankian makes fun of drugged-out groupies, chanting: "Psycho, groupie, cocaine, crazy!" "Shimmy" goes: "I wanna shimmy, shimmy, shimmy till the break of dawn, yeah."
And the "Prison Song" reads like an essay with "Oh baby" thrown in:
"They're trying to build a prison for you and me. Oh baby, you and me. All research and successful drug policy show that treatment should be increased and law enforcement decreased, while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences."
Onstage, the band mixes politics with fun, Tankian says. He'll be singing about politics upfront while guitarist Daron Malakian, a porno devotee who sometimes uses a vibrator in place of a guitar pick, is over on the side of the stage, trying to get women to make out with each other.
"There are tunes when he and I are saying things in between songs," Tankian says. "I'll be talking about (politics), and he'll be telling everyone to flip themselves off."
But they may stop all that for a while after their current American tour. Like other bands, System of a Down might opt out of foreign travel for a while and wait out military action.
"After the tour, we were planning on going to Europe, but now I feel very uncomfortable being on tour. If there's a war, I don't want to leave my family behind."
http://pub27.ezboard.com/bsystemofadownboard91102
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