“It’s not hard for me because we’ve been working together for over 10 years,” Serj points out. Malakian’s increased foreground presence poses no problems for Tankian. Malakian not only produced the band’s magnum opus with Rick Rubin, as he did with Toxicity and Steal This Album!, but also increased his already considerable song, arrangement and vocal contributions, stepping forward both as a lead vocalist and as one half of System’s distinctive harmonies. And how people want to look at that and understand it is really up to each individual.” Every album captures where you are at that moment, but almost instantly you’re in a new place, as soon as it’s recorded, so it’s just basically a window into where you’re going in the future. It’s more melodic but at the same time more aggressive. “I look at everything we do as a continuation because it’s the same band and the same four individuals,” says Dolmayan, “So Mezmerize /Hypnotize is still System of a Down, but definitely there’s a huge growth. We’ve gotta impress ourselves before we impress the fansyou gotta love yourself first, you know? I’ve gotta feel like we have everything it takes to make a record that’s better than anything we’ve done.” Some bands are afraid of their fans: ‘They’re not gonna like this and they’re not gonna like that.’ We don’t have that mindset. By not being afraid to use the new ideas that we have. “And the answer is: by not competing with it. “People ask, ‘How are you gonna compete with Toxicity?’” Malakian points out. Thus, Mezmerize /Hypnotize is both the long-awaited follow-up to Toxicity in big-picture terms and a natural progression from Steal This Album! in a musical sense. With Steal!, System, which up to that point had pitched nothing but fastballs (although some were of the split-finger variety), showed that it had a command of all kinds of stuff, and potent stuff at that. Just over a year later, the band offered up Steal This Album!, made up of tracks that had been started during the Toxicity sessions but didn’t fit that album’s dedicated confrontational vibetracks that put a greater emphasis on melody and the two-part harmonies of Malakian and Tankian. The album generated four Top 10 singles, including the #1 “Aerials,” and went on to sell 6 million copies, establishing System not as some prefab mainstream commercial entity but rather as an urgent voice in the uncharted wilderness that was heardand believedby a great many human beings. Perhaps because the music of Toxicity was so uncompromising and yet so full of humanity at its extremes, it provided a suitably harrowing soundtrack for that unimaginable moment, striking a deep nerve. 12, while America and the world were paralyzed with grief, shock and fear. 4, 2001 and was at the top of the charts on Sept. Toxicity, System’s second album, appeared on Sept. I think it’s more real.”įate chose this group of Armenian Americans, two of whom were born in Lebanon, one in Armenia and another in Hollywood, as unknowing prophets. If you just let whatever expression there is come outit might be socially viable, it might be political, romantic, humorous, a personal narrative, a philosophical thought, whatever it isif it’s pure and it just comes out and you leave it that way, I think it’s more potent. I think that’s always better with art because, once you have something in mind and you try to achieve it, it becomes less pure in some ways. “And our expression is pure and natural in terms of where it comes from. “We’re artists for the sake of art,” Tankian continues. “Our music has always been urgent, critical and questioning, and that still remains,” he says. “We’re not bullshitting ourselves and we’re not bullshitting them.” “We’re really an honest bandthat’s why people are listening to us,” he asserts. If you were looking for the ultimate one-sentence summation of this extraordinary band, that’s pretty good. “This band’s what Public Enemy once was and what Rage Against the Machine never quite managed to be: the potent trifecta of credibility, sincerity and real danger,” pronounced Esquire on naming them “Best Agitators” in the magazine’s 2005 Esky Music Awards. You can count on System, one of rock’s most daring and innovative bands, to do things in its own way, and with a level of commitment that’ll knock the wind right out of you. Three years and eight months after the release of Toxicity, one of this decade’s most corrosively powerful, relevant and down-right important albums, System of a Down guitarist/singer Daron Malakian, singer Serj Tankian, bass player Shavo Odadjian and drummer John Dolmayanunleashes Mezmerize /Hypnotize Well, actually, what they’re doing is unleashing half of itthe Mezmerize halfwith the understanding that attention spans aren’t what they used to be in the Too-Much-Information Age.
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