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YES, FUCKING yes. Every now and again rock music needs a reminder that it can be inventive, absurd, challenging and sell millions. System Of A Down are that reminder. Up against newer, younger, more visibly tormented souls who just about pass for rock stars these days, they make this shit too easy. This, their third proper album, matches anything they’ve don’t to dates and is nothing less than a sledge-hammer to the senses, an explosion where riffs fly like shrapnel and lyrics are reduced to seemingly nonsensical slogans that somehow still evoke an image, a thought or an emotion even if it’s confusion.
BYOB IS AN INCREDIBLE SONG. TALK US THROUGH IT
“The key lyric is “Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do we always send the poor?” But I’m not shouting at the president. I’m talking to the people. Like, why are we backing this thing? It’s a social message. I’m talking to the cab driver who’s sitting there with a son in Iraq. Those guy’s think its all for freedom. They believe in it. Some of these people have grandfathers who died in wars too, so it’s like a religion for them. If anything the message is to wake them up from that brainwashing” WHAT KIND OF BRAINWASHING? “It takes a lot of forms. Do you remember that movie ‘The Last Temptation Of Christ’? My mom refused to see it cos she’d been trained by the Church to think a certain way. If the truth came along she didn’t want to hear it. That’s what America needs to break out of” ‘BYOB’ IS A PROTEST SONG, YET IT’S ALSO INCREDIBLE CATCHY “Well I write everything in a ‘60s, British Pop, verse/chorus format. I’m not a riff writer or a composer. I’m a song writer. If catchiness is the way I can express myself and get through to people, then I guess that’s the way it comes out. I have a pretty progressive mind. I don’t listen to one kind of music. I wanna shoot all these kinds of music at you. The biggest challenge for me is speaking everything in my mind in two-and-a-half-minutes. That’s the challenge. It’s easy to write a 20 minute epic. I could do that easily. I feel like I’ve got a lot of ideas. My problem is filtering them. The challenge is to decide which of your ideas not to use. Because you always wanna use everything.” A LOT OF YOUR NU-METAL PEERS HAVE FADED AWAY, YET YOU’RE STILL GOING STRONG. “I think it’s because we’ve just stayed honest. Some bands are afraid of their fans. They think, ‘Our fans wouldn’t like this’. No offence to our fans, but we don’t think about them when we write out music. Plus, we’re not really a metal band. We’re a modern day rock band. Our philosophy has always been to avoid genres and labels. Because free thinkers are dangerous. So let’s promote free thinking, let’s be free thinkers in our music. And it’s obvious if you hear our music that we don’t give a fuck.” YOU’VE ALWAYS WRITTEN THE MUSIC. NOW YOU’RE WRITING MOST OF THE LYROCS AS WELL. “You know, I’ve come to realise that a lot of these songs are actually about myself. They’re about how horrible I am, not how horrible society is. Seriously, I’ve got issues. This album has a lot of angst to it. Is it weird that Serj sings lyrics that I have written? No. Sometimes it works the other way – sometimes I sing lyrics that he writes. There’s no ego about it at all” WHAT WERE YOU LISTENING TO WHILE WRITING THE ALBUM? “I’ve really been getting into disco. Metal has bored me for a long time, though I’ve rediscovered black metal recently. There’s something very apocalyptic about black metal which suits the time we’re living in. Early Emperor. Darkthrone. Metal gets such a bad rep – and I’m not waving the flag for it or anything – but it’s just a really incredible form of rock ‘n’ roll in my opinion. You say (throws horns, adopts Halford shriek) METAAAL! And it becomes a joke – but there are just as many great metal songs out there.” ‘MEZMERIZE’ SOUNDS LIKE IT WAS AN EPIC UNDERTAKING. ARE YOU GLAD IT’S OVER? “It’s never over, Music is a blessing for me, but it’s also my curse. I can never get away from it. Music is constantly with me. I can’t take a vacation. If I did, the music would still be in my head”
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<FONT color=#fdf5e6>by Ben Myers of KERRANG magazine issue at May.07, 2005
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