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But the news of our surprise chart triumph was drowned out a little by another unexpected event. The day we hit number one was September 11, 2001.
The night before I got on the phone for Howard’s show, I’d had a meeting with my bandmates at that same hotel. They weren’t much happier with me than everyone else was. They’d all dreamed of what we’d just achieved—a number-one album—and that success was being drowned out by death threats and accusations that we were all traitors. This was the band’s big moment, and my essay was threatening to ruin it for us all. At that meeting, the first thing our guitarist Daron said to me was, “Are you trying to get us all killed?” I remember telling him that what I wrote was the truth, that it was all
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Our first single, “Chop Suey!,” had essentially been banned from the radio. The song’s chorus—“I don’t think you trust in my self-righteous suicide / I cry when angels deserve to die”—did feel like a surreal reference to the disturbing events of 9/11, though obviously it was written long before that. But the ban itself was just a misguided knee-jerk effort by the country’s largest radio conglomerate, Clear Channel, to prohibit songs they felt might upset listeners already distraught by the attacks. I suppose “Chop Suey!” was an obvious candidate for this list of banned songs, certainly more
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In the space of a few weeks or months the deprivations to which they were subjected led them to a condition of pure survival, a daily struggle against hunger, cold, fatigue, and blows in which the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero. Among these, very few survived the test, and this thanks to the conjunction of many improbable events. In short, they were saved by luck, and there is not much sense in trying to find something common to all their destinies, beyond perhaps their initial good health.
If genocide is ultimately an act of erasure, denial is its final, comprehensive deed.
Does fear invite negative outcomes? Isn’t fearful thinking just a form of negative visualization?
I don’t know if that cliché about the usefulness of fighting your bully is sound, but I can say that not fighting him didn’t help at all.
For a while, it really bothered me that I never hit that kid back. I mean, they didn’t take our bikes in the end, and no one was seriously hurt, so in some ways, it was the best possible outcome. But I’m not immune to the testosterone-fueled sensitivities of the male ego. There is something almost prehistoric or animalistic in the male need to be able to handle conflict, to be able to protect himself and others. At the time and for a long time after, I was ashamed that when pressed, I’d failed to protect not just myself, but my little brother as well.
As an adult, I’ve thought a lot about how we react to provocation and how we deal with conflict and how all of that relates to justice and injustice. I think being an immigrant kid in the US gave me an appreciation of what it means to be the underdog, the outsider, which in turn seeded empathy within me for other underdogs and outsiders. I have the same revulsion to bullying on an international level between nations as I do between people.
However, avoiding violence and avoiding conflict are not the same thing. Even now, I think the former is probably healthy. The latter, not so much. But that can be a hard lesson to learn.
I apologized and told him I didn’t mean to be disrespectful but that, as Armenians, to hear the word “massacre” applied to the killing of five people when the killing of 1.5 million Armenians was being largely ignored by the same country that used this so-called massacre as a pretext for the revolution that led to the country’s founding—
Martin Luther King Jr. once called a riot “the language of the unheard.” Political violence is often similarly the desperate cry of the frustrated and the ignored.
In May of 1915, the phrase “crimes against humanity” was invented to describe the Turks’ treatment of the Armenians.
It was this calculated, wholesale destruction of a people and their culture that led the jurist Raphael Lemkin to coin the word “genocide” to describe the Turks’ vicious and systematic campaign against the Armenians.
When Hitler was readying his invasion of Poland in 1939 and formulating plans for what he saw as a restive, alien population within the borders of so-called Greater Germany, he waved away concerns about his military acting humanely with a haunting rhetorical question: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
In the 250 years since the country’s founding, America’s most successful and significant export is this vision of itself as a land of opportunity.
The American Dream is often portrayed as an upward climb—hard, for sure, but always ascending to greater heights. In fact, as I came to understand it, the American Dream is more like a rollercoaster, with towering peaks, deep valleys, and all sorts of sharp twists and turns in between. And like a rollercoaster, the ride itself could be disorienting enough to make you sick.
That said, apparently, the rest of the band wasn’t completely sold on me as their singer. I found out years later that at one point, they secretly tried to replace me, and even auditioned a few different people. It turned out none of the folks they brought in could really sing along with the crazy, chaotic noise that the band churned out, so I kept the job by default.
I used it as the basis for the lyrics to a song that was originally called “Bacon” but which Daron later incorporated into another song, “Mr. Jack.” So, if you’ve ever wondered why I holler “Fuck you, pig!” over and over at the end of that song, well—now you know.
When it came time to choose a band name, Daron had this poem he’d written titled “Victims of a Down.” I don’t even really remember what the poem was about—it was something personal for Daron—but it just sounded like a cool phrase and almost like a mission statement for the band. But there was discomfort with having the word “victims” in the band name as it denotes a negative connotation, so we subbed in “system of a down.” I liked the name because even though it doesn’t have any literal meaning, it has a figurative one that you can sense just by reading or hearing the words.
Finally, he wore down the guy at the Roxy enough that he offered us a gig—well, sort of. We had to sell at least seventy-five tickets in order to play. This kind of arrangement is a bit of a scam that clubs pull on young bands, but we didn’t care. We’d built up such a following through our warehouse parties that we ended up selling about 150.
As rock ’n’ roll as it would’ve been for him to have been covered head-to-toe, Scarface-style, in cocaine, I believe it was just baby powder.
don’t be neutral—it’s boring. Everyone who saw us didn’t necessarily like us. Some may have actively hated us. But very, very few were indifferent. We provoked a reaction. To me, that’s really the mandate for any kind of art. Don’t make neutral art and don’t make neutral music—that’s for elevators and malls. At the very least, make people feel something.
One day, when I was having a hard time sleeping on the tour bus, I asked John how he was able to fall asleep so easily on the road. His response is engraved into my memory. He turned to me casually and said, “I just imagine large planes bombing the shit out of the whole planet to a point where there is nothing to think of, and then I gently go to sleep.” My jaw dropped. What the fuck, psycho? That was John.
Ultimately, the sixty minutes or so you’d spend onstage each night would pump you full of endorphins, but once they wore off, the comedown could be rough. If you’ve ever wondered why so many musicians end up with drug problems, it must have something to do with navigating the distance between that glorious natural high onstage and the other twenty-three hours of monotonous drudgery that make up each day.
A Ryder truck with all our instruments and gear being stolen in Philadelphia, then recovered as an empty, burned-out husk in New Jersey.
Telling Ozzy Osbourne how excited I was to sing “Snowblind” with him in his hometown of Birmingham, England, to which Ozzy snarled dismissively, “This fucking industrial dump?”
One night in the venue parking lot after a show, Mike told me he had an idea for how to clear our bus out. Once everyone on the bus was good and drunk, I turned the music down and Mike slipped a German scheisse video into the bus’s VCR. If you’re unaware of what a scheisse video is, I’m about to ruin your day.
The first time I tried mushrooms, I was with Daron, at a Nine Inch Nails/Marilyn Manson show. The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow—a sort of roving carnival of freaks—performed between sets and I have a searing memory of watching a guy onstage hanging stuff from his balls while I was tripping. I looked down at my hand and was convinced that it was covered in blood. Alarmed, I pointed it out to Daron. “Don’t worry, bro,” he told me. “You’re just tripping.” He later admitted that he saw the blood all over my hand too but was trying to calm us both down.
American president Woodrow Wilson aimed to give Armenians a piece of their historical homeland in the East. The land that is modern-day Turkey, including the Black Sea coast, was to be split into two nations: one for the Turks, one for the Armenians. The Turks, awash in a rising tide of aggrieved nationalism, felt insulted, and cited a right to self-determination for the people living on the land that was ceded for the new Republic of Armenia. A majority of the population, they argued, was Turkish. This was technically correct but only because the Turks had exterminated 1.5 million Armenians,
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along with the infamous, ominous quote from Adolf Hitler, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
I really wanted to collaborate with Daron and had this vision of the two of us sitting with guitars, trading parts back and forth together as we banged out songs. Unfortunately, he didn’t really work like that. He liked to work on his music at home alone and then bring it into the rehearsal space in a much more arranged format.
On our debut album, the division of labor had been relatively predictable: Daron wrote the music, I wrote the lyrics. There were exceptions—Shavo came up with some of the riffs we used, I added bits of piano and samples, Daron wrote some lyrics—but for the most part, everyone knew their roles. Now, I’d thrown a wrench into the works. And I got the impression that Daron felt like my songwriting was infringing on his territory.
Anyone who knows anything about songwriting would’ve told me that sentences like “All research and successful drug policy show that treatment should be increased and law enforcement should be decreased while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences,” or “Drug money is used to rig elections and train brutal corporate-sponsored dictators around the world,” are not lyrics that belong in a song. But I didn’t care; I just jammed them straight in there, and the brutality of Daron’s music somehow complemented that stuff perfectly. At intervals, he chimes in with a goofy sing-songy line, “I buy my
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The original lyrics to “Bounce” were about pajamas—really just me playing with the word in lines about “the Dalai Lama’s pajamas.” The rest of the band rarely had any issues with my lyrics, but they hated these.
I decided it wasn’t a hill worth dying on though, so upon Shavo’s recommendation, I rewrote them to be no less silly—“BOUNCE pogo, pogo, pogo”—but vaguely sexual in a double-entendre way that the rest of the band could get behind.
It all turned on one word in the chorus, where in the original version, I repeatedly sang the line “Pull the tapeworm out of my ass!” The other guys were not okay with that. If I could sum up their argument, it went something like this: as System’s lead singer, if I was singing about pulling a tapeworm out of my ass, it was implicitly referring to all their asses too. I’m still not sure I buy this line of thinking, but they didn’t like the idea of anyone pulling anything out of their asses. It sounded kind of homoerotic. They were okay with weird lyrics, but when it crossed the line into
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Rick found the argument hilarious, and he may have been the one who suggested what became the elegant solution: changing “my ass” to “your ass.” For whatever reason, Daron, Shavo, and John were perfectly fine with the suggestion of someone pulling a tapeworm out of their own ass so long as it was not one of our asses.
Daron’s desire to control System’s creative course ground against my own artistic ambitions. He and John also had issues. Shavo was kind of Switzerland within the band (with a dash of Stockholm syndrome precipitated by Daron); he was passive, avoided confrontation (especially with Daron), and tried to get along with everyone.
Even though John had joined the band before our first album was even released, Daron frequently treated him like he was just a replacement member, a second-class citizen, telling him how lucky he was to have joined the band when he did. He’s tried to fire John multiple times over the years, and pretty much every time, I sat down with Daron and told him, “It’s not going to happen. If he goes, I go.” I felt like System was the four of us, and if you took one out of this unique formula, anyone, it would be a different chemical compound altogether.
As I saw them rushing together, I ran up off the couch to break it up. Instead, I mostly just got caught in the middle. John was swinging around me to hit Daron, who was sort of on the floor beneath me. Then Daron picked up my mic stand, which had a thick, metal base, and swung it. I ducked and it hit John square in the forehead, splitting open a gash. I think the sight of blood running down our drummer’s face finally broke the fever in that rehearsal space.
I guess it was some sort of macho guy thing—bonding over blood—but to Shavo and I, they sounded like total psychopaths.
She would even take phone calls during meditation sometimes. She’d tell me, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. If you have to pick up a call, pick up a call.” The goal was to make meditation a basic thing in your life, something accessible and easy to do every day, like walking.
Essentially, the more I meditated, the easier it was for me to see the inherent good in people. Everyone is born pure, and it’s the very act of living—fighting for our survival—that beats the purity and goodness out of us. We’re all on the same journey together, different parts of a greater organism. So, if I’m out honking at some guy who just cut me off on the 405, that guy who just cut me off is also me. I’ve been there, I’ve done the same thing, so why heap my scorn on him? How is that serving either of us?
The doctor attached thermometers to the monks’ bodies and was able to document their ability to raise their body temperature by as much as seventeen degrees Fahrenheit after just a few minutes of using this meditation technique.
We had a song we were calling “Suicide” back then; actually, if you listen to the track now, you can even hear me mumbling “we’re rolling ‘Suicide’” right before the first guitar notes sweep in. Anyways, the earlier version of the song had all these really cool pieces to it—staccato verses, winding melodies, tribal drumbeats, and a memorable, moody chorus about “self-righteous suicide” that Daron had written about drugs, I think.
He asked me to trust the universe and pull a book off the shelf, open it to any page, and stick my finger onto a sentence or word randomly. When I did, I saw the line: “Father, why have you forsaken me?” I felt goosebumps on the back of my neck. I can’t remember what the book was called, but it was a quote from Jesus. “That’s it,” I breathed. “That’s the line.” I wrote a little bit more to flesh it out, and the line completely transformed the whole song. It gave depth to the darkness of the chorus Daron had written and made the whole song sound like an angry lamentation toward an indifferent
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However, when we finally picked the fifteen tracks that would appear on Toxicity, only one of them, “Shimmy,” was among the ones I’d written the music for.
Everyone seemed to agree that the first single should be the song that we were calling “Suicide.” A lot of stories came out subsequently claiming that Sony forced us to change the song’s title, but I don’t remember it like that. I mean, you don’t have to be a multibillion-dollar international corporation beholden to shareholders to come to the conclusion that “Suicide” is a pretty bleak title for a song, particularly one that isn’t even about killing yourself. Changing it to “Chop Suey!” on the other hand, was a kind of meta inside-joke about the title itself. Both the song and the title had
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