Down with the System: A Memoir (of Sorts)

by Serj Tankian

Once you’ve had the experience of bombs raining down on you, it’s impossible to think of military campaigns the same way. For most people on the ground, war is not an academic or geopolitical exercise. It’s a deeply personal one.

History does indeed repeat itself and “never again” is always yet again.

To much of the world, moving to the United States is a golden ticket, a chance to alter the trajectory of your family’s life. 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.

I often question why some people are taken from this place in their prime. Has their vision already been realized? Why do others who rot the chair they sit on and exude nothing but villainy seem to live forever? It all seems so unfair.

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.

The whole idea of treating art like it was a competitive sport, with winners and losers, was just so counter to my ethos. You really can’t rank art. One song or one album is not objectively better than another. Different people respond to different music differently. That’s the whole point. Grading art is like grading emotions.

If we don’t tell these stories, whether they’re in Artsakh or in Efkere or in Auschwitz or in Rwanda or in East Timor or in Darfur, if we don’t demand accountability for the victims and fight for justice, we are doomed to see these stories repeat themselves again and again, all over the globe in years to come. What else can we possibly do anyway other than keep pushing our boulder up the mountain, hoping against hope that it doesn’t one day roll back down and flatten us?