“Minor drug offenders fill your prisons/You don’t even flinch/All our taxes paying for your wars/Against the new non-rich,” Tankian pronounces in a rapid sing-song cadence. The album begins with a song that lucidly highlights the evil of the American for-profit prison system. With such a nimble hand, System of a Down could smuggle radical politics into the headphones of bored kids drawn in by Tankian’s carnival-barker screams. But more importantly, the album is restless, bounding from one idea to another before the first can sink in. Toxicity is heavy, making abundant use of the juiciest guitar distortion in its class thanks to the density of Rick Rubin’s production. Their lyrics tended toward the surreal, the humorous, and the abstract, and the hairpin turns of their compositions kept them from marinating too long in a single mood. It lives on as a punchline that itself has grown passé.Įven when System of a Down quoted the literal Bible, they managed to sidestep the blunt impact of grunge’s sickly dregs. Post-grunge incubated a strain of sincerity so obsequious that no amount of nostalgia has yet to rehabilitate it. Most of their songs took the form of the confessional: Men apologized to women and to God for their sins, which tended to include substance abuse, emotional neglect, and general chauvinism.

System of a Down competed with the bros of Nickelback, Creed, and Staind on the alternative charts, bands that dressed up the Martin school of pop with power chords and ham-throated vocals. Max Martin had stamped popular music with his surefire songwriting brand, ushering in a cross-genre rush of structurally identical singles from the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Britney Spears. Their second album, Toxicity, succeeded, improbably, in a radio environment that favored simplistic formulas. Come to it with more specific personal angst and you’ll leave just as satisfied.

Come to it with political anguish and you’ll find an outlet for that pain. Political without dipping into preachiness, they accumulated fans who could either tap into the radical messages of their music or easily ignore them. Tankien, Malakian, bassist Shavo Odadjian, and drummer John Dolmayan played with the weight of metal, but the quick pivots of their compositions also aligned them with L.A.’s hardcore punk heritage. Malakian and Tankian forged a close chemistry on the band’s 1998 self-titled debut, whose cover image of an open hand referred to a World War II anti-fascist poster designed by a member of the Communist Party of Germany. Guitarist Daron Malakian didn’t drive home the beat of their songs so much as he threw it into disarray. Tankian’s wild, flexible delivery spun out of control. But SOAD’s compositions disoriented as much as they elucidated. Like RATM, SOAD interpolated West Coast hip-hop’s quick vocal clip into a guitar-driven metal milieu. System of a Down released their debut self-titled album toward the end of Rage Against the Machine’s tenure as rock radio’s crowning political agitators. contributed to the atypical configuration of their sound. It’s as if their position as ethnic outsiders in one of the largest cities in the U.S. Their families had survived the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century they grew up in the United States with ancestral scars from a massacre still officially denied by its perpetrators, which lent them keen eyes for political suppression and internal propaganda.

Raised in Los Angeles’s Armenian-American community, all four members of System of a Down were primed to see through the myth of American exceptionalism that would justify the coming warmongering of George W. One minute Serj Tankian’s shucking syllables like pistachio shells, saying nothing the next he’s appealing to the Lord God Himself in a rich, reverent baritone, singing the words Jesus spoke to his father on the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” The bait-and-switch between abrasion and allure makes the song irresistible, a songwriting tactic that would elevate System of a Down from the glut of hard rock that occupied a sizable portion of pop radio through the turn of the millennium. “Chop Suey!” became a hit all the same, a nu-metal chimera that crashed unintelligible babbling into the chorus’s gorgeous vocal melody.

Chop suey song came out