System of a Down
Genre: Metal
Year: 1998
Year I discovered it: 1999
Back in 1999, I started to hear this insane song on the radio
called “Sugar” by System of a Down. I recorded it on a few mix tapes when I was
lucky enough to catch it playing, and it became a favorite of mine. It wasn't
until early 2001 at age 14 that I finally bought the album it came on, their self-titled debut album, and
while reading the liner notes I came to the
startling realization that the band members were Armenian. I would have liked
them anyway, but that was certainly an added bonus. I’ve been accused of only
liking this band because the members are Armenian before, but that’s not true.
I bought their first album having no idea they were Armenian. The rest of the
songs on the album were favorites of mine that year, until their next album Toxicity
came out soon after. And my relationship with this band came in full circle
when I was lucky enough to get to see them play live in Yerevan, Armenia in
2015. This was still the most amazing concert I have ever been to, and made me
realize how far I had come from being a 13-year-old kid holed up in my room
recording mix tapes off the radio to a 29-year-old teaching in Armenia.
The album begins with the high energy track “Suite-Pee”.
The song lets you know what you’re going to be in for listening to this album: insanity,
but with hidden deep messages in the lyrics. There is method to their madness,
if you penetrate deeply enough into the true meaning. In this case, it’s a song
about religion. Ah religion, everyone’s
favorite topic to have rational, friendly discussions about. I already brought
it up in the last blog, so why stop now I suppose. Jesus is referred to with
female pronouns throughout the song, for whatever reason. “Try her philosophy,
try her philosophy, try her philosophy, try. You die for her philosophy, die
for her philosophy, die for her philosophy die.” They could also be singing
about the crusades and other holy wars, the Spanish Inquisition, the colonization of the Americas, anything on Christianity's long wrap sheet. This is hardly limited to Christianity,
of course. It’s an Abrahamic thing. Don’t ask me what the lyric “I want to fuck
my way to the garden” means. I’ve got nothing.
“Know” is even harder to interpret, I don’t have much
of an idea what the lyrics mean. But the other songs all mean something
(excepting one other song coming up that’s total nonsense). System of a Down is
teasing me trying to get me to figure out what the song means. Maybe it means
nothing. But maybe it means something. I don’t know. “Know”. Aha! Eureka! They “know”
what it means, but I don’t. I need to get to a point where I do know. I
understand these songs a lot better than I did back in 2001. It took many years
for me to mature to the point where I could piece it together. Maybe I’m not
quite there yet with this song. It sounds nice though. Almost has a particular
Middle Eastern, dare I say Armenian, flavor to it. Like a lot of their music.
Then we have “Sugar”, the main single from this album
that got played on the radio occasionally. In the late 90’s to early 2000’s, I
would listen to the radio stations with a blank cassette loaded into the tape
deck, and play a waiting game for music I liked to come on. I had an awful time trying to get this song sometimes, it was rare. But I managed. It appears on my
5th mix tape, censored by the radio station of course. This was my
favorite song when I was 13. The song mirrors a sugar rush, as the energy just
builds and builds. “What do I do, what do I day? In the end it all goes away.” I’d
never heard anything like it before when I first heard this song. Not since,
either. The music video (which I never saw until YouTube was a thing) definitely
had something deep to say, as stated by that newscaster in the beginning, about
how the rich corporations basically rule the world and tell you what to think
through the news outlets that they all own. “You’re mine. I tell you what they
want you to know, and you consider it the truth!” This is the dystopia we live
in. I get most of my news from outside the US on Armenian news sites or from RT
(the Russian news channel), where even if it is still biased and trying to get
you to think a certain way, they’re talking about things the US news never
talks about. Stuff outside what Disney, Viacom and General Electric want you to
know. I only rely on local news for the weather (and even that’s unreliable at
times) and other petty news stories from around where I live. Either way, it’s
all BS no matter where you get your news from, just different levels of it. Anyway,
more people should watch this music video. There’s probably a good reason I
never saw it on MTV back in the day.
“Suggestions” is a song that always takes me back to
this cruise to Mexico I took with my high school band class during Freshman
year of high school, in April 2001, during the week of my 15th
birthday as it happened. We all got on a bus and it drove all night from
Pleasant Hill to Los Angeles. I had a portable CD player, and I still remember
the CD’s I brought with me. This one, Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe,
Rammstein’s Mutter, and Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory (I was 14 and
it was 2001, of course I listened to Linkin Park). I just listened to these CD’s
on repeat for the whole trip. The lyrics “Watching, from a post up high, from
where you see the ships afar. From a well-trained eye, the waves will keep on
crashing by” reminds me of standing on the deck, looking out at the ocean and
watching the waves. I haven’t ever been on a cruise since then. We were only in
Ensenada, Mexico for a couple hours even though the cruise was for five days,
but it was my first taste of being in another country, making it slightly less
of a culture shock when I later went to Armenia.
“Spiders” is finally a breather song, a little slower than the others, gives you time to rest. It’s the first song on the album where there’s a quotation in the liner notes giving us a clue as to what the song is about. This one says “Your thoughts and dreams are no longer sacred as they are exposed to a weapon known as remote viewing and monitoring.” Can you imagine getting a fortune cookie that has that message? This album was prophetic. Twenty years later, here we are with TV’s that watch us, and telephones that listen in on us, all so they can bombard us with tailor-made ads while selling our information to insurance companies so they know who’s not worth covering and do who knows what else with our information. System of a Down knew what was going on way back then, and they tried to warn us, but nobody listened.
“DDevil” (not a typo) has the note “For those that control the central nervous system control society, and the world.” Deep stuff. Who controls the central nervous system? Have we lost control of that to the corporations too? If not yet, we probably will soon. They’ll start implanting the internet into our brains and every time we close our eyes we’ll see an advertisement. Just you wait. It sounds crazy now, but give it ten or twenty years. One line I’ve always been fascinated by in this song is “Stupid people do stupid things. Smart people outsmart each other, then themselves.” How do you outsmart yourself? Am I not smart enough to understand that line? Could be. I like to think of myself as smart, but so does everyone else. Nobody actually thinks they’re stupid. Maybe I’m actually stupid and don’t know it. How would you know if you were stupid? I think you’d have to be at least a little smart to know that you’re stupid in the first place.
Excuse me, I have a book to read now.
"War?" has a poignant quote in the liner notes. "We first fought the heathens in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change." Yes, the United States always has a boogeyman to justify their wars. It's amazing this was written before 9/11. But of course, phony excuses for war has been a signature American tactic since at least 1898, when the sinking of the USS Maine gave the US the excuse it was looking for to go to war with Spain. "The Splendid Little War" it was called. Splendid for bankers and corporations. Not so much for the people who died over something stupid. Now that terrorism is becoming old hat, I wonder what boogeyman they'll cook up for the 2020's. Just wait, it'll happen in the next couple of years. I'm just grateful I survived past the age where I could be drafted. I'd never want to fight a war where the entire point of it is to make oil companies richer. The only war I'd ever fight in would be if Armenia was being invaded, because unlike the United States, who tries to get you to lick the boots of the troops for "defending our freedom" that was never under any threat, Armenia has actual threats to their existence.
The quote for “Mind” is “Mind control technology has
been used by the CIA since the 1950’s as part of their non-lethal, covert
weapons program.” I don’t really doubt this, but…citation needed, as they say
on Wikipedia. The song has a strange intro where the singer Serj Tankian keeps
saying “look at each other.” It’s an interesting song, the lyrics don’t make a
whole lot of sense to me and I don’t have much else to say about their quote
that goes along with the song, so, onto the next one. The song “Peephole” has a
nice juicy quote for us to discuss. “The February 18 edition of Britain’s NEW
SCIENTIST Magazine reports that the Geneva-based World Health Organization
suppressed, under political pressure, a report which confirmed that marijuana is
safer than either alcohol or tobacco.” So damn true. D.A.R.E. lied to us as kids. All of those anti-drug programs and TV specials lied to us. Cartoon Allstars to the Rescue lied to us. Marijuana was never made
illegal because it was unsafe or unhealthy. If that were true, then alcohol and tobacco
would be illegal too. But those both have corporations protecting them. It was
made illegal because the pharmaceutical industry was unable to profit off it
and used their money to influence politicians to ban it so as to protect their
profits. Not to mention it proved a convenient way to criminalize African Americans
and other minorities along with young political dissidents, and fill for-profit prisons with non-violent offenders. I really think making drugs illegal is
pointless. It doesn’t stop anyone from doing them. But making it illegal is
profitable for drug cartels and pharmaceutical corporations, who are equally
morally reprehensible. Not that I would know anything about marijuana…I
certainly would never smoke it before writing one of my blogs, especially one
about Mortiis. Oh no, not me! Ahem. As for the song “Peephole” itself, it was
one of my favorites when I first got the album.
“CUBErt” is the other song on this album that’s incomprehensible. Just a bunch of words slapped together. Then again if you look at the lyrics, a meaning emerges. For the first couple of verses they sing “popcorn everywhere, canned, clichΓ© people organ rare.” I’ve never seen canned popcorn for sale anywhere. Later on the word “popcorn” is replaced with “humans”. Canned humans, organs rare. Is this song about the harvesting of human organs, to be sold on the black market? I’ve heard horrible stories of that happening in China. One of those things that makes you wonder if karma even exists. So I don’t know what the song’s really about, but who knows? Maybe I’m onto something.
The question System of a Down poses in the liner notes above the lyrics to the next song, “Darts”, is as follows. “Why do old societies hold the pantheon of 12 gods to be true, while modern societies generally have one God?” Well, there are various historical reasons for that. You could blame the Roman and Arab empires. The song starts with Serj singing in a funny voice, saying “May I please?!” in a shrill way that makes me think of whenever someone on Monty Python cross-dresses and plays an old British woman. The lyric “Arise as did the gods Ninti and Ishkur” dominates the song. These were Sumerian deities; Ninti was the Goddess of Life, and Ishkur was the God of Storms and Rain. I don’t know a whole lot about the Sumerian pantheon myself, but maybe I ought to educate myself on it sometime. I mainly stick to the Armenian, Urartian (early Armenian, basically) and Egyptian pantheons, though lately I’ve been reading up on the Greek pantheon as well.
Have a read about these two deities for yourself, it’s
interesting:
And finally, we have the song that made me realize System of a Down was Armenian upon reading the liner notes; “P.L.U.C.K.” (Politically Lying Unholy Cowardly Killers), a song dedicated to the 1915 Armenian genocide perpetrated by Ottoman Turkey. I wasn’t really raised as an Armenian; rather it is a path I chose to follow. At age 14 I didn’t know a whole lot about the genocide, just the basic fact that Turks had killed a lot of Armenians back then. I would later write several term papers and an entire novel about it in my 20’s, after choosing to go by my first name Suren rather than my middle name Michael, which until I was 18 was what I went by. I could probably write an entire term paper on that whole process, but for the sake of brevity I’ll leave it at that for now. “A full race genocide, taken away, all of our pride.” I can’t be sure exactly what the members of System of a Down wanted to convey when they wrote this song, but this is what I get from it. I feel like it’s not only about the Armenian genocide, but also about Armenia defending itself, both when Armenia established a brief independence after the genocide in 1918 when it repelled the invasion of the Ottoman Turks into Armenia’s modern boundaries, and when the Armenians of Artsakh, with help from Armenia itself, stood its ground and refused to be assimilated into Azerbaijan after the fall of the Soviet Union, fighting a war from 1988 to 1994 for their independence. This war would have been very fresh in the minds of Armenians in 1998. “Revolution, the only solution, the armed response of an entire nation, we’ve taken all your shit now it’s time for restitution.” And after attending their concert in Yerevan, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the genocide on April 23, 2015, I feel like I’m probably right.
Yes, everything came in full circle when I was lucky enough to be in Armenia as a volunteer teaching English when this concert took place. Standing out there in Republic Square in Yerevan in the pouring rain, thunder roaring in the clouds, lightning streaking across the sky, listening to the music of my early teens, I felt complete. Alive. And that was our revenge for the genocide. Despite their best efforts, we were alive.
And the last song they played was “Sugar”. The song that had started it all for me. And it was a million times better and rarer than catching it on the radio.
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