Down with the System by Serj Tankian

Author:Serj Tankian [TANKIAN, SERJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2024-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

We wrote and recorded almost forty songs during those sessions. I suggested that since we had so much music, we should put out a double album. It was quickly pointed out to me that this might be a little presumptuous for a band whose debut had exactly zero radio hits. I mean, not that many people even knew who we were. Daron and I had both brought so much music to these sessions that a lot of the songs were inevitably not going to make the final cut. 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.

To be fair, the songs we picked were the ones that danced best together, that felt like a cohesive album. Thinking back to those sand mandalas and the idea that the art was about the process of creation and not the product of it, I was content. The fact that the final song on the album, “Arto,” was a largely instrumental, tribal-sounding adaptation of an Armenian prayer-hymn called “Der Voghormia” (or “Father Have Mercy,” in English), which I played alone with a musician-friend named Arto Tunçboyacıyan, seemed to support that very idea.

Besides, it was hardly as if I was unrepresented on the album. I’d written a majority of the lyrics, including those for the title track, which were based on the writing I’d done while on that little personal retreat in the mountains in Ojai and at the beach in Santa Barbara. I’d been able to write about the prison-industrial complex, overpopulation, food insecurity, the protests at the Democratic National Convention, the failures of our education system, and my own spiritual rebirth, and then finesse all that into an album that was going to be released by one of the largest media and technology conglomerates in the world. That felt like a subversive triumph.

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 been cut up, diced, mixed around, so the new title seemed to make sense—it was the chopped version of “Suey” or “Suicide.” I liked it.

The record label had supported us after we’d released our first album, when it wasn’t at all clear that there was going to be a big financial upside for them. Sony and Columbia trusted Rick, so he had a lot of rope to do what he wanted. When we played Toxicity for them, though, the label reps seemed legitimately excited and told us they could hear “big songs.

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