Best known as the vocalist of quasi-prog metal band System of a Down, Serj Tankian is one artist not content with painting the same landscapes. Amidst System’s hiatus, Tankian has been working nonstop this past year, releasing a second book of poetry (Glaring Through Oblivion), developing a musical production (Prometheus Bound), and recording four solo albums: his latest hard-rocking LP, Harakiri;his collaboration with Jimmy Urine of Mindless Self Indulgence on Fuktronic, a soundtrack to an imaginary film; his first symphony, Orca, using non-traditional approaches to the classical idiom; and his venture into avant-garde jazz fused with electronics on Jazz-Iz-Christ.
Recently, Consequence of Sound caught up with Tankian to discuss the surprising nature of the album itself, the importance of evolution and challenges to artists (while also being able to balance the business side of the industry), and the difference between being personal and political in songwriting.
On your website, you said, “I needed a break after the busiest year of my life-2011. We have four new records and a film shot to release, the first and biggest of which is my new rock record, Harakiri.” Early feedback on Harakiri is describing it as you moving back towards fast-paced rock and the rapid-fire sounds of your early career. Do you agree with that?
I fully agree with it. It’s the most kind of upbeat punk, punk rock record that I’ve ever worked on. Reasoning? I have no idea. Harakiri came to me in a flash, starting in early 2011, with the death of all the birds and fish around the world. That ominous event kind of led me to write the title track, and then all the songs just kept on coming to me really quickly. Within two, three months, I had the majority of the record. In a year, I was completely overwhelmed with the musical [Prometheus Bound], the book release [Glaring Through Oblivion], touring with System, touring with an orchestra, and making three other records. But, somehow, we found time and did it. The muse came to me, really, very powerfully, and unfiltered, and I think there’s something to be said about that. It’s very truthful. It is what it is. I did spend a good amount of time working on it, making it as great-sounding, obviously, in terms of technicalities, as possible, and adding a lot of different musical influences to make it kind of colorful, but it is what it is, yeah.
So, you didn’t really have a different approach. It was more that it came to you. There was no set plan.
No. I had not intended to write a rock record last year, at all. It just came. I have no other way of explaining that. It’s really cool in that sense, because it’s expression in a very pure way.
You’ve indicated before in interviews that you’re not too worried about being one of those artists that falls into a rut, worrying about what other people are going to be thinking about you, because you’re changing so much. From what I can tell, you gather that it’s an artist’s responsibility to constantly creatively evolve and change, otherwise, and I want to quote you, “What’s the point of doing it at all?”
That’s correct.
So, [Harakiri] definitely lends itself to that.
I like working on different things. As a composer, I don’t want to stick to one genre. I don’t want to stick to one brush. That’s why within the same year I finished a rock record, Harakiri, which is our main release right now; we also have a jazz record called Jazz-Iz-Christ that I did with three other friends, an electronic project called Fuktronic that I did with Jimmy Urine from Mindless Self Indulgence, and my first actual classical symphony called Orca. All finished within the same year. I just like working on different types of music. What I find confounding is what people find confounding about artists that do different things.
It’s quite interesting to me for the human mind to expect an artist to write the same record over and over again or write it a little differently than before to please their audience. I think that’s lame. Maybe it’s commercially satisfactory for most people, but as an artist, that would be artistic death, wouldn’t it? But the whole industry’s based on that. Everything’s based on the last record that you do. Everything’s based on the last impression that you made, instead of an artist making different types of records. A good chef can make a pizza, and he can make a Cordon Bleu. They both taste good, but most people will eat the pizza, and it’s not because he’s not a good chef. [laughs]
No doubt. But you have been one of those artists who has definitely balanced an evolution with the ability to be successful in business, if you will.
Right.
The label doesn’t seem to be wanting to cut you loose because they’re worried about you failing… (he laughs). You don’t necessarily have the pressures of some people, but you still have that pressure, and you balance it well, while still being able to please people who are longing for the next System record or who are longing for the next Serj record.
Yeah. I’m very grateful, because I was in my ’20s when I realized that music was my calling. I started it late. I’ve been in many industries. I’ve done many things for a living. I’ve owned my own software company. I’ve had a good amount of experience before getting into the arts, so pressure, people’s expectations, the hype, the fame, all of those things, really, I take everything with a grain of salt. I make the type of records that I want to make, that I’m pushed to make through the Muse. I say the things that I believe in my heart, with the right intentions, and I put it out there. People seem to like it. If they don’t like it, that’s cool, too.
You often speak about your desire to incorporate various styles of art into your musical world. Where did your love and passion for art come from?
That’s a good question. I think [it comes] from the freeing sense that music and art gives one. Culture is beautiful. You look at different cultures around the world, and it’s the most important aspect of our differences. Our politics, our flags, our land lines, our borders, they’re not as important as our culture. Our culture is the most important, beautiful part of our diversity on this planet. The arts and music, they are the things that really make us different from other animals, first of all. And also, they make us aspire to something beyond our individual goals and dreams, something collective, something way bigger and more important.
And they’re freeing. Growing up listening to music, it was one of the things that saved me in some ways, as most people tend to tell me now. You know, they’re like, “System’s music, or your solo records, they saved my life.” They say stuff like that, and it’s a huge compliment. And I take that with a grain of salt as well, of course. [laughs] Music has that freeing, emancipating quality and an inspiring quality, an awe-inspiring quality that’s very unique.
This is a little off topic, but relating to culture: Why did your family immigrate to the US in the mid-70s?
Lebanese civil war. My dad wanted to immigrate even before the civil war. He was here in ’72. My uncle lived in New York, and he was trying to get visas for the whole family to come over. We came to the US for many reasons, for freedom of expression, for opportunities, economic opportunities. My dad wanted to bring us to a great country. Coming from Lebanon [laughs], that’s not hard.
How did you adjust as a child?
I was pretty young, so I think I adjusted pretty well. I was seven years old; my brother was four. We came here, and my parents put us in an Armenian private school in Los Angeles. We grew up within the warm confines of the Armenian community in LA and were able to integrate both our culture and the American culture, the Armenian culture that we came with and the American culture.
In your song “Chop Suey”, there was a suicide line that a lot of people blew up about. When I look at it, people are making a mountain out of a molehill. How did you and the band personally react to all these people acting so ignorantly or blindly?
Right. Well, you know what’s really interesting about art and music, you don’t ask a painter whether that’s a butterfly or an elephant. Modern painters, modern artists. It’s what you make out of it, and people make what they make out of it. And that’s fine; there is no right or wrong. We like people to internalize the lyrics for themselves, because… okay, if your philosophy is that the artist writes everything, then you have to assume that the artist knows everything that he’s writing. But if your philosophy is that art and inspiration comes from the universe, from collective consciousness, then the artist may not be fully cognizant of all of the deeper meanings of what is coming through him. And if that’s the case, then the artist is not necessarily the best person to represent it, the lyrical content or music of a given source.
So, maybe it’s meant to be interpreted in multiple ways. That’s what I believe in. Daron [Malakian, System of a Down guitarist] believes in this system, if I can speak for him in this regard. That’s what we’ve always believed. So, when it came to “Chop Suey”, the “self-righteous suicide” words, which were written by Daron, not myself, for the chorus, he may have had a certain twist on it and what he was thinking of it. But it probably means different things to other people, and that’s fine.
Some of the reaction was violent towards you and the band. People were threatening you…
Oh, no, not because of the song. The threats that we were getting weren’t because of the song “Chop Suey”. We’re referring to September 2011, right after the attack on the World Trade Center, the bombings and everything, and some of the statements that I made at the time. I had written a piece called “Understanding Oil”, which is still on the Internet today. And if you read it now, you’ll see that it has a very sober way of understanding what is going on in the world. A very reflective way of asking, “How do we approach this as an issue?” Make it a multilateral approach rather than a unilateral military reaction to what’s going on.
Anyway, I won’t get into that, but the reactions were because of that. It was a time of reactionism, people not understanding what was going on. Maybe part of it is the fact that I wasn’t born here, and maybe people give me shit for speaking in American politics just because I wasn’t born here, although I am a U.S. citizen and as deserved of my voice as anyone else born here multiple generations and on. The only people who can really claim to have been born here are the Native Americans. Everyone else can go fuck themselves, as far as I’m concerned.
Amen to that. I think where my misunderstanding was, was when I was looking in your bio, there was a mention of September 11th and then a reference to the suicide line.
Oh, I see. It’s quite interesting. People bring this up all the time. When we wrote “Jet Pilot”, for example, people were like, well that kind of refers to certain things. You can’t really say yes, because you have zero cognizance of what is about to happen in the future, obviously. But, at the same time, the collective consciousness may know what’s happening in the future. And through artists, it maybe represents certain things that even the artists themselves don’t understand. Again, taking us to a previous point that we were talking about, that art comes from the universe. We, as musicians, as artists, do our best to skillfully present it and understand it ourselves.
I’ve noticed that some of your poems that you’ve published in your books also have become lyrics to your songs. Is that intentional or just happenstance?
No, that’s intentional. When I’m writing a new song, I usually start with music, and then I look for lyrical ideas. Sometimes the lyrical ideas pop out of the music itself while you’re sitting at the piano or playing the guitar. Certain words will just come out of your mouth, and you take those concepts and run with them. And sometimes you search for influences, search for inspiration. And they could be anything. They could be life experience, personal experience, they could be political, they could be social, humorous, whatever. My poetry books are fair game, because they are my words, so I casually tend to refer to them sometimes, just to spark my intellect and see where it takes me. And if I find something that automatically fits into the music and go, “Wow, this is perfect for it; it’s almost like it was written for it,” then I’ll take those lines. And it’s usually a few lines, and I kind of write more around it and round it out, et cetera, et cetera.
Do you think if the tracks that made up the internet album Toxicity II hadn’t been leaked, that you would have ever released Steal This Album?
I think we would have, yeah. I was always under the impression that we intended to release that record. Now, not everyone in the band at the time tells it the same way, but it was my intention to always want to release that record. I did not want to see those songs just get buried in the archives. I thought they were too important. To this day, Steal This Album is my favorite record from System’s discography. So, it was my intention to do so, but whether it would have happened or it wouldn’t, I don’t know. That’s conjecture.
Were you afraid that the minimal artwork would have hindered sales or hindered fans even recognizing that it was an actual album?
No. It’s kind of funny, because if you invite people to steal, and you put it on the shelf and look at them, they are not going to steal it. [laughs] Because that’s not stealing. So, that was kind of like the funny play on everything. That was Daron’s idea. It was a genius idea at the time, based on the Abby Hoffman idea of Steal This Book and stuff. It was a great idea, and we got a lot of good press from it at the time. I was happy with that.
When you performed Elect the Dead with the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra, why did you choose to do it in New Zealand rather than a larger place like London or New York?
That’s a good question. The idea came from them. They reached out to me through a friend of mine, Bo Runga, who’s an artist in New Zealand. She said that the director of the APO really wanted to talk to me about doing something, and at the time, I had probably thought about doing something with orchestra but never really had the time to look into it or organize it. But when the offer came, I was like, “Wow! This is interesting; let’s look into it.” So, it was their interest. I remember seeing a Philip Glass documentary, and he had done this symphony with an Eastern European orchestra, and they asked him, “Why did you do this symphony with the East German orchestra?” And he said the same thing, “Well, they called me. They asked if we could do something with you.” [laughs] It’s as simple as that.
During that time, you kind of hinted that the next album, which at that point in time was going to be Imperfect Harmonies, would be more jazz-orchestral. So, do you think that this performance and subsequent release of the Elect the Dead Symphony was a way to ease the transition?
It inspired me to do that. Working on the Elect the Dead Symphony really opened me up to writing for orchestra and being way more a traditional composer, being more comfortable with my composing tools. So, it opened the doors to Imperfect Harmonies, which itself opened the doors to Orca, which is my first symphony that I’ve written. So, it’s one well leading into the other, which is beautiful.
Well, that leads to my next question. Regarding Orca, it’s said to be composed using “non-traditional approaches to classical music.” Could you explain that or go into a little bit more detail?
George wrote that at my office. I remember when he did. You need someone to write besides yourself. [laughs] There are certain aspects of it that are traditional in terms of composing, certain aspects that aren’t. One thing that I’ve noticed is it’s my influences. A lot of people say it’s like a nice mixture of film score-type of orchestral music mixed with early 20th century composer influences. There’s definitely a hint of Ennio Morricone, Philip Glass, and different composers that are more authentic film composers, but there’s also a little bit of System of a Down in it in the sense that my fourth act is like the mellowest things next to the heaviest, craziest things you can do in an orchestra. It’s quite an interesting symphony, actually. It’s very unique. I hope you get to hear it sometime soon.
Orca – “Act 1 Short Sample”:
Definitely. Your description of it makes it even more intriguing. Since you brought up film score, Fuktronic has been described as the ultimate British gangster film soundtrack. Didn’t you even get dialogue scripted for the album?
Yes, we did. There’s a number of voice actors on there. They’re all friends and family, basically. It’s a fucking hilarious project that we did with Jimmy, and we’re actually looking into a couple of visual components and partnerships right now to do some other interesting things with it. A possible graphic novel and a possible web series musical [laughs] and different, interesting concepts are coming to us to kind of do something with that project.
What came first, the music or the script?
Sushi. I was having sushi with Jimmy, and we were both talking about British gangster films, and we were like, “Have you seen this? Have you seen that? Have you seen Sexy Beast and Gangster No. 1?” We both enjoy the genre, because to us it’s funny. It’s something to watch late at night and go to sleep, because it’s funny. And so, we were like, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you put six of your electronic tracks together, and I put six of my electronic tracks together. We get these guys, friends of ours that are into British gangster films to do some voice-overs. We’ll write some cool script and put it out.” And he was like, “Fuck, that’s a great idea. Let’s do it!”
So, we both came up with the idea at the same time, decided to do it, put six of each of our tracks together, got our friends to voice-over with a script that we wrote… mostly Jimmy wrote, actually… and some of it is improved, which is really funny as well. And here we are.
Fuktronic – “The Chase”:
That’s awesome. When do you think that’s going to get released?
I don’t know. We’re trying to see how these visual counterparts develop, because it would be cool to release it in some other way than just an audio record, because it’s very visual and very interesting and funny. So, if we can figure out a very unique visual component to it, it would make for an awesome package.
Well, since we’re talking about all the stuff that you’ve been working on last year, let’s go ahead and wrap it up with Jazz-Iz-Christ.
[laughs]
This is fusing traditional and non-traditional jazz elements with electronic. Is that a decent enough description?
Yeah, yeah. Most of the songs are songs that I had written over time that are jazz tracks that I had three different friends collaborate on. I also had them send me tracks that I can collaborate on. It’s fusion; it’s progressive. Certain elements are experimental, and certain elements are classic jazz. There’s three songs, four songs with vocals; the rest are instrumentals. It’s a very unique record. It’s a beautiful record, actually.
You have been really busy.
[laughs] I have been.
Jazz-Iz-Christ- “Untitled Sample”:
You are known to be a tad political in your music, taking on typical subjects like political hypocrisy but also volatile ones such as the Armenian Genocide. Regarding the latter, with your song “Yes, It’s Genocide”, you said, “It feels personal, it doesn’t feel political.” Do you think perhaps the reason that some of your songs, or the more politically motivated songs, are so effective is because of the fact that they are so personal?
That’s a really good question, and I think that the answer is “yes.” A lot of my songs that I write, whether they’re political or socially involved, they always have a personal twist. I mix personal stories with everything else that’s bigger than life, in some ways. It’s because I look at everything in a very… I try to bring everything down to the human being, down to the simplistic aspect of what it means to me, and it becomes more personal; it becomes more emotional.
Well, I will leave you with something I found on a comments page. “Hey, Serj, I’m too old to appreciate your music, which my family and grandchildren enjoy. But yet, I thought you’d enjoy knowing that I enjoy your heart and your mind…”
That’s beautiful. Who wrote that?
It was on a comments page regarding an article about you getting the Prime Minster’s medal while in Armenia.
