![]() An album from 16 years ago that seemed to relish in depicting a fictitious breakdown of our society has instead sung about some harsh new realities.Ĭhop Suey requires no explanation. If this doesn’t whirl your head around to the recent images of ICE officers performing mass arrests of illegal immigrants and placing them in detention centers, than you haven’t been paying attention. Then it veers off into a walloping, thudding chorus: Peaceful, loving youth against the brutality, ![]() Deer Dance, one of the secret gems of the album, starts off like any system romp, cooling down into a sliding bass tune, and this is where the Trump-era images start to become painfully real:īeyond the Staples Center you can see America, The timing is always changing, and it is always catchy, from whomping, stomping nu-metal riffs, to pantomime, eastern European, Armenian-sounding jaunts. Not only do they fearlessly call out hypocrisies at the rate that Donald Trump spews unfounded claims in a press conference, but they spin out these songs with the structure of a 40 minute classical piece, and condense it into 4 minutes. Don’t forget, there is a quirky allusion to comedy and satire with how these men work.Īnd this is what the album–and the band–does so very well. “The percentage of Americans in the prison system Then as the song builds up to the chorus every time, Serj seemingly peeks his head over a couch in the background with kind reminders of the dark, subjective realities of 20 th century America, such as: ![]() ![]() The song smashes through fast paced guitar riffs that shake the floor before quickly flipping to fast-paced cymbal high-hat while Serj raps breakneck, no-breathe verses like: Prison Song starts the album off as a no-holds-barred rip through the nu-metal sound that Toxicity claimed virtually all on its own. Once playing into the quirky jokiness of System’s style, now unapologetically describing the horrors that are going on within our own country and our own administration in 2017. To bring this to light, many of the songs that once depicted a fictitious post-apocalyptic war-film are now simple realities. While in the 2000’s it was regarded as an indulgently liberal painting of the horrors of the world in a time of Neo-Cons and Hawks, the imagism it conjures is all too real today. Having been released the week of September 11th, 2001, the album stirred major controversy, to the point that Chop Suey, the album’s magnum opus, was immediately taken off radio stations for the sensitive lyrics “I cry / when angels deserve to die / in my self-righteous suicide.” Comprised by the four-man Armenian-American quartet of Serj Tankian, Daron Malakian, Shavo Odadjian, and John Dolmayan, the band has always sung about injustices in the world committed by various agents of imperialism and oppression, often referring to the Armenian Genocide still denied by the Turkish government to this day. From the first metallic crunch of Prison Song to the melodic high pitched, hair-raising opera-like harmony climax that the album closes on in Aerials, the album stands the test of time more than any other work of modern political critique remotely close to the genre of rock, especially in the age of Trump. The anti-establishment angst was so palpable it could level an entire World War 1-era battlefield. There has never been a more prolific, barrier-breaking, innovative, and quirky album than System of a Down’s 2001 Toxicity. To most younger MIIS students, the album elucidates memories of head-banging in your middle school friend’s bedroom with the volume cranked and the door shut. This may irk some people, but it’s been boiling in me for 15 years and I’m going to just come out and say it.
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