and Armenia, the two countries he calls home. I spoke to Serj Tankian in late February as he relaxed in Los Angeles post-vaccination about all of this, as well as the new documentary Truth to Power, a primer on his activism inside and outside of System of a Down Elasticity, an EP out later this month on which his rock-and-roll impulses have returned in vibrant, mischievous form and parallels between corruption and unrest in the U.S. It’s their first new music together since 2006. Tankian supported the public demonstrations against government corruption that would inspire 2018’s Armenian Revolution and reconvened System of a Down last year for a double A-side single addressing the nation’s political strife, whose proceeds assisted victims of the Nagorno-Karabakh war.
Efforts to have the United States publicly recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide paid off in 2019 when Congress passed a resolution to acknowledge the late Ottoman Empire’s ethnic cleansing as such following years of American leaders mincing words when asked to go on the record, for fear of angering Turkey.
#ORDER OF SYSTEM OF A DOWN ALBUM LICENSE#
(This at a time when an uptick in nationalist sentiments post-9/11 gave elected officials license to pass restrictive legislation like the Patriot Act and pursue military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan whose justifications would prove dubious in the years to come.) Outside of System, Tankian runs Serjical Strike, a record label where he and his friends, like Armenian singer and musician Arto Tunçboyacıyan, follow their muses down unexpected rabbit holes.Īs an activist, Tankian has worked to bring awareness to Armenia’s painful history of occupation, oppression, and displacement by larger nations in the Caucasus region like Russia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan. System of a Down examined political disorder at home and abroad, decrying police brutality, privatized prisons and health care, and unmanned drone strikes, using withering humor and astounding technical prowess to shake its American audience out of faith in the goodness of government. That perspective made his work as front man of System of a Down - which, like Slipknot and the Deftones, transcended easy classification and complicated the idea that nu metal was merely a fount of unthinking men’s rage - both unpredictable and informative for a generation of listeners learning about economics and world politics the hard way during the band’s heyday in the early aughts, when the growth and prosperity of the ’90s dissolved into the wars and recessions in the early 21st century. For more than 25 years, Serj Tankian has threaded art, activism, and Armenian identity into his career as a singer-songwriter, producer, label head, and political advocate.
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