System’s music sounded like it had been doused in whatever Barry Bonds was taking to fuel his record-breaking home run campaign that year. And with the sophomore LP they dropped 20 years ago tomorrow, they surpassed my wildest expectations.Īgain produced by Rubin alongside Tankian and Malakian, Toxicity amped up the insanity of the first album to unhinged new extremes. The prospect of a new album was tantalizing. At a time when the Family Values Tour axis of Korn and Limp Bizkit seemed in steep decline, my excitement for SOAD was just ramping up. By the time my senior year kicked off at the end of summer 2001, I had gotten way into Radiohead and mostly moved past nü metal. (Rubin remembers the program director at KROQ swearing the station would never play System but eventually relenting: “They clearly didn’t fit, but they were so good that they transcended not fitting.”) The band also toured relentlessly the first time I remember hearing about them is when a much cooler and more “alternative” classmate drove out of town to see them play with Incubus at a Winter X Games-ass package deal called the SnoCore Tour. In the three years after its release in the summer of 1998, singles like the jarringly zany “Sugar” and the deadly serious “Spiders” worked their way into radio rotation. Slowly but surely, that first album made System Of A Down one of the biggest rock bands in the world. It wasn’t like laughing like, ‘What a joke.’ It was just so over the top and so extreme - like, Armenian folk dancing with heavy metal riffs and wild political lyrics and screaming.
Describing the first time he saw SOAD at Hollywood’s 250-capacity Viper Room - around the same time John Dolmayan took over on drums in 1997 - Rubin once told the BBC’s Zane Lowe, “I laughed the whole time. Among those smitten with System was the Def Jam co-founder and sagelike producer Rick Rubin, who signed them to his Columbia subsidiary American Recordings and supplied their debut with the same kind of visceral heft he’d once provided for their heroes Slayer. Tankian, guitarist Daron Malakian, and bassist Shavo Odadjian had been in a band called Soil together upon recruiting original drummer Andy Khachaturian in 1994, they launched a new project named after Malakian’s poem “Victims Of A Down” and set about lighting up LA’s club scene. System Of A Down formed in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale among members of the area’s Armenian immigrant population. I sensed there was a lot going on here beyond my grasp, but I was also titillated by how often and how aggressively Tankian yelled “FUCK!” To a sheltered white Midwestern teen like myself, this band was intoxicating, adrenalizing, and deeply confusing. Tankian ranted about God and the devil, about sex and war, about genocide and Russian roulette, sounding sometimes like a maniacal circus ringleader and sometimes like a monster having a meltdown. The band behind him often exploded into halting, chugging downtuned power chords but just as often pivoted to combustible jazz, madcap alt-metal that pulled as much from the Pixies as Faith No More, or the kind of Eastern European party rock I’d later associate with Gogol Bordello. On the LA quartet’s self-titled debut, singer Serj Tankian was Robin Williams as the genie gone darkly deranged - howling and wailing with an unnerving wide-eyed passion, bottoming out into hellish death metal bellow-roars, shouting like an angry dictator ordering his troops into battle. But even in this context, SOAD’s intense idiosyncrasies stood out. It was the high Ozzfest era, and weird was normal. As a young teenager, I’d been startled by Phil Anselmo’s shrill and burly blood-curdling scream at the outset of The Great Southern Trendkill, mystified by Jonathan Davis’ demonic scat on Life Is Peachy, frightened by Slipknot’s audiovisual onslaught, and barreled over by the sludgiest of the nü-metal B-listers. System Of A Down were just about the craziest shit I had ever heard.
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