System of a Down Photo: Columbia

AN  INTERVIEW WITH — Ian Robinson

A song about the drug trade funding private American wars, another about drug-addled groupies — all these things and more have been mixed with dissonant sounds, power chords and odd singing/scatting-style vocals to create the new System of a Down record, Toxicity, which hits stores on September 4.

After the success of their self-titled debut album, System have been busy dodging labels. From "political" to "quirky," people have been working overtime attempting to squeeze the band into a niche. Their Rick Rubin-produced second album is sure to inspire a new wave of adjectives, plus a few raised eyebrows. I sat down recently with the band and found out why they're more comfortable in the pit with their fans than onstage, what was the inspiration for their upcoming tour with Slipknot and why too many songs is a good thing. Here's how it played out.

Iann Robinson: Your new record is so much more abrasive than the first record was. Was there a conscious effort to make it more brutal?

Daron Malakian: It's funny that you say it's more brutal. I feel like it has more melody. Everybody comes to us with a different opinion about the record.

Shavo Odadjian: ... It starts off really heavy. It's like a roller-coaster ride.

Malakian: The influence of death metal is there. I'm an old death metalhead myself. ... It doesn't come out just heavy.

John Dolmayan: Some of it can be more in-your-face than our first album was, but I think it hits elements of melody a little more than our first album did.

Malakian: There's just more drive to certain riffs. It's tough for us to explain, because we were on the inside.

"Spiders" [RealVideo]

Robinson: You get really close to your fans in the video for the first single, "Chop Suey."

Malakian: It shows how much we are like those people. We've got shots where we're in the [mosh] pit. We don't feel very distant from our fans, as human beings. Maybe our fans might see us that way, but at the end of the day, all of this hasn't changed anybody in this band too much. People who know us will tell you that. We're still four ordinary dudes. We're no different from those people that come to the shows and pay their money. ... I am the people, we are the people.

Dolmayan: When we go on tour, you'll usually find us somewhere in the audience watching the other bands we tour with. That's the best place to watch from. There's a point to all those speakers being pointed out as opposed to in.

One of the coolest things about this video is [having] real fans there. A couple days before the video shoot, we went on the Net and let people know we needed fans to come in. We had 1,400 kids there. We played for about six hours with live instruments. Between takes we'd play songs from the new album and the old one.

Malakian: That's why I've got a lot of respect for System fans, man. System fans came from all over the world.

Odadjian: ... Canada, New Mexico ... for one day, just to be in a video.

Malakian: The point is, we didn't hire anybody to come and cheer for us at the show. ... So the video actually looks like a live show, and I'm stage diving. It's pretty much what happens at a System show.

Robinson: You guys have gotten behind House Resolution 596. Can you fill people in on what it is, what your involvement is and what you're doing to spread the word about it?

Serj Tankian: It was a resolution that was about to pass the House of Representatives last year while [Bill] Clinton was still president. It's about the United States officially recognizing the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turkey in 1915. Clinton wrote a letter to the House speaker asking him to withdraw the resolution.

It was a cowardly move — as far as I'm concerned, as far as we're concerned — to basically hide the truth in history. ... It's already passed in France, not the same resolution, but a similar one. The Italian Parliament has also recognized it, as well as the European Union.

Malakian: This is not political, this is personal. Whenever it's your great-grandmother that got chopped up, you're like, "I'm coming after you now, in my own way. In a nonviolent way." ... Here's four Armenian dudes that play rock music that are actually getting attention. If we're not gonna do it, who is? It's like we have a responsibility to the souls.

"Sugar" [RealVideo]

Tankian: We did a benefit concert last year to raise some awareness and funds for an organization in Washington, D.C. that lobbies for recognition for the Armenian genocide. We're gonna continue that until there's proven results from the Turkish government and America.

Robinson: In "Prison Song," there's a lyric about the new "non-rich." Who, in your opinion, are the new non-rich?

Tankian: Most of the population of the industrial world — as well as most of the non-industrialized world — is the non-rich.

Robinson: Daron, you co-produced the record this time. Was that scary for you?

Malakian: I know what I'm doing. There are just certain things that I thought could have been better from the last record. ... I knew what I wanted to do with the guitars to make it more furious. On the last record there were two tracks of guitars. On this record, there's 12 tracks on each song.

Tankian: We were very confident and focused this time around. [We knew] exactly how we wanted it to sound and we became workaholics and did 33 songs.

Robinson: How hard was it to decide what songs you weren't going to put on this record, and what's going to happen with the other songs?

Dolmayan: It took us a long time to even approach that subject. We recorded 33 songs. I think we had a lot more, like 45.

Odadjian: It was really tough, man. We all had to choose from all those great songs. We had to pick 17 that Andy [Wallace] mixed, and out of those 17 we had to pick 14 that made the album.

Dolamayan: Every song could have been on the album, in my opinion. One thing we try to avoid is the filler philosophy. I don't like to listen to an album where I have to skip over songs. I like to put on an album and listen to it from beginning to end and enjoy it as a piece, as opposed to whatever song happens to be on the radio right now.

Malakian: The reason why those songs are on the record is because [they] felt like they made an album. They felt like they belonged as a family together. It doesn't take anything away from the other songs we didn't put on the record. Sometimes people think you didn't put it on the record because it wasn't a good song. It had nothing to do with that.

Tankian: We haven't exactly decided how to do it, but [the extra songs will] probably show up on the next album. [Most of them] will show up in one form or another.

Robinson: You're going to do the "Pledge of Allegiance" tour with Slipknot and Mudvayne. Why Slipknot? How did that come up?

Odadjian: We've known Slipknot for a while, and we've been talking about doing something together. We played with them on Ozzfest '99 and we made friends. ... It just happens that our records are coming out around the same time and there's no other big tours going on.

Dolmayan: We have a lot of respect for them and it's mutual. [We thought] "Why don't we put it together? We have totally different vibes, but let's give the fans a really good show.