SYSTEM OF A DOWN TRIVIA
Trivia
The band's Japanese label, Sony Music, dates their first concerts in Japan, in Tokyo and Osaka, to April 1999. On 29 July 2001, five weeks before Toxicity came out, they played the GREEN STAGE on the third day of Fuji Rock Festival; the festival's own timetable for that day lists Tool and Eminem after them on the same stage.
The band has four Grammy nominations and one win. "Chop Suey!" was up for Best Metal Performance at the 44th awards in 2002 and "Aerials" for Best Hard Rock Performance at the 45th in 2003; "B.Y.O.B." from Mezmerize won Best Hard Rock Performance at the 48th in 2006, and "Lonely Day" from Hypnotize was nominated in the same category the following year.
The band took its name from a poem Daron Malakian had written, "Victim of a Down". Bassist Shavo Odadjian was convinced that changing the first word to "System" would catch more eyes and would also put their records next to their heroes Slayer in the racks, and Malakian had no objection. When people asked him in the early days to describe the music, Malakian has said, he would tell them it was as if Slayer and the Beatles had had a child.
For the two or three years they were selling out Los Angeles clubs, nobody would sign them. Daron Malakian has said labels accepted that an Armenian band could draw the city's large Armenian community but asked who would listen in countries where people did not know what an Armenian was. The offer finally came from Rick Rubin, who saw them at the Viper Room and remembered it as a show so funny and intense that he could not stop laughing. The band had nearly signed with Universal, but the posters on the walls of its offices told them nobody there knew what to do with rock, and they went with Rubin.
The 1998 debut sold just 3,000 copies in its first week, then kept selling steadily, reaching about 764,000 by the time the second album, Toxicity, arrived in September 2001. Toxicity entered the Billboard 200 at number one on 222,000 copies. Billboard added a note that, because of the emergency situation in New York that week, incorrect data had at first been used to compile the chart, which had shown the band at number two.
In early 2002 more than a dozen unfinished songs from the Toxicity period began circulating online as "Toxicity II". Making the best of a bad situation, the band hurried to finish the recordings for the holiday season, wrapped them in a bare sleeve modelled on a home-burned CD-R and called the result Steal This Album!, a nod to the political activist Abbie Hoffman. Sony Music Japan's note on its own edition tells the same story: the leaked recordings were all unfinished, so the band recorded them properly for an urgent release.
"I-E-A-I-A-I-O" from Steal This Album! was reportedly called "KITT" at first, and it owes a debt to Knight Rider. John Dolmayan has told the story behind it: at about twelve he ran into David Hasselhoff walking out of a Los Angeles liquor store with a soda, shouted "Knight Rider!", and got a "Hey kid" and a cowboy-style finger point in return. He told Serj Tankian, and the encounter, the name of the liquor store included, went into the lyrics.
Mezmerize and Hypnotize are one work released six months apart. Rick Rubin has said he recorded about 35 songs with the band and could not get them down to a manageable number. Daron Malakian said he would have felt uncomfortable handing someone a CD with 25 songs on it, and Rubin reasoned that in an age when people rarely listen to a whole album, the only way to get the music properly heard was to hand it over a little at a time. Each half runs between 35 and 40 minutes.
The paintings on the covers of Mezmerize and Hypnotize are by Daron Malakian's father, the artist Vartan Malakian, who opened an antiques and art gallery called Arka in 1993 and has worked in oils, watercolour, mosaic glass and three-dimensional pieces. Because Daron wanted to take his father's art on stage with him, Vartan hand-painted several of his guitars, which can be seen in many of the band's videos, and Ibanez issued a limited-edition Iceman guitar painted by him.
In 2015, the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, the band played the Wake Up the Souls tour, which opened in Los Angeles on 7 April and closed on 23 April with a free concert in Republic Square in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. Serj Tankian had played solo shows in Armenia, but this was the first time System of a Down performed there, and the set ran to nearly two and a half hours and 37 songs.
"Protect the Land" and "Genocidal Humanoidz", released on 6 November 2020, were the band's first new songs in fifteen years, and it took a war to make them: fighting had broken out in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) that September. On the first Sunday evening of October, John Dolmayan texted the other three asking them to put their differences and the past aside and make a song for their people; they went back into the studio, and the proceeds went to help Armenians.