System of a Down
"Toxicity"
2001
American Recordings(1)
"Toxicity" is an album on the edge between thrashy punk and heavy metal.(2) Despite coming from a musical niche known for its displays of crude power, System of a Down is very artistic and the single "Chop Suey" is a major hit with the lyrics: "I cry when angels deserve to die."
Most people will not like the music; even though it is very well done. The big time music review magazine Spin called it #1 and the Time magazine conglomerate named it #3 for the year 2001 in its review. Count the reviewer among the revolutionaries in the imperialist countries who will enjoy the album quite a bit with its driving sounds and political message.
System of a Down is a proletarian band with emphasis on a lot of issues that young people today care about--climate control treaties, opposing Echelon which is satellite spying on everyone, the arms race in space, globalization, opposition to war with Iraq etc.
System of a Down's website links to "Z Magazine" and the "Nation" which are the two largest circulation periodicals calling themselves "left-wing." They also link to "Amnesty International" and a site called "Global Revolutions" which is for legalizing pot--oh well.
The lead singer is an Armenian from Beirut, so the band has raised money to raise awareness of the Armenian genocide. This is yet another project that MIM supports.
Our disagreements with the band are in two main areas. One is that it opposes science itself in a song in the album titled "Science": "Science has failed our mother earth" and "spirit-moves-through-all-things," the song says. It is this sort of prevalent attitude which proves that people are going to have to choose between science and capitalism, because capitalism is giving science a bum rap. MIM is hoping people will keep the science and toss the capitalist system responsible for its production right now.
Two is that MIM would call these activists radical bourgeois democrats, the kind even Marx met in his day. MIM does not work within the whole "democracy" paradigm, because we are for "survival rights" even if a majority somewhere opposes those rights to shelter, clothing, food etc. Ironically, System of a Down gives us another very good reason to get out of the "democracy" game: "drug money is used to rig elections,/ and train brutal corporate sponsored/ dictators around the world"--so says System of a Down in "Prison Song." MIM would say that while calling themselves "democratic," U.$. rulers carry out what System of a Down is saying, so calling ourselves "democratic" is playing the rulers' game and confusing people. People need to be told that the system does not work the way the fairy-tales told in civics classes want us to believe. Unlike System of a Down, we believe that it is not possible for capitalist democracy to work the way that it is supposed to.
Related to this point is the band's flying the Amerikkkan flag upside down, which means the country is in distress. Rather than fly it upside down and imply that the United $tates should be saved from itself in its present form, people should burn the U.S. flag if they are going to use it as a symbol at all.
"Prison Song" is a right on topic for MIM, and the first song of the album. The band has picked up on the prison craze in the United $tates. In this day of shallow "patriotism," it would be good to point out that no one has a lower opinion of the Amerikkkan people than the current U.$. rulers, because those rulers are justifying imprisoning Amerikkkans more than any other people in the world per capita. That means that compared with other rulers, these rulers believe Amerikkkan people are more criminal than others. The U.$. rulers hate their people more than other rulers in other countries. That's a measurable fact.(3)
MIM is also right there with "Needles," the second song, which is about parasitism.
On the intersection of politics and art: System of a Down is very, very polished for thrashy metal, speed metal or whatever it is called, but sometimes the lyrics are simply didactic, as if to "bash it into their thick heads." Many people go into punk rock with this intention in mind. MIM does not agree with that thought, but many people should go into the arts with proletarian intentions like System of a Down's.
Notes:
1. See the band's web site: http://www.systemofadown.com/
2. For a description of the music styles and how it fits in:
http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/ChroniclesOfChaos/coc055.txt
3. MIM puts the references for this fact in every issue of MIM Notes.
On the web see, http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/freecoun.html