2001: System of a Down, Toxicity
By Michael Lee
Toxicity, The War on Terror, and the Founding of the 21st Century Through Splitting
This is a story of System of a Down’s sophomore album, Toxicity. It is also a story of America’s War on Terror and the narratives of empire. But to tell these stories, with something close to the complexity they deserve, we have to begin elsewhere, and a bit further back, with the First World War.
It was June 28th, 1914—the morning of St. Vitus’ day, a deeply important Serbian holiday—when Austria-Hungary's Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrived in occupied Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The relationship between the Austro-Hungarian empire and Slavs was a colonial one, and his arrival was salt in a wound.
Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian-Serb, along with his group of revolutionary minded youth, “Young Bosnia,” developed a plan to assassinate Franz Ferdinand. Most of us know the next part of the story, at least the basics: the assassination succeeded (and then, like a ghost, war appeared). It succeeded, however, mostly due to a series of mishaps so numerous it may as well have been an accident. The bad luck and hubris of the Archduke was in turn the good luck of the amateur assassins. And, as it turned out (at least in the short run), it all appeared to be great luck for the war mongering Austro-Hungarian Empire looking to expand its influence in the region.
Truth is, in part, shaped by memory. Memory, in part, by stories. Stories, in part, by power. Austria-Hungary told a story of professional assassins sent by the Serbian state. As such, and with the blank check backing of the German Empire, they felt emboldened in declaring war on Serbia exactly one month after the assassination.
To even begin to scratch at the complexity of the context, we’d also have to talk about The Balkan Wars, The Russo-Japanese War, The 1905 Revolution, The Berlin Conference, The Franco-Prussian War, and the subsequent Franco-Russian Alliance (and then some). These events set the stage for what was to come; following Austria’s declaration nations fell like dominoes, fulfilling the terms of past treaties and alliances until all of Europe, and its imperial holdings throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa were at war, ushering the globe into the 20th century: the Age of Industrial Slaughter and Total War.
The 19th century is known as the “long” 19th century, ending—finally—when the 20th century began with World War I in 1914. Similarly, the 21st century did not begin on New Year’s Eve in 1999 as us millennials sat in front of our TV’s wondering if Y2k was real and if, come midnight, all of the lights across the world would go out, plunging humanity into darkness. While Y2k captured the mood of transition, the founding event of the 21st century began the following year on October 7th with the U.S and allied invasion of Afghanistan ushering us into the global War on Terror. The catalyst for which was, as the story goes and is remembered, the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001.
The attacks on the World Trade Towers were—like Gavrilo Princip’s murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand—the pretext needed for the war mongering American empire, and its Western allies, to initiate a world hitherto unimaginable and yet predictable. Indeed, one which they had already been planning while waiting for an event large enough to gain the popular support necessary to carry that plan out.
***
Days before the US invaded Afghanistan, my basketball practice had just wrapped at the Hopkins Senior Center in downtown Hopkins, a small city just west of Minneapolis. My friends and I waited outside for Stephen’s mom, Donna, to pick us up for our regular weekend sleepover. Autumn seemed to have come early, and the days were shortening quickly. The crisp air outside of the gym held that silent tension which was everywhere after September 11th, so ripe and tenuous it felt like the air might split open. Everything seemed to have the potential to suddenly snap.
What I remember faintly in between our laughter as we piled into the car, was Donna’s almost frantic energy. She had always been kind, energetic, and especially generous, but that night that energy seemed cranked up a few notches to the point of strangeness. She made us so many meals, snacks, and desserts while we played NBA Live and argued over who would get to have Sam Cassell on their fantasy basketball team, you would have thought there was going to be a food shortage and she wanted us to enjoy as much as we could before it hit. When she finally went to bed and we were ordered lights out, Stephen told us how his mom had been acting strange since September 11th. We had noticed, but hadn’t taken it much into account. All our parents had been a bit off. What we didn’t know then was that Stephen’s mom was Schizophrenic and had stopped taking her medication; none of us had even heard the word before. The events of 9/11 and the American propaganda machine were taking a reality bending hold on much of the public, but this grip was especially tight on her.
9/11 had a similar effect on American consciousness as World War I and the advent of aerial bombardment and long-distance shelling had on Europeans: war could happen here. Not only in this country, but in our cities and neighborhoods. War was no longer an abstract experience that happened in some imagined periphery.
Keeping the TV on low, we surfed through channels late into the night. We clicked past what came in clearly and began to sift through the static. We excitedly found what we thought was a softcore porn channel and could almost make out a human body between the crackling. Even as we quietly wrapped tinfoil around the antennae, nothing was clear enough to make out, let alone enjoy. Dismayed, bored, but too hopped up on caffeine and sugar to sleep, we continued. We were about to give up when suddenly a channel broke perfectly through the static. A chaotic, seemingly nonsensical clash of instrumentation and lyricism caught our attention immediately:
Why'd you leave the keys up on the table?
Here you go, create another fable, you wanted to.
Grab a brush and put on a little makeup, you wanted to.
Hide the scars to fade away the shakeup, you wanted to.
We kept the volume so low we could barely hear it. It didn’t matter, we had been screaming the lyrics to the Armenian-American heavy metal band System of a Down’s (SOAD) hit single “Chop Suey” in the hallways at school for weeks. During practice. After practice. Out the windows of buses. On the sidelines at our weekend tournaments. We had the song memorized and didn’t need it to be loud to feel it. We listened to the song the same way we sang it: with our bodies. And yet, had anyone asked us what any of it meant, we couldn’t have told them. But we knew it at the level of instinct. It was the chorus in particular which both baffled and pulled us into its orbit.
I don't think you trust
In my self-righteous suicide
I cry when angels deserve to die
In my self-righteous suicide
I cry when angels deserve to die
It would be this chorus which also launched the band to both fame and to infamy. System of a Down’s second album Toxicity debuted at the top of the Billboard charts on September 4th, 2001. One week later, bassist Shavo Odadjian was packing for the band’s upcoming, and ironically named, “Pledge of Allegiance Tour.” He took a break from packing to tune into the news. All the way across the country, the first tower was falling. From his home in LA, Shavo stood in disbelief, unable to turn away from the footage of ash and debris pluming the air. It was at that moment the band’s manager called to inform him that their single, “Chop Suey,” had just gone number 1.
No sooner had it reached the top, it was pulled from the radio. In the wake of 9/11, the lyrics referencing self-righteous suicide and angels deserving to die were believed to have been predicting or supporting the suicide attacks killing 2,977 people.
The band found themselves in the national spotlight in ways they had long dreamt of and in ways which they could never have imagined, suddenly branded as national security threats. “Chop Suey” earned them a spot on the lengthening national watch list, and the cities they played in raised their terrorist threat level whenever SOAD came to town. The band’s frontman Serj Tankian reflected years later how he’d constantly worried that “we might die any night.”
“Chop Suey” was initially titled “Self-Righteous Suicide,” but the label rejected it as unmarketable. “Chop Suey,” the Americanized dish of tsap suey, was chosen in part because the word “suey” sounded to the band like a play on the word suicide. Secondly, tsap suey roughly translates to “odds and ends,” which feels like a pretty accurate analysis of the song’s sonic and lyrical makeup (especially considering the lyrics to the bridge: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit / Father, into your hands / Why have you forsaken me? / In your eyes, forsaken me? were the result of a band member blindly pulling a book off the shelf and picking a random passage. That book happened to be the Bible).
“Chop Suey” is at once harmonic as it is discordant and concussive. From its soft intro to the quick explosion of the first verse—verging on an unhinged variant of rapcore—it starts and stops in a kind of chopping before the band’s metal roots take over all while Armenian folk music runs as a steady through line across the song, and the album as a whole. For my friends and I, our initial attraction to the song was this grating and harmonizing of seemingly disparate genres, sounds and language. It was the strangeness of the lyrics. It was Serj screaming, Serj singing softly like a saint.
It was these juxtapositions which highlighted each note, each movement, and each lyric of the song. The surreal and humorous highlighted the political, the political highlighted the strange, both within the album and the world into which the album was released. A world suddenly and starkly highlighted by the rattling and grinding concussive machinations of war, the propaganda and public cultural production which spoke in favor of or against the belligerence of the American empire.
Ultimately, “Chop Suey” was important because the song felt and acted almost like a Trojan horse. That it had been briefly banned, then blacklisted, made it all the more alluring. The single brought millennials and Gen-X into an album which offered not, as its conservative detractors claimed, a 9/11 prophecy but instead, in its analysis of American politics, provided millions of increasingly politicized young people a lyrical blueprint by which to understand and critique America’s global War on Terror.
At 12-years-old, I had a growing understanding of race, class, and police violence, but it was hyper localized. I didn’t yet have a framework for America’s war machine and the reciprocal relationship between imperial violence and State violence. Toxicity felt prophetic in part because it was an indictment of what was already happening, had been happening, and what post 9/11 imperial logic would amplify at every level.
The album begins with “Prison Song,” as Serj harshly whispers, “They’re tryna build a prison.” This song, and the political context the album was released alongside, shapes the lyrical interpretation throughout aided by the group’s, at times, opaque surrealism which leaves incredible latitude for listeners’ analysis.
In the second verse, Serj indicts the prison system by framing the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty as wars against the poor.
Minor drug offenders fill your prisons, you don't even flinch
All our taxes paying for your wars against the new non-rich
Doing so appropriately labels these projects, but also sows the seed for the song’s bridge when the band connects the drug war to US interference in global elections.
Utilizing drugs to pay for secret wars around the world
Drugs are now your global policy, now you police the globe
and plainly,
Drug money is used to rig elections and train brutal
Corporate sponsored dictators around the world
“Prison Song” introduced me to the immense scope of the War on Drugs by illuminating its global implications and situating the War on Terror within a genealogy of the CIA and post WWI nation building. It set me on a course for interpreting the rest of the album and subsequent two decades as we occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq.
What I’m struck by most perhaps, even 20 years later, is how bizarre much of the album is. The band’s surreal, almost carnival-esque lyrics continue to highlight the band's overt polemics across the album, yes, but also allow these polemical movements to be easily digested by a wide audience and offer a kind of endurance to the listener. If one ever felt like they were getting a bit worn down by overt waves of political commentary, it was quickly paired back with the strangeness from songs such as “Jet Pilot” and “Bounce” that came to define a great deal of millennial humor and aesthetics.
The song on Toxicity which captures this balance best is “Deer Dance.” It opens:
Circumventing circuses lamenting in protest
To visible police presence-sponsored fear
Battalions of riot police with rubber bullet kisses
Baton courtesy, service with a smile
It’s this verse which captures the bizarre, absurdity of the police state, that proliferated rapidly after 9/11 as the Patriot Act was passed, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security were formed, and the Border Patrol exploded from 9,000 agents to more than 20,000 by 2008. Every transgression of the State was justified by the refrain that if it is not done then the “terrorists win.” Swiftly “terrorist” was applied to already surveilled and brutalized Black, Brown, immigrant, and Muslim populations across the US. Foreign terror was the justification for increasing State terror. No matter the protest or resistance, the silent masses accepted the increasing scope and brutality of the police, their violence quotidian as “kisses” and “service with a smile.”
“Deer Dance” goes on to indict American celebrity and entertainment culture as an obscuring and hypnotizing force used to pacify the masses. Serj Sings:
Beyond the Staples Center you can see America
With its tired poor avenging disgrace
Peaceful, loving youth against the brutality
Of plastic existence
and again, holding up the brutality of the nation to its face:
Pushing little children with their fully-automatics
They like to push the weak around
Pushing little children with their fully-automatics
They like to push the weak around
What SOAD did so well, especially Serj—who is the group’s political and moral compass in addition to its strange, wild bard—was highlighting the linkages of past and present, self and group, global and local, as inextricably connected. And so, it is the song “X,” specifically a single line therein, upon which the album swings. Serj screams:
Show your people, show your people how we died
Show your people, show your people how we died
By the time “X” comes up on the album, the lyrics have run the gambit. The “we” can be taken to mean the working poor, immigrants, or drug addicts, but I can’t help but interpret these words as a demand to remember the Armenian Genocide specifically. One of the defining features of WWI, wherein one million Armenians were systematically murdered by the Ottoman-Turks, it was a genocide that was largely able to take place given the way the narrative strategies and weapon systems of WWI erased the boundary between enemy combatants and civilians (a now standard practice). It seems all too appropriate—if not inevitable—that it should be an Armenian-American metal band providing the soundtrack, if you will, to the “war” which initiated the 21st century.
Less central in the West’s public memory of WWI is how the Middle East was reshaped as much or even more than Europe. Perhaps wider reaching than the Armenian Genocide, was the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France which decided that, should the Allied Powers win the war, Britain would take Palestine, Jordan, and a new nation-state to be called Iraq. France was to have Syria and Lebanon.
It is these projects of global ordering and nation-building through the victors’ treaties which create the conditions for the War on Terror. Almost any contemporary disorder within the region can be traced to the power vacuums resulting from the War on Terror and 20th century imperial order aimed solely at bolstering European spheres of influence ignoring existing ethnic, cultural, religious or linguistic boundaries.
And it is this word, “order,” which hangs over the album. Order for whom? Order at what cost? These questions are posed in devastating fashion in the title track, Toxicity.
You, what do you own the world? How do you own disorder, disorder?
Now, somewhere between the sacred silence, sacred silence and sleep
Somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep
Disorder, disorder, disorder
The song begins and ends with its chorus as the song bitingly asks, “You, what do you own the world?” Followed by a more earnest inquiry, “how do you own disorder?”
The song is a forceful critique that the “order” upon which Western powers are founded depends upon an engineered disorder exported throughout the global South. And yet, it is this disorder that inevitably recreates itself within the metropolis. The surveillance, counterinsurgency, imprisonment, and murder required to maintain control of a colony become the same tools of control within the nation-state itself.
Toxicity concludes with the hidden track, “Arto,” based on a traditional Armenian funeral chant. The song draws its name from friend of the band Arto Tuncboyaciyan who played the duduk (a traditional Armenian reed instrument) on the track.
That an Armenian funeral song both concludes the album, and does so as a hidden track, feels especially poignant. It would be another 20 years before a sitting American president would finally acknowledge the Armenian Genocide carried out during the First World War (106 years after it took place). The secret of the song felt like an acknowledgement of the grieving done in silence and in the shadows, of the past and of the future, a grief survived again and again by its victims and their descendants. A grief both ignored and argued as fictional by its architects. How many survivors of American domestic and global policy can also identify with being forced to grieve in secret? Grieve unsaid violences that had been dismissed like they’d never happened? To be simply a story?
Arto is a funeral song for 1 million Armenians, yes, but also a funeral song for the victims of police brutality and the prison industrial complex. A grieving for victims of imperial wars past, present and future, the latter of which the band could not have guessed would begin only a month after Toxicity was released.
***
On October 7th, 2001, as the US and its allies began the War on Terror in Afghanistan, I sat silently in front of the TV and watched in the dim green of night vision, the missiles railing against Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad. System of a Down’s lyrics spun through my body as the distant and muffled sound of artillery crackled from the speakers—delayed slightly—just after each white green flash splitting the night.
I’ve read countless reviews on Toxicity over the years, and there is one word used with alarming consistency to describe their sonic and lyrical juxtapositions: schizophrenic. I’m not a fan of, and ultimately condemn, the use of neuro-atypicality to describe anything but the condition itself, but it is worth looking at the etymology of the word “schizophrenia”. From Modern Latin, literally "a splitting of the mind," from German Schizophrenie, derived from Greek, skhizein, "to split" and phrēn, "heart, mind."
When I think of Toxicity and the War on Terror, I do in fact think of splitting. Of breakage and fracture. I think of the material and psychological effects of the surveillance state, the swelling prison industrial complex, the widespread use and acceptance of torture, the advent of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, the absolute dystopian border patrol and immigration policies. I think of the rapidly proliferating drone program, and the more than 330,00 bombs the US has dropped since the War on Terror began. I think of proxy wars, power vacuums and sectarian violence. I think of how Isis declared the erasure of the border between Iraq and Syria a direct blow to the Sykes-Picot agreement, World War One still shaping the land, the tensions within it, and its continual Western invaders a century later. What has all this amounted to other than a splitting of countries, cities, and communities. A splitting of lives, by bombs and by bullets, by torture and State terror. A splitting of the mind, and body, through the cumulative trauma of endless war and the stories told to justify it.
Twenty years on, reflecting on the founding of the 21st century and the music that shaped and was shaped alongside it, I am haunted and captivated by this epoch made by splitting. I am brought back to Stephen and his mother Donna’s schizophrenia.
Four months after the War on Terror began, Stephen’s mother’s paranoid delusions became so lucid that her connection to reality was entirely split. One of her primary delusions was that Al-Qaeda terrorists were coming to kill her son.
After September 11th, the demonization of Muslims worldwide was smothering. It felt like every day that an American politician was on the news yelling how terrorists wanted to kill “our” children. She believed the lies. And if not exactly as they were told, she believed people were coming for her son. She believed the only way to save him was by killing him herself. And on February 24th, 2001, she carried this belief out.
Of the roughly 1 million killed in the War on Terror, more than a third were civilians. I now count Stephen among them. His mother is culpable, ill as she was, but I imagine her culpability is at most equal to that of the propaganda machine which accelerated her down the unraveling path of unreality where she would fully live, but also, to some extent, where many Americans began to live. The machinery that helped drive her to kill her son, was the same machinery used to send hundreds of thousands of Americans to kill the children of other mothers on the other side of the world.
Stephen’s death was not inevitable. The War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, the First World War, the Second, the Armenian Genocide—none of it was inevitable, but they were each distinct possibilities within the material and mythologized world erected by Western imperialism. And it is these events, their echoes and their progeny, that Toxicity sought to elucidate and mobilize against. So many politicized youth in the early 2000’s joined the movement; including Stephen and I, young as we were.
Music too, or especially, is a mode of sense making, a way to grieve and to survive, to celebrate, to indict. To enter the “Deer Dance,” Toxicity’s wild carnival, to arise at the intersections of propaganda and cultural production. A means to remember, a means to rage. It is also a way to say no. No, we do not accept this world. We will not be beguiled by plastic existence, by propaganda, by the American war machine. We will sing and scream, dance and laugh and weep. We will hold up the names of the dead against the lies of the empires which killed them. And then we will hold up a different story, one which subverts the logic of this world in which we live in service of a new one. A world that is not inevitable, but is possible. So long as we sing the right songs to light the path. So long as we tell the right stories to guide us there.
Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer and educator. Author of The Only Worlds We Know (Button Poetry), his work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, and Best New Poets 2018 among others. Michael holds an M.Ed. from Harvard and is currently an MFA candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at Cornell University. He instagrams at MichaelLeeWrites.