Toxicity

Toxicity came out one week before September 11th, 2001. Its lead single, “Chop Suey!,” famously landed on a Clear Channel blacklist of songs to avoid broadcasting in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center. “Chop Suey!” contained the word “suicide,” so it joined Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me” and Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” on a roster of tracks that might conceivably remind listeners of the recent national trauma.

“Chop Suey!” became a hit all the same, a nu-metal chimera that crashed unintelligible babbling into the chorus’s gorgeous vocal melody. One minute Serj Tankian’s shucking syllables like pistachio shells, saying nothing; the next he’s appealing to the Lord God Himself in a rich, reverent baritone, singing the words Jesus spoke to his father on the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” The bait-and-switch between abrasion and allure makes the song irresistible, a songwriting tactic that would elevate System of a Down from the glut of hard rock that occupied a sizable portion of pop radio through the turn of the millennium.

Raised in Los Angeles’s Armenian-American community, all four members of System of a Down were primed to see through the myth of American exceptionalism that would justify the coming warmongering of George W. Bush’s presidency. Their families had survived the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century; they grew up in the United States with ancestral scars from a massacre still officially denied by its perpetrators, which lent them keen eyes for political suppression and internal propaganda. It’s as if their position as ethnic outsiders in one of the largest cities in the U.S. contributed to the atypical configuration of their sound.

System of a Down released their debut self-titled album toward the end of Rage Against the Machine’s tenure as rock radio’s crowning political agitators. Like RATM, SOAD interpolated West Coast hip-hop’s quick vocal clip into a guitar-driven metal milieu. But SOAD’s compositions disoriented as much as they elucidated. Tankian’s wild, flexible delivery spun out of control. Guitarist Daron Malakian didn’t drive home the beat of their songs so much as he threw it into disarray. Malakian and Tankian forged a close chemistry on the band’s 1998 self-titled debut, whose cover image of an open hand referred to a World War II anti-fascist poster designed by a member of the Communist Party of Germany.

Tankien, Malakian, bassist Shavo Odadjian, and drummer John Dolmayan played with the weight of metal, but the quick pivots of their compositions also aligned them with L.A.’s hardcore punk heritage. Political without dipping into preachiness, they accumulated fans who could either tap into the radical messages of their music or easily ignore them. Come to it with political anguish and you’ll find an outlet for that pain. Come to it with more specific personal angst and you’ll leave just as satisfied.

Their second album, Toxicity, succeeded, improbably, in a radio environment that favored simplistic formulas. Max Martin had stamped popular music with his surefire songwriting brand, ushering in a cross-genre rush of structurally identical singles from the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Britney Spears. System of a Down competed with the bros of Nickelback, Creed, and Staind on the alternative charts, bands that dressed up the Martin school of pop with power chords and ham-throated vocals. Most of their songs took the form of the confessional: Men apologized to women and to God for their sins, which tended to include substance abuse, emotional neglect, and general chauvinism. Post-grunge incubated a strain of sincerity so obsequious that no amount of nostalgia has yet to rehabilitate it. It lives on as a punchline that itself has grown passé.

Even when System of a Down quoted the literal Bible, they managed to sidestep the blunt impact of grunge’s sickly dregs. Their lyrics tended toward the surreal, the humorous, and the abstract, and the hairpin turns of their compositions kept them from marinating too long in a single mood. Toxicity is heavy, making abundant use of the juiciest guitar distortion in its class thanks to the density of Rick Rubin’s production. But more importantly, the album is restless, bounding from one idea to another before the first can sink in. With such a nimble hand, System of a Down could smuggle radical politics into the headphones of bored kids drawn in by Tankian’s carnival-barker screams.

The album begins with a song that lucidly highlights the evil of the American for-profit prison system. “Minor drug offenders fill your prisons/You don’t even flinch/All our taxes paying for your wars/Against the new non-rich,” Tankian pronounces in a rapid sing-song cadence. He’s not joking but it sounds like a joke, which helps him ease into his more literal policy suggestions: “All research and successful drug policy shows that treatment should be increased/And law enforcement decreased while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences,” he shouts repeatedly at the bridge to “Prison Song,” biting out every syllable of the last three words. Malakian screeches behind Tankian, punctuating his lines and lubricating their blank seriousness; radical abolitionist viewpoints go down easier when accompanied by visceral nu-metal grunts.

The tension between the state and its subjects plays out more dramatically on “Deer Dance,” where riot police shove their guns into the ribs of peaceful anti-capitalist protesters. “Pushing little children/With their fully automatics/They like to push the weak around,” Tankian chants at the chorus, calling to mind any number of images from the past 15 years: mass shootings at high schools or concerts, demonstrations turned violent at the hands of the cops. There’s a light, playful quality to his voice throughout the verse. He trills the “R” in the word “brutality” and swoops in and out of the melody. Then, at the chorus, Tankian snaps into a scream and Malakian grinds between two chords, squeezing all the space out of the arrangement. The verse is like watching a riot on TV, with commercials breaking up the violent footage. The chorus breaks the glass and transports you into the claustrophobic mayhem of the crowd.

System of a Down practice their politics knowing full well its material limitations. They’ve almost certainly directed a few inquiring minds to Howard Zinn and perhaps they’ve reframed the concepts of prison and policing for more than a handful of millennials. Redirecting attention and softening preconceptions are both forms of political work that music can do, but it can’t pass laws or free prisoners. It can only galvanize, and its effects are almost always invisible, subconscious, and slow. The awareness of music’s inherent failure as a political tool saturates Toxicity. It’s why Tankian twists his voice into a sneer when he sing-speaks, “We can’t afford to be neutral on a moving train.” He’s not a theorist, only playing at being one. It’s why, between “Prison Song” and “Deer Dance,” he breaks out a song whose chorus urges, “Pull the tapeworm out of your ass!”

These comic deflations balance the weight of Toxicity’s politics, though some of their humor pitches into the oppression they purport to resist. “Psycho,” sandwiched between the mournful title track and “Aerials,” cuts the mood with a sequence of complaints about, of all people, groupies. He skips the ritual fun and goes straight to rejecting the groupie for being “cocaine crazy,” an elision without improvement. That women only appear on Toxicity to play disposable nuisances (or, on “Bounce,” orgy fodder) makes “Psycho” a skippable extra at best, and at worst a perfect example of the left’s longstanding deficiency in gender politics. The patriarchy and the police state are one in the same, but System of a Down only strike at one face of the enemy while ostensibly shielding the other.

Though “Psycho” mars Toxicity’s tightly wound wit, it only emphasizes just how magnificent the album gets when it’s not distracting itself with petty sexism. The three singles from Toxicity—“Chop Suey!,” the title track, and “Aerials”—represent a break from its two predominant modes of deadly serious politicizing and patently absurd joke-cracking. These songs are weighty and helpless. In them lies the dead air that rises when all the problems have been named, and the naming brings you no closer to a solution. The picture is clear but the path forward remains obscured.

Tankian’s language breaks down on “Aerials.” He gestures toward a spiritual unity among humans: “We’re one in the river/And one again after the fall,” he sings, rendering all of life as the few seconds between the top and bottom of a waterfall. At the chorus, he stresses every syllable and lapses into barely legible syntax. “When you lose small mind/You free your life,” he urges, a sentence that hints at psychedelic enlightenment, escaping predispositions through biochemical intervention—free your mind, man. Except it’s not the mind that gets free: The mind falls away and the person who’s lost it rises away from needing it at all. This isn’t mind-expansion. It’s mind-sloughing. No wonder the grammar’s bad.

The weight of the instrumentation on “Aerials” captures a sense of exhaustion that spills over into Tankian’s delivery. Having wrestled through his share of abolitionist praxis and scatological humor, he falls, drained, to the reminder that the world still exists even after it’s been defined. These songs, where System of a Down shift away from agitprop and plunge into numbing despair, comprise Toxicity’s gleaming emotional core. It’s that rare artifact among commercially heavy music: a nu-metal band that gets tired, and funnels its fatigue into its most compelling performances. System of a Down let their motor run out. After firing everybody up, they offer solace for the spent.

The lyrics to the title track call to mind the serene, lonely image of a barren highway on a midwinter night. Tankian sings of “Flashlight reveries/Caught in the headlights of a truck” and “Looking at life through the eyes of a tire hub,” as in spinning, exhausted, disoriented. There’s a city in the chorus, and the mock Hollywood sign on the album’s cover suggests the song takes place in Los Angeles, a strange, dry place choked with smog and congested with traffic. Trees grow there, but they’re palm trees, which look the same in emoji or Lego as they do in real life. The song houses a world sick with technology, cars, and apartments and the scourge of software updates, and still, the speaker is “eating seeds as a pastime activity,” like a paleo-vegan cruising the shoreline in a Tesla. Toxicity came out the same year as David Lynch’s surrealist nightmare Mulholland Drive, and both works feel prescient 17 years later, as if both Lynch and System of a Down could see California (and the rest of the country) about to fall into disarray.

“Toxicity” ends on a new idea. It doesn’t trail off into the cold. Malakian plays a lunk-headed riff and Tankian repeats a new lyric: “When I became the sun/I shone life into the man’s hearts.” There’s the potential for a whole song packed into those quick measures—earlier in the track, he sings the word “disorder” for longer than he takes to sing that entire couplet. It’s a big idea rendered in fragments: man becomes sun, sun enlightens man. Why end there? “Toxicity” snaps off, leaving silence. Tankian speaks in the past tense, like he’s already illuminated humanity, as if his work were done. He points to that distant, abstract image of life without suffering, and then he falls back into disorder.