His metal band was huge, his rock memoir tackles something bigger

Serj Tankian has sold more than 40 million records, scored an equal first with the Beatles on US charts, and once had his beard yanked by the Dalai Lama. But his newly released memoir is not, he is keen to stress, “your typical rock memoir”.

The former frontman with metal band System of a Down is talking about Down with the System: A Memoir (Of Sorts), which, shortly after its release, hit The New York Times’ top 10 bestsellers list.

“There is no sensationalising of partying with other rock stars, I’m telling real stories here about growth, evolution, activism and family,” the 56-year-old Armenian American explains from his home in Los Angeles. “I wanted to write about the intersection of justice and spirituality, almost like a philosophy book.”

Tankian says what drove him to write the book was a desire to tell “the story of my people”. The book, which details his own childhood experiences of civil war in Beirut, begins with a brief biography about his grandfather, Stepan, who was born in 1909 in Efhere, a village of 500 Christian Armenian families. They were an ethnic minority, living within the borders of the multi-ethnic Ottoman empire, where the majority were Muslim Turks. Today, Efhere is part of central Turkey. But no Armenians live there.

“To understand my life, my work, and the things that drive me, you need to understand what happened in Efhere,” Tankian writes.

He is talking about genocide. It’s estimated that up to 1.2 million Christian Armenians were killed by the Young Turk government in the systematic slaughter that occurred from the spring of 1915 through the autumn of 1916. Tankian says remnants of Armenian life and culture, like his grandfather’s village of Efhere, have been destroyed, discarded and allowed to disintegrate into nothingness, as “genocide denial” by the Turkish government continues.

“My grandfather survived the Armenian Genocide,” Tankian explains. “That’s why telling his story is so important.”

Aged 13, Stepan ended up in Beirut, where he found work as a stone carver. Tankian was born in the Lebanese capital in 1967. “My memories of Beirut are a little hazy,” he says. But he vividly remembers the sounds of bombs exploding and bullets fired as the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) broke out. “That stuff stays with you,” he says. “For a kid, it’s f---ed up.”

He was seven when he left Beirut for Los Angeles in 1975. “Coming from Lebanon to the US was like going from monochromatic to colour,” he says. Initially, his family moved into an apartment on Bronson Avenue, Hollywood, where other Armenians were living, including his grandparents, and uncle Shant, who introduced Tankian to artists like Stevie Wonder, The Jackson Five and Marvin Gaye.

“We are talking about Hollywood, California, in 1975, it was an incredibly colourful culture — hippies, hookers, pimps, TV, music, and the orange sunsets matching the orange cheese, which I had never seen before! It was just totally different,” he recalls.

Tankian was a boy when his parents bought him his first acoustic guitar, but it was attending an Iron Maiden gig at 17 that was his important cultural milestone. Years later, System of a Down supported the English heavy metal band; they have since sold over 40 million records globally. When they released their 2005 album Hypnotize, they became the first group since the Beatles to have two albums reach the number one position in the US charts in the same year.

The group started out in the early 1990s, and were initially called Soil. Daron Malakian, the guitarist, wrote most of the music and Tankian became the keyboard player, rhythm guitarist and singer. Shavo Odadjian came in on bass, and Andy Khachaturian joined on drums. All four original members were Armenian Americans;they chose their new name by playing on the title of a poem Malakian wrote called Victims of a Down.

The band’s 1998 eponymous album, produced by legendary American producer Rick Rubin, had limited success, but that would soon change – their follow-up, Toxicity, also produced by Rubin, went on to sell 12 million copies worldwide. The album landed at number 1 in the United States on September 11, 2001.

Within a couple of days, Tankian posted “Understanding Oil” on the band’s website, an emotive essay arguing that the 9 /11 attacks were “a reaction to existing injustices around the world, generally unseen to most Americans”. The fiery polemic was critical of US foreign policy, which Tankian claimed was mostly based upon a quest for military-economic-political dominance, and cheap oil.

He was dragged onto The Howard Stern Show – then the most popular radio show in the US – by the band’s record company, essentially to apologise. Stern asked Tankian if he and his other band members hated America.

Tankian winces when he looks back at the charade. The wave of criticism that followed left him disillusioned, alienated, anxious and ashamed. He was 34, and says he lacked the emotional and spiritual tools needed to deal with the stress and stand his ground.

He turned to Rick Rubin for advice and the producer told him to visit Nancy de Herrera. The (now late) author of All You Need Is Love: An Eyewitness Account of When Spirituality Spread from East to West had been a spiritual guru for celebs including Madonna, David Lynch and Lenny Kravitz.

In 1968, on the Beatles’ infamous trip to India, de Herrera served as a conduit between the Fab Four and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. De Herrera’s proximity to the Maharishi eventually put her in the orbit of other spiritual leaders, including the Dalai Lama. Tankian met the Tibetan monk for a 2006 documentary in which he appeared called 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama.

“I remember his holiness grabbing on to my beard, playing with it and laughing like a little kid,” he remembers. “He also told me that to follow a path of injustice would be spiritually disconcerting.”

Tankian was baptised a Christian; today, his religious sensibilities veer towards the beliefs of indigenous cultures and Buddhist philosophy. “I believe in the interconnectivity of all things,” he says.

He has also learned to tolerate political figures he does not always agree with. In 2006 he went to US Congress to confront then Speaker of the House, Republican Dennis Hastert, regarding his failed pledge to allow a vote on the Congressional Armenian Genocide resolution. Nearly a decade later, as plans were being made to commemorate the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, Tankian received a letter from Serzh Sargsyan. Armenia’s then president invited System of a Down to play a concert in Republic Square in Yerevan.

‘My grandfather survived the Armenian Genocide. That’s why telling his story is so important.’

Serj Tankian

In 2015, the band played its first show in Armenia, which Tankian describes as “a remembrance to our ancestors”. But he made it clear that he would not be used as a political puppet to endorse “Sargsyan’s kleptocratic Armenian regime”.

Tankian told the Yerevan audience that while the Armenian government had indeed come a long way since the country’s declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, “there’s still a lot of f---ing work to do”. It’s a mantra that could easily be applied to his ongoing work as a political activist.

In 2021, Joe Biden became the first American president to formally acknowledge the Armenian Genocide while in office. But Britain, Australia, and New Zealand are among the many nations that still won’t recognise the genocide as historical fact.

Tankian says the job of every artist is to “tell the truth of your times and always be honest”. “You have to decide whether you want to be just an entertainer or whether you want to be an artist,” he says. “If you are just entertaining, then you are not going to say things that might be divisive or that could possibly get you cancelled by a crowd of your followers. As both an artist and an activist, I believe it’s vitally important to speak truth to power.”

Down with the System: A Memoir (Of Sorts) by Serj Tankian (Hachette) is out now.

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