Down With the System: A Memoir (of Sorts)

System of a Down lead singer Tankian’s forthright debut recounts his intertwined evolutions as an activist and a musician. The grandson of Armenian genocide survivors, Tankian grew up in Lebanon in the late 1960s and early ’70s before his family fled the Lebanese Civil War for California in 1974. Both of those historical traumas shaped the artist and his progressive, antiwar, anti-genocide worldview. Inspired to “change the world around me with art,” Tankian imbued his music with commentary on the Armenian genocide, police brutality, and U.S. foreign policy. He chronicles the evolution of System of a Down from early jam sessions with his bandmates that “coalesced into... big, bruising, angry shards of progressive metal,” to the group’s breakout 2001 album Toxicity, whose release was complicated by Tankian’s remarks decrying U.S. foreign policy following the 9/11 terror attacks. Asserting that fame and fortune were “never my motivation,” Tankian is at his most impassioned and eloquent when discussing his activism and the complicated feelings about his Armenian roots that fuel it—“If you’re chased out of your homeland, a part of you is always trying to get back there, even generations later,” he muses. Heavy metal fans will welcome this expansive look at one of the genre’s key figures. (May)