SERJ TANKIAN

Serj Tankian has spent a lifetime balancing political activism with being the frontman of System Of A Down. As he releases his memoir, he reveals what he’s learned along the way

WORDS: PAUL BRANNIGAN • PICTURES: TRAVIS SHINN

PRESS/TRAVIS SHINN

Serj Tankian was at work in his home studio last night, immersed in composing a score for an upcoming Hollywood movie, when he suddenly realised he was not alone. Taking off his headphones, and pausing the action on screen, Serj walked over to join his nine-year-old son on the couch, and asked his boy what he’d been drawing in the sketchbook on his lap. Young Rumi, however, was much more interested in what his father had been watching.

“He was like, ‘There was a gun, some girls, and some sexy stuff happening there, what is that?’” Serj says, laughing. “I said, ‘Um, it’s inappropriate for you, so you can’t watch it. But it’s a Hollywood film, it’s not real, the gun’s not real’ – you know, kinda explaining it. And he’s like, ‘Oh, OK’, and off he goes again, happy. It’s funny, you don’t lay out plans to explain how the world works to a kid, but questions come when you least expect them, so then you have to deal with it.”

It’s a cute anecdote that illustrates that, beyond the public profile of Serj Tankian – identified on his Wikipedia page as a singer, musician, songwriter, record producer and political activist – there exists a father, a husband, a human being.

‘I am large, I contain multitudes’, the great American poet and essayist Walt Whitman once wrote, an acknowledgment that we are all more complex than the persona that others see. And over the past couple of years, System Of A Down’s frontman has been doing some self-analysis of his own, seeking to find out who he really is by drilling down into his family history, and his own life journey, in order to write what he calls an “accidentally hatched philosophical memoir”, Down With The System.

Unfortunately, and somewhat unusually, the book’s publishers were unable to send us a copy ahead of our conversation with the 56-year-old musician – the author puts this down to the fact that their lawyers are still poring over the manuscript, pre-publication – but Serj tells us that it’s about “lessons learned, the intersection of justice and spirituality, and moral implications”, and says that writing it provided him with “incredible free therapy sessions”.