This isn t what Serj Tankian expected for himself. Back in college, he was a business and marketing major and music was just a hobby. At his first job after graduation, he was clean-cut and self-contained, hardly recognizable as the cerebral wild man and staggering vocal talent he would become with System of a Down.
Then music became an obsession, as he discovered a new creative impulse erupting inside himself. In System, he joined guitarist Daron Malakian, bassist Shavo Odadjian and drummer John Dolmayan to create a revolutionary alt-metal sound that collided Slayer riffs with ancient folk melodies in songs that were complex and confrontational. And as singer, Tankian was as schizoid and unpredictable as the music, shifting from melodic croon to metal howl to nattering diatribe, at times playful, passionate or intensely political.
Getty Images/Ringer illustration
Truth to Power, the new documentary about System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian’s life and activist work, begins with a question that’s seemingly impossible to answer:
Can music change the world? But it’s a question that Tankian has never shied away from. The 53-year-old Armenian American has dedicated his life in the public sphere to trying to prove music can shift the way we think, from attacking the prison-industrial complex on
Toxicity, to the 2005 antiwar anthem “B.Y.O.B.,” to System’s landmark 2015 concert in Armenia’s capital, where Tankian called out the country’s government for corruption. And at times, he and his bandmates have been highly successful at inspiring change their efforts to raise awareness of the Armenian genocide played a role in convincing the U.S. Congress to recognize the atrocity, which saw about 1.5 million people slaughtered by the Ottoman government during World War I.
System of Down s Serj Tankian on Band s Politics, New Music vulture.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from vulture.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2021 by Christopher Stipp
Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they’re seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: What better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising?
This week, we put on an angry pair of jeans, learn how to be a private dancer from the OG, spend some time with one of America’s most high profile Armenians, see some sci-fi done on the cheap, and get our hands filthy with dirty money.
Class action, power chords, and a walrus-loving whistleblower
By Peter Keough Globe Correspondent,Updated February 25, 2021, 11:54 a.m.
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An image from Un Film Dramatique. Cinema Guild
One way to explore the truth of a subject is to allow the subject to film itself. Or in the case of Ãric Baudelaireâs
âUn Film Dramatique,â to allow the subjects to make a film about whatever they want and film their process doing so.
Commissioned by the brand-new Dora Maar middle school (named after the photographer, painter, and companion to Picasso) in the racially and ethnically troubled St. Denis district of Paris, Baudelaire enlisted 21 engaged and engaging students of diverse races and backgrounds to undertake the project. Giving them basic technical instructions, he set them off on their own and filmed their efforts over the course of four years. They begin by brainstorming ideas and wrestling with basic questions (What is a film? Is this a documentary