People love a good tea session, even metalheads. Sometimes, however, the tea is served at a cost, and that cost can occasionally be anonymity. In a recent interview with São Paulo, Brazil’s 89 FM A Rádio Rock radio station, System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian opened up about his 2024 memoir, Down With The System, and explained that he purposely chose to protect the identities of some bands and band members when discussing “drama.”
“I included a lot of intimate things within the book, a lot of things that could be seen as confrontational, but I did it in a way that was retrospective and respectful, while taking responsibility for my own part in the drama,” Serj said, as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH. And so there’s a lot of things like that.”
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“The book is incredibly honest and intimate in that sense,” the Grammy-winning musician continued. “There’s a lot of things I did leave out. Some of them were sensationalist stories of touring with other artists that I didn’t feel obliged to represent without their understanding and conditional release.”
Tankian also offered some perspective on the difference between expressing himself through song and the written word. “I think telling your story through music is challenging because of the limitations of the musical refrain,” he said, “whereas in a book, a 300-plus-page book, you can expound more so than any other form of art, more so than films or art itself.”
