SERJ TANKIAN
It was late at night and pouring with rain when Serj Tankian had what he calls his “epiphany”. Serj was in his mid-20s and had been working for his uncle’s jewellery business since graduating from university, playing music on the side. But he wasn’t happy, so he had decided to study to become a lawyer.
He was making the long drive from Downtown LA to night school in Long Beach when his subconscious took over. He slammed on his brakes and started hitting the dashboard, yelling: “I want to do fucking music, fuck all this shit.”
“Becoming a lawyer was a very negative thing,” says Serj today. “I fucking hated lawyers. But I always say that I had to go to the far extreme of who I shouldn’t be to shake myself into the realisation of who I am.”
His roadside meltdown was a tipping point. Within a few months, he had joined a young Armenian-American metal band named Soil, who would eventually mutate into System Of A Down. More than a quarter of a century on, the 53-year-old is one of modern metal’s most charismatic figures, a multi-hyphenate singer/ artist/activist whose career has been punctuated by both political controversy and ongoing intra-band drama with the rest of System.
“This is what I’ve learned
