Serj Tankian on his untypical rock memoir and an Anzac Day conundrum

As is apparent from his memoir, Down with the System, Serj Tankian has had an interesting life. Then he became a rock star. Then he became a New Zealand resident.

His System of a Down was one of the biggest American metal bands of the late 1990s-early 2000s. The group was formed by four Armenian-American guys who had mostly all attended the same Armenian school in Los Angeles.

Those roots gave their moshpit-friendly, heavy rock a distinctive melodic sense. By the time Tankian called a hiatus on the band in 2006, they had sold 40 million albums. These days, there are occasional live reunions. Throughout and since, frontman Tankian has been vocal, musically and politically, in the campaign for recognition of the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire in World War I, during the foundation of what became modern Turkey. The country has aggressively denied it since.

Tankian has been a permanent resident for nearly 20 years and has a rural home north of Auckland, where he and his family spend most Southern Hemisphere summers. He has occasionally ventured out creatively, with a show with the Auckland Philharmonia and an exhibition of his paintings.

Today, we’ve interrupted him via Zoom in his home studio in LA, where he’s working on soundtracks for three different screen projects.

Your family fled Beirut, where you were born, during the Lebanese Civil War and you landed in Hollywood. You went out into the world with a band that made fun of the Hollywood sign on the cover of your biggest album but here you are working in Hollywood’s main business. Do you find that funny?

It’s definitely amusing because I never saw that being my life in the least bit when I was growing up. When I was going to uni, I had no idea that music was my calling. I studied business administration and got a degree in that, then I went off and started working in the jewellery industry, because of my uncle. I also had experience in the shoe manufacturing industry because of my dad. Then I started my own software company, which I sold. It took me a while to realise what my destiny was. But in retrospect, it’s interesting that when we migrated, the first place we stayed in was Hollywood. And here we are.

There are some things you don’t see in a typical rock memoir. There’s a chapter about the problems of establishing democracy in a post-Soviet Armenia. And we have a chapter about establishing democracy in a heavy metal band. The band one seems harder.