Serj Tankian

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.6 • 908 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2024

⏱️ 95 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Serj Tankian is a Grammy-award-winning artist best known for being the frontman of System Of A Down. His powerful vocals and thought-provoking lyrics helped the group achieve wild success, including over 40 million records sold worldwide, multiple platinum albums, more than a billion YouTube plays, and multiple Grammy nominations (winning Best Hard Rock Performance in 2006 for "B.Y.O.B."). Beyond System Of A Down, Tankian has released five solo albums (Elect the Dead, Imperfect Harmonies, Harakiri, Orca, Jazz-Iz-Christ, and Elasticity), composed music for film and television (Body of Lies, Godzilla: King Of The Monsters, Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields, among many more), and been a prominent activist for human rights, environmental issues, and causes related to his Armenian heritage (In 2011, he was awarded the Armenian Prime Minister's Medal for his significant contributions to the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide). His book Down with the System: A Memoir (of Sorts)—which shares his extraordinary life story, from his childhood in war-torn Beirut and his family’s move to Los Angeles, to his decision to pursue music and his rise to fame as the lead singer of System—is out now! ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------ Lucy https://lucy.co/tetra ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra

Transcript

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0:00.0	Tetragrammaton
0:02.0	Tetracket
0:05.0	Tetracket
0:10.0	I kind of didn't want to do like a rock, typical rock memoir.
0:27.6	Originally, I wanted to write a philosophy book like you wrote, you know.
0:30.6	That was my goal.
0:31.6	I wanted to, I've been interested in the intersection of justice and spirituality to great
0:36.6	kind of topics that have led my evolution
0:39.6	as a human being and as an artist.
0:41.8	But the agent that I met, a really nice young man from London, he said, why can't you
0:47.1	do both?
0:48.1	Why can't you tell your stories and share the lessons you've learned, your philosophies,
0:53.2	or whatever from it? So that kind of really got me going into thinking in that route.
0:58.0	And it's been an incredible learning experience because I've had to do a deep dive in terms of research in my own family's history,
1:07.0	in my own history, my own troubles, having to like face stuff from the past, you know,
1:12.3	it's the best therapy session I've ever had in my life writing a book because there's things
1:17.4	you realize that you may have known intuitively, but you weren't admitting to yourself, about yourself.
1:22.8	Like, I didn't know the day that my mom and dad had met.
1:25.7	I had never asked them, they had never told us. My brother and I, you know, were like, how come we didn't know, day that my mom and dad had met. I had never asked them, they had never told us.
1:27.8	My brother and I were like, how come we didn't know, like, how did you first meet?
1:32.2	When was the, you know?
1:33.3	And then they told us the story and it just became like, wow.
	...

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