Thursday, July 22nd 2010

Interviews:  Serj Tankian

Fanning The Flames With Serj Tankian

By Johnny Firecloud

Antiquiet: The evolution of the protest song is a fascinating thing to look at from a historian perspective. Like you said, going from Bob Dylan and earlier and seeing how that’s moved along to the point where we’re now discussing songs in Imperfect Harmonies.

Serj Tankian: Artists also have another window, and that window is the necessity to tell the narration and truth of our times. One of our jobs is to do that, and whether that is in a comical way or a personal or political way, I think it’s one of the things that just naturally creeps into what we do. If you listen to Bob Dylan, you’ll totally be able to reference the ’60s. It represents that movement. And it’s important to have that, and not just manuscripts.

Antiquiet: There’s a line in Left Of Center where you speak of “swimming in theocracy, we are far from holy, the wholeness of one.” It struck home, it reminded me of the modern blending of religion and spirituality, largely driven from political and religious propaganda and sociopolitical pressures from theocratic power structures. It calls to mind Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, which I think should be required reading for everyone with any level of religious curiosity. But when the very concept of spirituality is so deeply diluted and politicized, how is it possible to speak to the core of that truth in a way that people will respond to?

Serj Tankian: Intuitively. We still have that instinct of intuition, even though we don’t know how to use it, but it’s there from indigenous times. We just haven’t kept practice with that God-given ability. But it’s still in us, and still resonates – how much we recognize it is up to us, I guess. But it’s there, and that’s a great thing about music – it’s an intuitive medium. If I was writing a piece of text instead of music and sending it in, it would be immediately logically interpreted, and therefore lost a lot of content, unless it’s done in a poetic sense, which is great as well. Those Sufi writers, their writings were like songs. They were so intuitive and poetic and powerful.

So I agree with you, I think there’s a huge distinction between spirituality and religion, and organized religion is a child of civilization. All known organized religions that rule the world in terms of population numbers are all established within the city of civilization, and to me that is questionable. It doesn’t come from our indigenous past. Mankind has been on the planet for millions of years, according to archeologists, and civilization’s been around for 10,000 – and that’s what we consider history. Everything before that was pre-historic. We see the dangers of modern religion, organized religion and any type of hierarchy existing today. It can be terrifying to examine.

Antiquiet: How do you feel about the concept that music is a higher form of language, in the sense that through the use of arranged chords and notes as well as melodic narrative, you’re able to evoke emotions and capture the spirit of an idea in a greater capacity?

Serj Tankian: Definitely. I don’t know if I’d call it a higher form, but I definitely think it’s more intuitive. You get across to many people that may not immediately grasp all angles of it. Listen to Borders Are, for example – someone might like the music but really not totally grasp the lyrics, then find themselves singing along with something like “fear is the cause of separation.” And then thinking about it a year later, they may go, ‘Wow, I just got that.’ That’s happened to me many times with songs, that may be in your head forever, and years later it just kind of hits you that that’s what it was saying. I think that’s really cool, it’s like a sleeping gem that awakens when it’s your time for it to be fully presented.

Antiquiet: What are you reading these days?

Serj Tankian: Good question. I was recording and mastering and mixing for a long while so I didn’t have as much time to read as I would’ve liked lately. I just finished a book about running. I’ve been running for the last two years, and a producer friend of mine gave me a cool book about running which kind of ties in to the purpose of humanity. It’s quite a great book. It’s called Born To Run, and it’s a national best-seller. Christopher McDougall. And at first you think a running book might not really sound interesting at all, but it actually really is. It deals with this tribe from Mexico that are these super runners who can just run for days at a time, as well as the creation of all these marathons that are happening around the world, the running shoe and how it was created as well as some of the actual bad side effects on our bodies… It really kind of redefines one of the reasons for our existence in some ways, and it’s written really well.

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. That’s a good book.

Hear more from Imperfect Harmonies and find out when Serj is touring near you at his official site.