as great as it is to see you both this one's a conflicting one for me to know that you know the harrowing reason that that pulled you back together and it just to me is so at the core of everything system of a down has ever been about it suddenly struck me that this music that we go and we rock out to and we love always has purpose i gotta ask on behalf of all of us individually how it felt for the two of you starting
with you shavo actually when you got that text and how you felt i wanted to say it i swear i'm not saying this because it was said by someone but i really i think we all wanted to say it john took the initiative and said it and once he said it we jumped to it to my surprise everyone was involved um everyone was into it uh darren right away said oh i have something that you know so we could save time
you know because we could have gone in there we could have sat there and written music we all have stuff happening we all have thoughts we have but he had something ready to go and this is so time sensitive it was so time sensitive that um you know i'm so happy that it happened the way it did you know and um so the way it felt was that i had this unexplainable emotion to help uh to uh this urgency uh to whatever i can do
i can't get a grip grab a gun and go i'm not trained that's not my forte my forte is doing what we do and it came together and um just to say even hearing the song and then once we did it the emotions every time i heard it ran really deep it's one thing to kind of sit down and go artistically what do i like what do i want to do what is the direction forward whether as a solo artist or as a member of a band it's another thing when
your brothers hit you up and go you know there's war going on what are we going to do i'm not sure people are aware but when azerbaijan and turkey decided to um attack the peaceful people armenians of nagorno-arapa and they not only launched a military campaign with tanks and drones and all this stuff but they also launched a huge disinformation propaganda campaign to try to create false parity in the press
and you know they lied from the first minute and said oh armenia is the one that attacked that wasn't true because our you know the armenians were protecting their lands and they came to attack like they had to come to attack it's impossible so for me we needed to fight this this information and propaganda and the best way to do it was to create this you know this incredible reaching out to tens of millions of system of a down
fans that could energize all around the world and say oh this is actually happening and this is important to these guys and and and have excitement around it and basically we basically you know how do you say it we broke into their propaganda immediately like our you know uh the release of the song and the press around it stopped their propaganda campaign at least for a little while i wonder how you how you balance that
that responsibility that you clearly feel to do something and to want to and to want to take part and to want to to to change things but knowing the power that your music carries and and also the effects it has on you personally that is a very heady concoction that's a chemistry and i wonder how having released these two songs long question i know but i'm trying to word things very carefully
out of respect how how how it how it makes you feel individually not as a group can't speak for the whole band how makes you feel individually coming back as a band right now man from day one even when we disbanded for a little while in old five or six i'm always a supporter i'm always on the side of like this needs to be going on forever uh we never will call it quits i will refuse i don't care i'll refuse if anyone else
else will call them a quiz i'm not going to call it quits uh as long as we're all still alive we're we're going to be the unit that we are the thing is is that for it to come out as good as it did and as good as it might in the future we all have to be on the same wavelength and and be as content and happy with what we're doing and if one of us is not it won't be what it should be or what it needs to be
that's the deciding factor of if we should or not and exactly in 15 years if we had and we did it with someone less heartened if someone was heart wasn't as much as the other two or the other three or the other one it wouldn't be what it needs to be so i say everything i'm saying with the the in the mind state of hopefully we all feel the same again to do it again if we don't i'm not gonna take this much i'll rather take the full
thing you know what i mean it felt beyond special you know it felt very natural and and you know it's something we've done for so long together and especially having a cause that you know for me that that was the most important thing you know it's it's one thing you know like i said it's one thing to do something for yourself and for your band and for music itself or whatever you want to call it for your
career or for your business or it's another thing to do it for something completely outside of yourself in every way donate the proceeds and and and and and the song and or the group of the songs become a part of the activism like a strong part of it i think it's unique that we've done that with this band we've done it in the past throughout our music you know with with different songs obviously we have songs that are not
necessarily sociopolitical and are fun and and all sorts of stuff but i think when we have done this we've done it really well and this time it's it's it's exceptional in that sense not to praise us us or anything like that but the fact that we used it exactly we used it as a weapon unapologetically and that's what that's what it should have been i want to ask you this because i've always wanted to ask
two of you this at least because because i always wanted to respect serge when it came to to the system of a down story and we talked about it but we never went crazy on it but i wanted to ask the two of you this there's obviously some personal disconnection when it comes to the creating of the music of direction that's what keeps getting thrown out there direction direction directional but it's obviously not personal personal
because you tour when you can no you can and you play live and those shows you're not lying like i've seen those shows they are system of a down shows they are not caching checks they are real shows and so how does that work like normally when bands have personal differences the whole thing is off the table right i don't want to be on a bus with you i don't want to be on a plane with you i don't want to see you again for the
rest of my life our era is done but it seems to me like there's a caveat here with this that it just comes down to creative process personally you seem fine i mean personally as friends we have love and respect for each other beyond you know so that's why we're able to tour with each other hang out with each other have dinner with each other we're friends we're family we visit our kids play together um my
drummer's my brother-in-law for for god's sakes like even if we have different you know even family what [Laughter] this cousin happens to be your drummer yeah gotta love it it's not personal just as you stated zayn it's philosophical you know it's like the way you see things and and and see the way you see the music going forward what it means to you what system of a doubt might mean to you and and there has been a discrepancy in
that and and but that that obviously didn't stop us from jumping on board for doing something for our people which is beautiful so i don't know what else to say i think that's you know that's that's where it's at hey guess what chop suey just cost a billion streams now now before anybody starts to be like a billion streams that is huge i want to know just some reflection about that and on this milestone because we are reflecting a
little bit and that song still matters to people more than making this song the memory that hits me as soon as you said chop suey and the time that it's gone by chop suey was released september i don't know if shove you can correct me if i'm wrong but i want to say like a day or two before september 11 2011. it was one exact week it was one week prior and on september 11th when you know the whole you know uh
planes crashing into world trade center that that catastrophe happened our chop suey our song was number one our album was number one our album was number one and and the whole you know felt like the whole world was exploding and and you know they took our song off the radio you know chop suey was because it had the word suicide in itself right to suicide everyone was calling us going you know how did you guys know and all
this stuff and we're all weirded out and figure trying to figure out what the hell is going on meanwhile we go on tour because we were booked to tour on toxicity uh the record with chop suey as a single and every day i remember those you know shovel remember the different you know orange and red and danger basically you know the news basically saying the danger signals and yeah there might be terrorist attacks
elsewhere terrorist alert every year it was daunting time so when i think of chop suey i you know i can't think of how we actually sat in the studio and worked on it i'm thinking of 9 11 going on tour thinking we might die any night and anxiety you know levels must have been through the roof the pledge of allegiance tour that was the name of the tour a pledge of allegiance to america so it seemed pre-contra kind of
contrived the whole thing we did so i woke up to the morning my phone blowing up and i didn't and i was trying to you know it was those last couple of days at home i was trying to really get knowing i'm going on two in a couple days um i answered the phone it was my mom and my mom saying turn the tv on this crate chaos happening in this in in america i turned the tv and i saw it it was like 9 15. i saw a tower fall my phone beeped
and i went to the other line and it was my manager and he goes congratulations you're number one on billboard in the same thought process of what's happening in new york i'm in la what's happening in new york and then oh whoa we just went number one and it remember it was our second record you know we were we didn't get we weren't famous yet we had we had a record it was very um humble it was we
did what we had to do we toured it came back home and wrote this other record and we released it it's gonna be our first tour for the our second sophomore record you know so yeah i until today when people ask me it's bittersweet about number one yeah it's uh i don't know how you know it was such a weird time and that day our crew was flying out to go set up the tour to the first city they got they were held up at the airport
yeah we didn't know where they were i started calling everybody i started calling because you know our crew back then were a lot of our friends um our drum tech was like our you know darren's one of darren's best friends in the world so we knew him as like a friend so i had calling where he is such a crazy time it just becomes this thing of art and life coming together and so often it can stick with you that
can really stick with you it becomes part of your legacy without you even meaning to right it must have been something that was as you were pushing forward and making new music were you conscious of of that that for whatever reason you'd found yourselves creating art and life had met at this really catastrophic crossroad personally it didn't i always feel like the muse is the honest truth uh basically through collective
unconscious and that we all have we all you know the skill is to learn how to download that if you will you know as an artist and how to present it skillfully if you will um so i mean that's what an artist is an artist isn't one who creates something out of nothing because that something is in the collective consciousness an artist is one that can download that something and skillfully present it so that truth is
there in the universe of what's going to happen what likely might happen and all of that stuff one thing i do remember about that story lyrically and you'll appreciate this because i know you're friends with rick rick rubin uh is that uh while we were you know while i was writing the lyrics uh darren had written some lyrics for the song uh in the chorus and stuff but i was writing majority of the you know verses and
and all the all the rest of the lyrics and at one point we were in the studio and i remember i was kind of stuck on the middle eight section the breakdown section and uh rick goes let's take a break let's go to my house let's have some lunch so we went over to his house and um he goes he had a beautiful library and he said he said go pick a book just out of you know use your intuition and just pick a book i picked a book
and just opened to a random page stuck my finger out and it was you know um uh what was it the the breakdown the um father into your hands i commend my spirit you know it suddenly became a jesus thing and i'm like oh my god you know the self-righteous suicide became a g you know like it it just lent itself and i'm like oh my god the universe literally wrote those lyrics like my finger just yeah yeah it's beautiful it's beautiful