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" I like having songs that go from the personal to the kind of inter-relational, universal, because everything comes back to micro/macro and everything's tied in. "

Serj Tankian

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Personal

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" Pretending that we live doesn't make us alive. "

" It's probably a combination of personal and non-personal matters that have led us to where we are musically. "

" You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully. "

Serj Tankian

You

Song

" With 'Elect the Dead,' I learned how to make a rock record without a rock band and make the rock record I've always wanted to make. "

" Life is that perfect fine line between ironies. "

" I think music is a powerful medium because it co-inspires. It inspires the artist who then inspires the listener, and it's a back-and-forth process. "

" I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art. "

" We first fought... in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change. "

" People get so attached to a position which they identify themselves with that they just spurt it out, but they can't really give you a viable reason why they feel that way. "

" As long as people are living their truth or their vision, whether they're activists or not, that's the important thing. "

" You listen to Bob Dylan and you can't help but think of the 60s, it's very relational and if artists are true artists and not just mere musicians they need to be truthful because the music doesn't come from them it comes from the universe and it's to be shared. At best, we're skilled presenters, and I say that at best. "

" I don't want to spend all my time working as an activist. I don't get satisfaction out of it. I'd rather be doing something else. I'm a musician. "

" The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985. "

" Harout Pamboukjian is one of the biggest Armenian folk singers in the world. In the '70s, he was making these records that were really Zeppelin-influenced. "

" Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest. "

" I think it's my interaction with journalists that has pegged me more as political than my actual records, although they have obviously political aspects to them as well. "

" We're addicted to this concept of civilization - we can't imagine living outside of it because we've had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form. "

" I'd rather let the music speak for itself. "

" I like African music, and I'm a huge Ravi Shankar fan. "

Serj Tankian

Fan

African

" I think I might write a book. I like writing. People have asked me if I would get into politics, but I think I feel a lot more effective being a representative of truth through the arts. "

" My two interests are spirituality and politics. I would mesh them in some way; maybe try to figure out the politics of spirituality, or the spirituality of politics. Or maybe come up with this really crazy naive solution for the end of civilization. "

" I am more interested in how people interpret the phrase 'Elect The Dead' than what I may or may not have intended. I named the album after the track, which is a spiritual song about love, life and death and is the heaviest song on the album without having any heavy instruments. "

" With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music - you can't do that in jazz. You can't do that with classical. "

" Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization. "

Serj Tankian

Industrialization

Descendant

" I write music when I'm free and for no particular project in mind. "

" Capitalism unchecked is not a democratic system. "

" I think every artist should follow their vision; their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for. That said though, I think also artists have, continuously good artists, have been good for their times. "

" As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way. "

" It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest. "

" If you allow for a purely capitalistic society, without any type of regulation at all, you will get one monopoly that will eat all of the smaller fish and own everything, and then you'll have zero capitalism, zero competition - it would just be one giant company. "