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" 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. "

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" 'Elect the Dead' is a rock record that takes you on a journey with different types of genres integrated, different lyrical themes digested, and many fun and colorful moments to enjoy. "

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" I've got my own studio, and I've got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I've got stuff that's electronic, orchestral, jazz, I've got rock, I've got metal, you know, I don't have polka. "

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

" I've always worked on all different types of music, some with specific project goals and deadlines and some not. Sometimes I would write a piece of music that is almost like a film score or weird electro pieces, wherever the muse took me, and I still do that. "

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" People always ask me 'do you think there should be more bands doing political music?' and I say 'absolutely not.' "

" 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. "

" When I was younger, I was listening to a lot of Armenian music, you know, revolutionary music about freedom and protest. In the 70s I was listening to soul and the Bee Gees and ABBA, and funk. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization. "

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Industrialization

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" I think anytime that you go to the extreme of any mode of economics, be it capitalism or communism, you have these feedback mechanisms that make the system turn in on itself. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" In America, there's more of the question, should music be political or should it just be for entertainment purposes, whereas around the world that's not even an issue. I think people just assume that music should be everything. "

" 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. "

" Composing is what I love most from what I do. Each genre has a unique expression that you cannot supplant with another. All the records co-inspire each other though they are not tied conceptually in any way to another. "

" 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. "

" I hate injustice, and I can't help but speak against it. But I don't want to get involved in politics. "

" Life is that perfect fine line between ironies. "

" 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. "

" The most important thing about music that I've learned after all this time is that to me, it's a way of reaching the truth. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Serj Tankian

Fan

African

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

" People think our music's very aggressive or angry or whatever, and it's just the opposite, really... I like laughing. And I like being really calm before a show, and smiley. "

" 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. "

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