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" In the last few years I've been listening to jazz more than anything else. I listen to a lot of world music and experimental here and there. "
Serj Tankian
World
Jazz
Listen
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" People always ask me 'do you think there should be more bands doing political music?' and I say 'absolutely not.' "
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" 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. "
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" The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985. "
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" Awareness in our society has flipped all types of injustice on its head. "
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" The best way to do that is to pick up a new instrument or an instrument that you don't typically write on and see where it takes you. Whether it's using an acoustic guitar, or piano, or electronics as tools, all of these lead to creating different types of songs and I used all of these methods for this record. "
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" Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
Serj Tankian
Spiritual
Song
Love
" I'm a huge Beatles fan, but I've only really gotten into them as an adult. "
Serj Tankian
Really
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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. "
Serj Tankian
Turn
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" I have a more direct avenue to expression as an artist than I ever would as a politician. "
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More
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Artist
" I hate injustice, and I can't help but speak against it. But I don't want to get involved in politics. "
Serj Tankian
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Hate
" A lot of pop music is based on trying to make people remember it so that they'll buy it. To me, it was not about that. "
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People
Music
Trying
" 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. "
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Music
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" 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. "
Serj Tankian
Reflect
Power
Jazz
" 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. "
Serj Tankian
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Process
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" Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest. "
Serj Tankian
Than
Better
Democracy
" I'm not comfortable with just entertaining. Although I like entertaining, I also like bringing forward the truth of our times as minstrels used to in the old days. "
Serj Tankian
Like
Old
Forward
" Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace. "
Serj Tankian
Think
Failure
Love
" 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. "
Serj Tankian
Way
Expression
Love
" 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. "
Serj Tankian
Think
Interaction
Political
" Pretending that we live doesn't make us alive. "
Serj Tankian
Alive
Pretending
Make
" It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest. "
Serj Tankian
Music
Honest
Painting
" 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. "
Serj Tankian
Music
Musicians
Help
" 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. "
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More
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" I believe very firmly that indigenous populations had a really good, intuitive understanding of why we're here. And we're trying to gain that same understanding through psychology and intellect in modern civilization. "
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Good
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" 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. "
Serj Tankian
Folk
Were
World
" It's probably a combination of personal and non-personal matters that have led us to where we are musically. "
Serj Tankian
Personal
Matters
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" 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. "
Serj Tankian
World
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