After two decades of being rejected from the metal genre, System of a Down is getting more love these days. At the beginning of their career, the band had this misfortune to be lumped together with that short-lived 90’s fad “nu metal” (System of a Down never accepted the label, though). System of a Down continued to have a contentious relationship with genre, but especially with metal. Metal fans lambasted System of a Down for being paradoxically too commercial and too weird, too political and too silly. ((If you don’t believe me, check out this thread from Encyclopedia Metallum.)) But more recently, the band seems to be getting more favorable treatment, placing well on several lists of “best metal of the 21st century” and that sort of thing.

This could be because people who were growing up when System was popular (like myself) are now in their late 20s and early 30s and working their way into rock journalism jobs. Another factor could be their enduring success as one of the heaviest bands to continue to sell out stadiums. I mean, how many other metal(ish) bands can successfully attract a headline spot and an devoted crowd at a major festival like Download when they haven’t released an album in more than a decade?

But it’s also because their music actually has a fair amount of metal in it. Part of what connects System of a Down’s songs to the metal genre is that parts of their songs often sound like or recall various styles and subgenres from various moments of the history of rock and metal. (And of course, there’s usually something in the same song that is weird and original and alien to those other styles). And System of a Down isn’t the only band that reuses or returns to ideas and materials and styles from metal’s past. It’s becoming very common these days, as a glance at the recent winners of the best metal performance Grammy (Ghost and Mastodon, I’m looking at you here…).

In music theory, a similar idea has been quite popular in recent years, in which these “commonplaces for musical discourse” are called “topics” (Ratner 1983). ((Leonard Ratner’s 1983 book Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style is the key source introducing the term “topic” into modern music theory.)) Music theorists often describe topics as a particular kind of musical icon or symbol, but some authors including Raymond Monelle (2006) have used the term “topic” in a more conventional sense, an artistic or literary concept like “pastoral” or “storm” that is a part of wider culture and rhetoric as much as it is “just” a musical idea. ((Raymond Monelle’s 2006 book is titled The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral)) A recent book by William Echard (2016) has applied many of the framing concepts of topic theory to describe the topic of “psychedelia” in rock, metal, and electronic dance music. ((William Echard, Psychedelic Popular Music: A History through Musical Topic Theory )) This post will be my first in a series applying the concept of “topics” in metal music.

What follows is a dive into the musical details of a few System of a Down songs. One of the biggest categories of topics in studies of classical music is the “importation” of other genres for use out of context in a piece that properly belongs to another genre. I’m hoping to convince you that some of the raw materials which System of a Down uses come from thrash metal and black metal styles, and that this makes System of a Down an important part of metal’s legacy. Even if you aren’t convinced that System of a Down should be considered part of the metal genre proper, I hope this will provoke a discussion of what makes metal sound like metal, and how aspects of metal and rock styles like “hardcore punk” “black metal” or “thrash” can be heard in other contexts.

1. “Suite Pee” from System of a Down  (1998)

I’ll start with one of System of a Down’s heaviest songs, “Suite Pee.” This song begins with a super heavy riff, built from alternating between C and Db (see the riff below). This riff is kind of on the simple side for metal, but I could see a band like Sepultura using it. Then the bridge riff is a half-time variation on the same C-Db-C idea, a breakdown strategy you will see in lots of mosh-y extreme metal songs. On the other hand, the upbeat, dance-y feel of this main riff feels more like a hardcore punk band like Black Flag.

The bridge uses a more plodding, metallic variation of the main riff. And it opens with some real death growls, which makes this probably one of the moments in System of a Down’s catalogue that most sounds like death metal.

2. “Aerials” from Toxicity (2001)

“Aerials” has melodically sung harmonies like plenty of pop songs, but its structure and melancholy attitude actually follows a strong tradition that runs through the history of metal. The song begins with an intro riff in an acoustic guitar, which ends up serving as the chorus of the song once the singer comes in. This riff is built on a rhythm involving three-eighth-note groupings that has been used by tons of metal bands, most notably Metallica in the main opening riff for “Master of Puppets.” For the final chorus, there is a rhythmic reduction that simplifies this riff into enormous power chords (see the figure below), another stock trick in metal that Metallica used throughout the 1980s.

The contrast System of a Down creates between this soft sound (clean vocals, acoustic guitar, melancholy minor key) and the huge loud verse riff (see below) is a strategy used throughout the history of metal—although usually the louder riff is the chorus and the quieter part is the verse. Sure, there might be some middle-eastern folk instruments in the background, which not many metal bands would use. But it works as a metal ballad in the tradition of Metallica’s “Fade to Black” or Pantera’s “Cemetery Gates.”

The verse riff itself, a combination of chugging, palm-muted open-string power chords (the eighth notes) and the descending minor melodic scale (F-Eb-D-C), is straight out of the thrash metal playbook, or even early death metal. For example, Death uses a similar descending scale figure during the intro to “Evil Dead” from their first album Scream Bloody Gore (1987).

3. “Revenga” from Mesmerize (2005)

Revenga is full of the same kind of galloping, frenetic riffs that are used by almost every thrash metal band. Which isn’t to say that this song “sounds like thrash metal,” because it doesn’t. The falsetto vocals by Daron Malakian and Serj Tankian, and more importantly their earnest melodicism, would be out of place in any thrash song by Metallica or Slayer.

Perhaps the most metal moment in the whole song, though, comes late in the Bridge, in a spot that launches what many might call this song’s “breakdown.” The Bridge starts with a vulnerable, intimate moment in which Daron Malakian sings “I saw her laugh, then she said / Go away.” This builds in intensity and urgency, then finally explodes into a devastating tremolo-picked section which outlines several parallel minor chords that don’t quite fit in a single key. The solo guitar is also janglier and harsher than System of a Down’s normal production. These are classic black metal characteristics, and if the production on the vocals was different and there was a blastbeat in the drums, I could imagine this riff blending in if placed in the middle of a song by Behemoth or Emperor.