“We didn’t kill anybody”: the band fined and banned for dropping a 2005 F-bomb on ‘Saturday Night Live’
Technically, anybody can say “fuck” at any point during Saturday Night Live, and there’s not much that anyone can do about it until after the fact. It might have been an accident, but one band paid the price for turning the airwaves blue, and they were persona non grata from that point on.
Paul Shaffer made history when he became the first person to drop an F-bomb on SNL, and since then, he’s been joined by countless others. It hasn’t happened very often, relative to how long the show has been on the air and how many episodes there have been, which is why it causes so much pearl-clutching.
Most people who tune in every week will have heard the word “fuck” before, or so you’d imagine, and many of them will use it in everyday conversation, too. Lorne Michaels won’t stand for it, though, and most of the unfortunate folks have discovered to their detriment that swearing in Studio8H is an almost literal case of fucking around and finding out.
As well as the occasional accidental flub from a cast member, SNL‘s musical guests have deployed the odd F-bomb over the years. Prince did it, so did Steven Tyler and Kanye West, and even Sabrina Carpenter got in on the act, and while there’s no word on if any of them were slapped with a fine or handed a lifetime ban from the never-ending sketch series, System of a Down definitely were.
During the group’s May 2005 performance, the song’s five uses of the line, ‘Where the fuck are you?’ were censored for broadcast, only for guitarist Daron Malakian to throw in an impromptu, “Fuck yeah!” during their performance of ‘BYOB’, and it didn’t take long for the band to face the consequences of his actions.
“It’s ridiculous that people make a big deal of it, incredibly ridiculous that it’s newsworthy,” drummer John Dolmayan responded. “It’s just a word. We didn’t kill anybody. People should relax. If you’re old enough to be up at 11.30, I’m sure that you’ve heard that word before, and it’s not going to affect your delicate sensibilities if you hear it again.”
Several years later, bassist Shavo Odadjian shed further light on the aftermath of System of a Down’s improvised fuckery, admitting that “we got kicked out of SNL for cussing,” before clarifying, “Well, not kicked off, but we got banned,” with the musician recalling how as soon as Malakian said it, “It got weird, it got colder in there.”
He did reveal that Chevy Chase, who was lurking in the wings, found it hilarious, although he does remember Dan Aykroyd looking less than impressed. “We got fined, and the rest is history,” Odadjian concluded, and as you’d expect, System of a Down have not been invited back to atone for their sins at any point in the last 20 years.
While there’s no word on how much they were forced to shell out for their transgressions, networks can be fined to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars by the FCC, so it probably wasn’t chump change.
