“No point of reference”: The band Rick Rubin called impossible to define
There have never been any limits on what music could be. Even though Western culture likes to put music in little boxes so that everyone knows what they are going to be listening to every time they turn on the radio, it’s sometimes more fun to go from a song that’s straight-up funk to a bluesy rock groove and then immediately put a dance beat underneath everything. Every genre is elastic, and while Rick Rubin knew that all too well, there were always going to be bands that threw him for a loop whenever they played.
Then again, any band that’s able to blow Rubin off his feet usually deals with some sort of magic. The bearded production guru has been one of the mainstays of modern production for years, and from his start with Run-DMC and Public Enemy to working with Johnny Cash, there aren’t too many bases that he hasn’t covered in the industry. But that’s not due to his ability to play a different instrument whenever he goes into the studio.
Rubin had grown up in the punk scene, and while he never needed to know the ins and outs of what an augmented ninth chord was, he was always keen to listen to how a fan would react to the music in front of him. After all, he was the fan before these acts got their start, and he wouldn’t let anything get on the record that he couldn’t be proud to listen to if he were playing it in his car.
And while breezy Tom Petty or stoic Johnny Cash was a certain definition of fine playing, metal is an entirely different conversation. The whole point behind a band like Slayer was to bludgeon people over the head with sound, and while most parents would have ripped their headphones out the minute they heard ‘Angel of Death’, getting that kind of reaction may as well have been a badge of honour for metalheads.
But System of a Down was always a bit of a different story. Outside of the heaviest moments that the late 1990s ever spit out, much of their sound was about making polar opposite sounds work together, whether that’s the exotic harmonies that showed up in their music or hearing them go from a laid-back groove to breaking out the blast beats within five seconds.
“When I first saw System of a Down, I loved them so much, it just made me laugh. There was no point of reference. It was so unusual.”
Rick Rubin
While Rubin loved the idea of working with them when he first saw it, he admitted that he could barely comprehend what he was listening to seeing them in a club, saying, “When I first saw System of a Down, I loved them so much, it just made me laugh. There was no point of reference. It was so unusual. It’s hard music, but a lot of hard music sounds very similar. This is hard, but it’s playful, and it’s really danceable and funky. And the emotion of the performances, it really reaches me.”
That laughter wasn’t simply a reaction to the tonal shifts, either. For a band that could be militant about their political beliefs, every one of their albums could have at least a little bit of absurdist humour sprinkled in the mix, like the strange vocal breakdown in ‘Violent Pornography’ or when ‘Cigaro’ breaks down the political ideology of the Bush administration into one gigantic dick-measuring contest.
There might not be a reference point in some respects, but that was what made System of a Down so unique, to begin with. Some inspirations could be picked out in their guitar tones, but much like artists like Prince and David Bowie, they were the kind of band that no one could have ever truly replicated.
