Serj Tankian Quotes
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With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.
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We're addicted to this concept of civilization - we can't imagine living outside of it because we've had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form.
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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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It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Sometimes a good love song can change the world and create positive energy more than any political song can.
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I think music has the ability to inspire people and to change hearts, and the heart has the power to change the mind, and the mind has the power to change the world.
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I think every artist should follow their vision, their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for.
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The living ideas of the dead are more powerful and effective than the dead ideas of the living.
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I've always tried to listen to a lot of different music from around the world.
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I think that the memory of Armenia's genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.
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Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization.
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My personal relationship with music is an imperfect harmony because I never studied music, but here I am not just writing for bands but full orchestral sections and doing all this composition, and I never learned the right way of doing things so I have a lot of dissonant sounds and things that are brought to my attention, and generally I leave them that way because I like those imperfections.
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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.
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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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In terms of political things, I think it's important to be more direct in terms of political statements. I think in terms of philosophical and things that you plant things and see them grow lyrically or musically, it's okay to be subtle.
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I think the gift of music is it's intuitive capability. 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. Because it's intuitive, the truth has to be defined intuitively. It can't be preached, it can't be pushed. It's got to normally go across organically and make someone feel something, and that's the power of music.
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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.
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I'd rather let the music speak for itself.
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We [americans] self-regulate ourselves, we self-censor ourselves a lot in this country instead of having someone else censor us so we can blame them. That's not good, either.
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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.