This may irk some people, but it’s been boiling in me for 15 years and I’m going to just come out and say it. There has never been a more prolific, barrier-breaking, innovative, and quirky album than System of a Down’s 2001 Toxicity. To most younger MIIS students, the album elucidates memories of head-banging in your middle school friend’s bedroom with the volume cranked and the door shut. The anti-establishment angst was so palpable it could level an entire World War 1-era battlefield. From the first metallic crunch of Prison Song to the melodic high pitched, hair-raising opera-like harmony climax that the album closes on in Aerials, the album stands the test of time more than any other work of modern political critique remotely close to the genre of rock, especially in the age of Trump.

Having been released the week of September 11th, 2001, the album stirred major controversy, to the point that Chop Suey, the album’s magnum opus,was immediately taken off radio stations for the sensitive lyrics “I cry / when angels deserve to die / in my self-righteous suicide.” Comprised by the four-man Armenian-American quartet of Serj Tankian, Daron Malakian, Shavo Odadjian, and John Dolmayan, the band has always sung about injustices in the world committed by various agents of imperialism and oppression, often referring to the Armenian Genocide still denied by the Turkish government to this day. While in the 2000’s it was regarded as an indulgently liberal painting of the horrors of the world in a time of Neo-Cons and Hawks, the imagism it conjures is all too real today.

To bring this to light, many of the songs that once depicted a fictitious post-apocalyptic war-film are now simple realities. Once playing into the quirky jokiness of System’s style, now unapologetically describing the horrors that are going on within our own country and our own administration in 2017. Prison Song starts the album off as a no-holds-barred rip through the nu-metal sound that Toxicity claimed virtually all on its own. The song smashes through fast paced guitar riffs that shake the floor before quickly flipping to fast-paced cymbal high-hat while Serj raps breakneck, no-breathe verses like:

About Toxicity 'Toxicity' is a single by Armenian-American alternative metal band System of a Down, released in 2002. It was originally released on the album of the same name. The writing credit for the song is Malakian/Odadjian/Tankian. It is known for its dynamic chorus, aggressive vocals, and prominent drum beat. Toxicity:Buy/Listen - About the album:Toxicity is the second studio album by the Armenian-American heavy metal band System.

“Minor drug offenders fill your prisons
You don’t even flinch
All our taxes paying for your wars
Against the new non-rich”

1. I think ya'll are jumping to conclusions, although I love to see the jumps. I listened to the song about 50 times in a row. Obviously, it is about male standing against a tank, and the wonder, was it just popular to be there.
2. 'Toxicity' is also System Of A Down's second album that carries such singles as Chop Suey, Toxicity, and Aerials. A song made by System Of A Down that's a testament to the disorder, confusion, and complexity of the world.

Then as the song builds up to the chorus every time, Serj seemingly peeks his head over a couch in the background with kind reminders of the dark, subjective realities of 20^th century America, such as:

“The percentage of Americans in the prison system
Prison system, has doubled since 1985″

or

“Drug money is used to rig elections
And train brutal corporate sponsored
Dictators around the world!”

That last one gets me every time. Don’t forget, there is a quirky allusion to comedy and satire with how these men work.

And this is what the album–and the band–does so very well. Not only do they fearlessly call out hypocrisies at the rate that Donald Trump spews unfounded claims in a press conference, but they spin out these songs with the structure of a 40 minute classical piece, and condense it into 4 minutes. The timing is always changing, and it is always catchy, from whomping, stomping nu-metal riffs, to pantomime, eastern European, Armenian-sounding jaunts. Deer Dance, one of the secret gems of the album, starts off like any system romp, cooling down into a sliding bass tune, and this is where the Trump-era images start to become painfully real:

“Circumventing circuses,
Lamenting in protest,
To visible police,
Presence sponsored fear

Battalions of riot police,
With rubber bullet kisses,
Baton courtesies,
Service with a smile

Beyond the Staples Center you can see America,
With its tired, poor, avenging disgrace,
Peaceful, loving youth against the brutality,
Of plastic existence.”

Then it veers off into a walloping, thudding chorus:

“Pushing little children,
With their fully automatics,
They like to push the weak around”

Toxicity Of Our City

If this doesn’t whirl your head around to the recent images of ICE officers performing mass arrests of illegal immigrants and placing them in detention centers, than you haven’t been paying attention. An album from 16 years ago that seemed to relish in depicting a fictitious breakdown of our society has instead sung about some harsh new realities.

Chop Suey requires no explanation. It is the schizophrenic anthem of an age of discontent youth surrounded by the dominance of corporate America. If you don’t know this song, youtube it and you’ll remember probably one of your high school friends or your own teenage children riffing its quantum-speed staccato verse in an obnoxious, hilarious way. The final chorus is one of the most climactic points in modern music with biblical references abound.

Forest begins with haunting rolling drums that break into another dance-frenzy of hunking riffs. The chorus is notably harmonious, but also deep in meaning:

“You made the weapons for us all, just look at us now!

Why can’t you see that you are my child?

Why don’t you know that you are my mind?

Tell everyone in the world that I’m you

Take this promise to the end of you”

This alludes to the utilization of neocolonial entities by major powers to do their dirty work. To Serj, our children are the foreign leaders western (and eastern) powers have used (directly and indirectly) to commit various atrocities across the globe.

ATWA is no exception to the back-and-forth of melodic, subdued verses interrupted by powerful, crashing choruses that lead into epic, leaping guitar solos and is one of the top tracks. Science directly confronts the negative impacts of technology on mother-nature: “Science has failed our world / Science has failed the mother earth / Spirit moves through all things…”

Toxicity, the second of the three smash hits of its namesake, starts of quietly like many others. Serj lulls you to sleep through the quiet destruction of society:
“Conversion software version 7.0 looking at life through the eyes of a tire hub

Eating seeds as a past time activity, the toxicity of our city, of our city.”

Before yet another earth-shattering call to a harsh reality:

System Of A Down Disorder

“You, how do you own the world?

How do you own disorder, disorder?

Now somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep, disorder”

After a head-banging euphoria reserved only for the most iconic rock songs, the song stomps to the end with an unholy statement of Beethoven-like proportions and rhythm:

“When I became the sun, I shone life into the man’s hearts!”

The final track Aerials carries the weight of a 200-ton sinking ship. It creeps into your psyche with a haunting bass line that seems ever so slow but ever so complexly melodic and breathless. Sure enough, in about the only semblance to anything predictable by SOAD, the peace and quiet is soon ripped apart by a chorus of sky high vision:

Toxicity Song Meaning

“We are the ones who wanna choose, always wanna play but you never wanna lose

Aerials in the sky, when you lose small mind you free you life.

Aerials, so up high, when you free your eyes, eternal prize”

The album is a culmination of all anti-establishment resentment that built up throughout the 90’s and that overflowed into the 2000’s. For its time, it painted powerful images and emotions of our own subjugation to an all-powerful corporate machine, but it did this with imagism that was more than anything indulgent and divergent to the reality of the Bush-era. It asserted powerful meaning hopelessly torn between vicious, house-shaking riffs and Armenian-inspired periods of serenity. Every song on the album has a different structure and is soaked in progressive, anti-war emotion that pokes fun at the Bush administration and the overarching imperialistic tendencies of neoliberalism, but it does so in such a creative, never-before-done way that it makes you almost think that they’re joking. Perhaps the darkest aspect of this album, that which proves that they are, indeed, not joking, is that these notions that were once jests of the corporate America of the Bush era are now all-too-serious paintings of Trump’s America.

ATWA Lyrics

1. 1TOP RATED

   anonymous

   click a star to vote

   Feb 6th, 2007 2:42pmreport

   
   

   If you look at the song lyrics, try to think about who might be talking.
   Perhaps the world? How we're killing it? Or maybe even God.
   'Hey you, see me, pictures crazy....'
   Could that be referring to pictures of the God in cathedrals and churches? The crazy part being how we've pictured him all along? Or maybe the world. Pictures of our world, and how amazed some people are with those sort of pictures. Or, how absolutely crazy all the pictures we're seeing now are. Our forests: gone. Our air and water: polluted. Our animals: dying and becoming extinct.
   Don't forget. The title of the song IS Air, Trees, Water, Animals. Everything that makes up the Earth (aside from earth itself). We're killing it all:
   Air: We're polluting.
   Trees: We're cutting down to no end.
   Water: We're polluting it, and running out of fresh drinking water.
   Animals: We're killing them directly, and indirectly (such as garbage and pollution).
   'You don't care about how I feel.'
   We no longer even think twice when we cut a forest down, kill an animal, drink a glass of water, or work in a factory.
   'Hey you, are me, not so pretty...'
   We're not good people for what we've done on this world. That we can accept. And because of what we've done, our water is no longer clear, air in no longer pure, forests are becoming landscapes of stumps, and animals are just...dying. They are no longer 'pretty'.
   'Silent my voice, I've got no choice.'
   In everything we do everyday, ATWA (Air, Trees, Water, Animals), have no choice in the matter. We just kill them all mercilessly. And we never hear anything about it from them, because they cannot speak.
   Finally:
   'All the world I've seen before me passing by....'
   They've all been on this Earth longer than us. This can simply be a statement implying that.
   'I've got, nothing, to gain, to lose....'
   They don't. I believe this line came after the one mentioned just above, because they've been on this world longer than us, and they've always survived what has happened on the planet. Either that, or because we're killing the planet itself, no matter what we do, they die anyway, so what's the point?
   That's my interpretation. Long, I know. But...hey.

2. 2TOP RATED

   anonymous

   click a star to vote

   Sep 17th, 2008 9:54pmreport

   
   

   'Our songs mean nothing except for what they mean to you' - Daron Malakian (System of a Down)

3. 3TOP RATED

   crackSmOkinAssDouche

   click a star to vote

   Jan 18th, 2007 1:08pmreport

   
   

   ok I think I have it figured out....this might sound crazy but maybe serj is singing in the place of our earth....what else has seen the whole entire world pass before its eyes......i think its talkin about all the pollution and shit.....we don't care about it anymore.....in one of their live shows serj was talking about polluting the earth and he seemed pretty passionate about it so I think that's why they wrote this song

4. anonymous

   click a star to vote

   Sep 27th, 2013 9:34amreport

   
   

   I've actually always thought this song was about a girl.
   Mainly a break up.
   Just kind of what I think.

5. anonymous

   click a star to vote

   Jul 17th, 2013 7:48pmreport

   
   

   Jesus fucking christ, what the hell is wrong with u people? Serj can spout rhetoric and wax lyrical with the best of them and i love his music...But what the hell guys?!? I have just read the interpretations (on one of my all time favourite songs) and you guys need to chill out and stop the back and forth argueing, how do u think wars start? By tiny little men with big opinions (always on others, they tend to see themselves as prophets think they are benevolent) and they bicker over trivial matters until it escalates...oil ring any bells america?S.O.A.D have a facebook page, why not just ask them what they're songs mean? Or am i just another idiot for using my common sense? USE YOUR BRAINS GUYS. S.O.A.D songs truly are beautiful to each individual but they are tempered with the pain Serj feels when he looks at the world and sees the suffering we cause. A.T.W.A is about Charles Manson's perspective twisted as it may be from his vantage point, serj is trying to help others to see things from the perspective of his fellow man whether he is African, Jewish, English, German (yes even those guys) and to use a little empathy and compassion for those who have not been so fortunate in life as most of us are. Rant over.
   Thanks for listening. Dave

6. anonymous

   click a star to vote

   Nov 15th, 2012 11:48pmreport

   
   

   i know this song is suppose to mean air, trees,water, animals so about nature but to me i means how he loved a girl and wanted her so much and the person stoped loving the guy and he has allot of feelings for the girl and he is finally deciding to move on because its making him mad

7. anonymous

   click a star to vote

   Nov 12th, 2012 11:32pmreport

   
   

   Dudes...its about charles manson. We see him in pictures(tv) as crazy, the man has nothing to gain or lose in his cage so he has no feelings, and the world as he knew it has passed away before his eyes: a feeling alot of us can relate to...thats all

8. anonymous

   click a star to vote

   Nov 10th, 2012 11:56pmreport

   
   

   I feel like it completely misses the idea of atwa. there is a charles manson song called ATWA and it is not even remotely like this. As for the system version I'm not particularly a fan, mostly because i feel like it misses the point of ATWA (as a pseudo belief system or whatever) and what charlie says.
   Although with some of the other interpretations I may be wrong. However I really don't think it is.

9. anonymous

   click a star to vote

   Jul 28th, 2012 7:15pmreport

   
   

   Maybe about is homeland

10. anonymous

    click a star to vote

    Mar 19th, 2012 3:45pmreport

    
    

    In my opinion this song has multiple meanings. I do agree with first interpretation but I think there is also another which is correct.
    You must remember that band members are foreigners in US. Their families came to US not because they wanted but because they had to run from their homes in middle east and I do think this song is more about them seen by Us nationals. They are a metal band (pictures crazy) and they are not home in LA but in exodus.
    So based on that I think its more about they struggle in being accepted in their new home.

11. anonymous

    click a star to vote

    Jan 21st, 2012 1:13pmreport

    
    

    Air,Trees,Water, Animals. i didnt get this at first. but when you look at the lyrics its pretty clear. it either God (because of the line- 'hey you, are me..' and and since we believe that we've been created in the image of god) talking to us about how we are desecrating the world, but we look at pictures and say what a lovely world we live in, when we are tinting it every second.
    OR
    it can be the world, talking to its inhabitants and telling them that its nice to look at pictures, but in reality im not so pretty anymore, because you are destroying me every second.

12. anonymous

    click a star to vote

    Jan 4th, 2012 1:52pmreport

    
    

    Daron said on an interview that the sog was based on something Charles Manson wrote..

13. anonymous

    click a star to vote

    Nov 13th, 2011 11:46amreport

    
    

    A.ir_ T.rees_ W.ater_ A.nimals

14. anonymous

    click a star to vote

    Jun 5th, 2011 6:12amreport

    
    

    I agree with a lot of what the top comment said about who's point of view it is, apart from it being about God.
    I think that the song is from the point of view of the indigenous populace from a lot of the places that have ben tainted by the hands of 'The White Man'.
    e.g. Australia, America basically everywhere in the world

15. anonymous

    click a star to vote

    May 7th, 2011 5:02pmreport

    
    

    ATWA stands for air,trees,water,animals. This meaning was created by Charles Manson, this is a song from his perspective. He is sitting in a prison cell watching the world go by. Daron Malakian is highly interested in Charles Manson so to anybody who says this song inst about him their complete idiots

16. anonymous

    click a star to vote

    May 1st, 2011 5:49amreport

    
    

    Well, if you think about it quite well, it can sound like it's about breaking up with someone or one side love (how it says the person doesn't care and 'i' don't feel it now as well as 'i've got nothing to gain, to lose' and 'i don't see,hear,speak,sleep,eat,live' as how someone can just stop living out of sadness)

17. anonymous

    click a star to vote

    Jan 26th, 2011 1:43amreport

    
    

    I might be restating some things that have already been posted on this site, but....ATWA (Air Trees Water Animals) was first termed by Charles Manson. The song directly applies to Charles Manson (and could be interpreted as being from Charlie's perspective):
    'Hey you, see me, pictures crazy' This is so straightforward, as the media have done nothing but paint Charlie as a crazy, evil brainwashing cult leader for decades. The picture shown most frequently is the one that was on the cover of Life, which is the one where his eyes have a strange look to them.
    'All the world I've seen before me passing by' He's spent the majority of his life in lockup, even as a juvenile. Life passed him by. He hasn't gotten to experience life as other people do. He was a petty criminal as a kid. He was thrown away by his mother and by society and no one seemed to care.
    'I've got nothing, to gain, to lose.' This is obvious.
    'You don't care about how I feel, I don't feel it anymore' Again, straightforward. No one has really cared how he felt, so he stopped feeling. (If you read 'Manson in his own words', by Nuel Emmons...a part comes to mind where the first time his mom left him at one of these juvenile places, he was very hurt. The next time, he was numb to the pain/bitter.)
    'Hey you, are me, not so pretty' This could be how he says whatever you are, he is a reflection of. This could be that society isn't pretty and he is a product or a reflection of that.
    'Silent my voice, I've got no choice' What I immediately think of with this is simply how interviewers never let him speak. They never let him finish a sentence. Instead they act like Wayne Gale from Natural Born Killers and purposely say things that are misleading to give the audience a certain inaccurate idea. His voice hasn't mattered to people, they just care about confirming what they already think about him. He has not had a choice in this. Also he has said before that he's not even allowed to live in the desert, and has been used his whole life. He can't help what the media has created - they have effectively created the 'myth' of Charles Manson. This line could also refer to the trial/courtroom.
    I think that's all the main lines from the song I wanted to address.
    I hope someone reads this =)

18. anonymous

    click a star to vote

    Jan 25th, 2011 1:24pmreport

    
    

    For what I have heard this is a song based on the a poem from Charles Manson and that ATWA stand for All The World Around

System Of A Down Toxicity Lyrics Meaning

Trending:

• XXXTENTACION
• Sheppard
• One Direction
• Beatles
• Bob Dylan
• Drake
• Harry Styles
• Fleet Foxes
• Demi Lovato
• Kanye West
• John Lennon
• Cavetown

Just Posted

Weekly Most Popular

Latest Releases

Popular Song Categories