Scar Power: How Daron Malakian learned to let go

You might be surprised to learn that the man responsible for the words ‘I buy my crack, my smack, my bitch right here in Hollywood’ and ‘My cock is much bigger than yours’ likens his songs to toys.

“There are some [songs] that took years of fiddling around and then it just seems like when I’m done playing with my toys, I’m ready to share them with the other kids,” he explains, not necessarily caring what the other kids think of said toys. “Every one of us has a certain kind of laugh, and every one of us has a certain kind of cry. Who’s to say that my laugh is better than your laugh, and my cry is better than your cry?”

Welcome, then, to an audience with Daron Malakian.

It’s midnight in Los Angeles, and the self-proclaimed night owl is holding court and a cup of tea. While Daron’s girlfriend goes to bed around 10pm, he generally turns in at about 5am, which is something of a concession to age, as it used to be 6am. Regardless, that leaves plenty of time to be able to discuss Addicted To The Violence, the latest manic maelstrom from Daron’s other band, Scars On Broadway.

If Daron wasn’t doing this right now, he’d be writing music, as the ungodly hour means he can do so with no-one listening; he compares his creative process to something being channelled through him, so any self-consciousness stifles things.

And if he wasn’t doing that – “I’m not constantly writing for 24 hours!” – he might watch a documentary or a little wrestling, or put on a record and stare out of the window, perfectly content; recent soundtracks have included dub legend King Tubby, Miles Davis and the ambient work of Brian Eno. In the rare instances he listens to metal, he says, it’s the suffocating cacophony of black metal that floats his boat.

Despite this chilled atmosphere, Daron’s productivity means he’s accumulated “a rolodex of songs” over the years, many of which are yet to be released. As a result, some of the ones on Addicted To The Violence date back a fair way. The first single, Satan Hussein, was written so long ago it could have appeared on one of System’s last two albums, Mezmerize and Hypnotize, both released in 2005, though its genesis goes back further than that.

“It was inspired by when I was 14 years old, when my mum took me to visit our family in Iraq,” explains Daron, whose Armenian parents, both artists, lived in Iraq before moving to the U.S. where their son was born. “We visited Iraq at a time when Saddam Hussein was in power, his picture was on every building, and inside every house and business. At that age, I’d never seen anything like that, so it left a mark on me. And it made me think, ‘If my parents hadn’t left [Iraq], I would have been a soldier, in Desert Storm or something – a total alternative life. Instead, my parents decided to move to fucking Hollywood, California.”

While Addicted To The Violence’s closing title-track doesn’t date back nearly as far, it illustrates the fatalistic streak that’s long characterised Daron’s music, beginning as it does with the words, ‘All the damaged people marching to oblivion.’ It doesn’t exactly cry hope…

“Hope for what?” Daron asks, genuinely unsure.

The state of the world, perhaps? The future of mankind…?

“The world’s always been in some kind of turmoil,” Daron reasons without hesitation. “You could go back to World War I or World War II. And there were countless wars before and after. Violence has existed before. Genocide has existed before. My people have been through a genocide. As an artist, I’m living in some interesting times, but I don’t like to be the guy to say, ‘This is wrong and this is right,’ or, ‘You should vote for him,’ or, ‘You should listen to her.’ I’m not that guy in the band when it comes to System and I’m not that guy in Scars On Broadway. I see what I see, and I feel what I feel as a human being. Addicted To The Violence [the song] is me looking outwards, but it’s also me dealing with my struggles and my demons, and how there have been times when I’ve coped with things in not such a good way. I’m addicted to the violence I inflict on myself living in the world I’m in.”

Perhaps Daron’s unwillingness stems from witnessing the tensions between System singer Serj Tankian and drummer John Dolmayan over the latter’s public support for Donald Trump (which must have been awkward, as Serj and John are effectively brothers-in-law, having married sisters). Yet Daron is surely aware that being in a band as synonymous with political comment as SOAD means people will naturally ask him what he thinks of big issues. So, what does he make of musical acts using their platform to speak out about Gaza, and the controversies around the way in which some have done so?

How other artists respond to events, much like the events themselves, isn’t Daron’s area of expertise. He refers to the lyrics for Hypnotize, the title-track from System’s final studio album: ‘Why don’t you ask the kids at Tiananmen Square / Was fashion the reason why they were there?’ and includes the refrain, ‘I’m just sitting in my car and waiting for my girl’ – to illustrate how ill-suited Daron considers himself to field enquiries about the state of the world.

“You have the freedom to express what you want, but sometimes I feel I’m not that full of myself to think that my opinion should be so fucking important to all of you,” says Daron. “I wrote [Hypnotize] because we’d get a lot of questions like, ‘What do you think of this issue?’ And I would think, ‘Why are you asking me? Go and ask the kids at Tiananmen Square who went through it.’ What do I know? I’m not in Palestine and I don’t have bombs falling on me. I see it… I see the world and I paint my song paintings as a person in that world, expressing myself. You can always find two sides of the argument of who’s wrong and who’s right – they might both be right, and they might both be wrong. I’m not here to judge that. But I don’t like seeing death, and I don’t like seeing injustice. This is humanity we’re talking about… we’re fucked up!”

But what of Daron’s own activism? The release of two new System songs, Protect The Land and Genocidal Humanoidz, in 2020 – their first in 15 years – served to draw attention to the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with proceeds going to the Armenia Fund; while the band have spent their career raising awareness of the Armenian genocide during World War I, when up to 1.5 million Armenian people were wiped out.

That’s not political, according to Daron. It runs deeper than that.

“Sometimes, on April 24, which is the day that we recognise the Armenian genocide, I’ll get on the stage and I’ll say something against the government or the people who deny that they killed my people 100 years ago,” explains Daron. “And I’ll say that because it’s not political for me. That was my grandmother, my great grandmother – that’s my bloodline, so that’s personal.”

“You know how it sounds…” Daron says incredulously.

The guitarist turned 50 on July 18, the day of Addicted To The Violence’s release. It’s a milestone he marked quietly, both at dinner with friends and bandmates, then by visiting his aunts and uncles. K! naturally wonders how that age would have sounded to him when he started touring in his early 20s.

“It would have sounded fucking old!” he exclaims, unleashing an impish rat-ta-tat of a laugh.

While not someone who overdoes the reflection, Daron can’t help but acknowledge how far he’s come when the opportunity presents itself. Talk of the recent Back To The Beginning concert, for instance, prompts him to admit that as a child he’d regularly dream that Ozzy Osbourne came to his house and had dinner with his parents.

This was in the 1980s, when America was in the grips of Satanic panic, an unsubstantiated moral anxiety that children were being subjected to ritual satanic abuse, with heavy metal music considered to be some sort of recruitment tool. Rather than be scared off, though, Daron, who believed he’d be a musician from the age of seven, ploughed on with his passion. Twenty years later, in 1999, System opened for in Black Sabbath in their hometown Birmingham for what was supposed to have been their final show even back then.

Now, 26 years on from that, Daron recognises he might have similar status to younger musicians. “They see me as a veteran, or whatever the fuck you call it in this game. Or someone who inspired them through their life, or through when they were young. And to be honest with you, that’s an awesome fucking feeling, especially that I’m still able to do what I’m doing at my age.”

Unbelievably, the past 20 of Daron’s 50 years have gone by since System Of A Down last released an album. They’ve long since resumed touring of course, way back in 2010, and recently delivered some of the most extraordinary performances of their career; widely circulated drone footage from their show in São Paulo shows 75,000 people, many holding red flares aloft, in a scene more akin to a sci-fi battle than a gig.

Despite the excitement System still elicit, these days it seems fans have made their peace with the fact a new record is unlikely to ever materialise. So, has that resignation helped Daron personally and creatively?

“I’m also at peace with it,” he says of the prospect, as zen as he’s been throughout this hour-long chat. “There was a time when I wasn’t, which is why it took a long time between the first Scars record [2008’s self-titled] and the second one [2018’s Dictator]. Back then I felt like I had to save the songs, as I’m the guy who brings in the songs for System Of A Down. So if System needed me, I wanted to be ready for that. But a lot of time has gone by, and I know people will hate for me to say this, but I’m not sure I want to make another System Of A Down record. We have those five records, which people still enjoy and we play live. I’m really enjoying being live onstage with System Of A Down. We’re all getting along really well. There was never hatred between us. The differences between us were more about the politics in the band and how different people wanted the band to move forward.”

That appears to be that. Except Daron can’t seem to let the door close completely…

“Things change. Moods change. People change,” he adds. “But as of right now, I’m at peace with not making another System record. It feels good not to have that [pressure] weighing on me anymore, and to release something with Scars. I’m not going to lie, I was holding myself back a little, and now I don’t feel that way when it comes to writing, recording and releasing my songs. And at the same time, I’m still a part of System Of A Down. I still see my brothers in System Of A Down, and I love them very much. So we’ll always be System Of A Down.”

Consider yourselves able to have your cake and eat it, then, because Addicted To The Violence is everything you’d want from a record made by Daron Malakian – intense, idiosyncratic, funny, heavy – regardless of which banner it’s released under. Plus, it’s always worth remembering that your favourite musicians have multiple facets to their creative lives, all of which are there to be enjoyed.

“You know, Phil Collins came from Genesis,” Daron says by way of example. “And he was a fucking drummer…”

Addicted To The Violence is out now via Scarred For Life

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