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San Francisco Weekly (California)
May 4, 2005 Wednesday
Caught in a Mosh
System of a Down's Fillmore show was the bee's knees. The proof was
in the mosh pit.
By Garrett Kamps
The mosh pit is a misunderstood thing. Too many people regard the
mosh pit the way Tipper Gore regards rap lyrics: as a threat to the
very fabric of society, let alone to those misguided enough to jump
into one. This attitude is naive and unfair, because mosh pits are
supersweet.
I don't have the statistics in front me (I left them in my other
pair of pants), but I'm pretty sure no one's ever died in a mosh pit.
Plus, I know a lot of cool gentlemen who spent the good part of their
formative years in pits and who turned out fine. My friend Andrew
is one of them. He's an EMT in New York City now, and he recently
saved a baby's life by giving it CPR. See? Andrew taught me that
mosh pits are far less chaotic than they appear. For example, did
you know that there are moshing dance moves? I forget their names,
but I've seen Andrew do most of them. And there are rules to moshing,
too; for example, you always pick someone up if he falls down, and you
have to beat up anyone who gropes the rare but totally awesome female
who ventures in. To me, though, the best thing about mosh pits is that
they are unique, living things. They are born and die in one night,
during one band's set, and their lives tell the story of that set.
This is what I realized last week at the System of a Down show at
the Fillmore.
Some of you may have cringed when you read that last sentence, because
System of a Down is a mainstream metal band that ascended more or less
in sync with the explosion of Ozzfest (which the band has played twice
now, in 1998 as an unknown supporting act and in 2002 as a headliner),
so it's easy to confuse it with many of its lame peers, like Drowning
Pool and Mudvayne and Korn. But friends, please, please reconsider. I
mean, let's just take SOAD's newly ubiquitous single, "B.Y.O.B.," off
the upcoming Mezmerize (which comes out this Tuesday). The song's title
stands for "bring your own bombs," which epitomizes why this band is
good: It appeals mainly to frat dudes, but is secretly trying to blow
their minds. This goes for the music, too. "B.Y.O.B." contains a chorus
that's as sickeningly catchy and overproduced as anything No Doubt's
ever written, as well as the lyrics "Everybody's going to the party/
Have a real good time" -- which are followed by "Dancing in the desert/
Blowing up the sunshine." Ha! Mind-blowing. Plus, that cheeky hook is
sandwiched between thrashing, jagged verses that feel as if someone
were skateboarding over my face. "Why do they always send the poor/
Why don't presidents fight the war?" shrieks the always surprisingly
understandable Serj Tankian. Now that is what I want our troops
listening to as they drive their tanks over children. Who knows;
it may give them second thoughts.
Anyway, I was really looking forward to the SOAD show, because for
most of the band's career I, like many of you, had dismissed it and
so had never seen it play live. The dang thing was being held at
the Fillmore, too, part of SOAD's "guerrilla" effort, for which it
plays small (relative to how big the band is) venues and tickets go
on sale at the last minute and only at the box office, so only the
real die-hards show up. The group opened the show with "B.Y.O.B.,"
an indicator that it was going to dispense with the new stuff quickly
and stick mainly to older material, which is a pretty ace thing to do
(no one likes going to see Rod Stewart if dude's not gonna play the
hits). The crowd was the expected mix of old-school heavy metal perps
in black Iron Maiden T-shirts and meatheads from Fremont who like
Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. The guy-to-girl ratio was about 3-to-1,
and there was enough secondhand pot smoke to bake Free Willy.
The pit was up and running right from the start, swirling like
a whirlpool, counterclockwise (pits swirl the opposite direction
in Australia). Throughout the night, you could tell how hard the
band was rocking based on the size of the maw: monster truck tire,
sumo wrestling ring, backyard swimming pool, Il Duomo. I have
a theory that, like yours truly, the members of System of a Down
(in addition to Tankian there are guitarist Daron Malakian, bassist
Shavo Odadjian, and drummer John Dolmayan; they're all Armenian,
in case you're wondering about the names) must have grown up doing
musical theater, because there was something wonderfully operatic
about their performance. Tankian growled as well as he crooned as
well as he screamed, and during songs like "Chop Suey" -- as Malakian
(backed by a battery of Marshall half-stacks) beat his guitar as
if he'd caught it stealing his wallet, and Dolmayan (shirtless,
ripped like an American Gladiator) drove the beastly noise like a
herd of Clydesdales trying to outrun a tornado -- the singer flew
around the stage and inspired audience members to throw their hands
dramatically up in the air like Willem Dafoe in Platoon; this strange
gesture was made throughout the night, and it seemed to express both
utter stupefaction and a religious awakening.
For the most part, the band played songs from 1998's System of a Down
and 2001's Toxicity, delivering 24 tunes in just under two hours with
no encore. The audience knew every single word, even to older songs
like "Sugar," the mammoth track with the strange detour into jazz
that closed out the set. Two songs earlier, SOAD played its megahit
"Toxicity," the first foreboding guitar notes of which had the effect
of water sweeping out into the ocean in anticipation of a tsunami.
When the distorted wave broke over the Fillmore, the invisible membrane
that surrounds a pit became porous, and moshers bled out into the
crowd like those ravenous zombies from 28 Days Later, effectively
turning everyone they came in contact with into one of them until
the entire floor was thundering. Pockets of fury melted into and out
of one another like storm clouds -- you could feel the floor shaking
from the balcony. I've never seen anything like it.
That is the beautiful, natural thing about a mosh pit: You have
dozens and sometimes hundreds of individual rockers, each responding
to the music with his own intensity, expressing themselves through
bumping into, pushing, and sometimes even hitting one another,
though all in the spirit of good fun (my favorite name ever for a
hardcore band belonged to one I saw with Andrew in the basement of a
library in D.C., Good Clean Fun). When you combine all that energy, it
creates an entirely new organism, a creature with a life of its own.
That's how I know that System of a Down rocks really damn hard. That
night at the Fillmore the band had created a monster.
May 4, 2005 Wednesday
Caught in a Mosh
System of a Down's Fillmore show was the bee's knees. The proof was
in the mosh pit.
By Garrett Kamps
The mosh pit is a misunderstood thing. Too many people regard the
mosh pit the way Tipper Gore regards rap lyrics: as a threat to the
very fabric of society, let alone to those misguided enough to jump
into one. This attitude is naive and unfair, because mosh pits are
supersweet.
I don't have the statistics in front me (I left them in my other
pair of pants), but I'm pretty sure no one's ever died in a mosh pit.
Plus, I know a lot of cool gentlemen who spent the good part of their
formative years in pits and who turned out fine. My friend Andrew
is one of them. He's an EMT in New York City now, and he recently
saved a baby's life by giving it CPR. See? Andrew taught me that
mosh pits are far less chaotic than they appear. For example, did
you know that there are moshing dance moves? I forget their names,
but I've seen Andrew do most of them. And there are rules to moshing,
too; for example, you always pick someone up if he falls down, and you
have to beat up anyone who gropes the rare but totally awesome female
who ventures in. To me, though, the best thing about mosh pits is that
they are unique, living things. They are born and die in one night,
during one band's set, and their lives tell the story of that set.
This is what I realized last week at the System of a Down show at
the Fillmore.
Some of you may have cringed when you read that last sentence, because
System of a Down is a mainstream metal band that ascended more or less
in sync with the explosion of Ozzfest (which the band has played twice
now, in 1998 as an unknown supporting act and in 2002 as a headliner),
so it's easy to confuse it with many of its lame peers, like Drowning
Pool and Mudvayne and Korn. But friends, please, please reconsider. I
mean, let's just take SOAD's newly ubiquitous single, "B.Y.O.B.," off
the upcoming Mezmerize (which comes out this Tuesday). The song's title
stands for "bring your own bombs," which epitomizes why this band is
good: It appeals mainly to frat dudes, but is secretly trying to blow
their minds. This goes for the music, too. "B.Y.O.B." contains a chorus
that's as sickeningly catchy and overproduced as anything No Doubt's
ever written, as well as the lyrics "Everybody's going to the party/
Have a real good time" -- which are followed by "Dancing in the desert/
Blowing up the sunshine." Ha! Mind-blowing. Plus, that cheeky hook is
sandwiched between thrashing, jagged verses that feel as if someone
were skateboarding over my face. "Why do they always send the poor/
Why don't presidents fight the war?" shrieks the always surprisingly
understandable Serj Tankian. Now that is what I want our troops
listening to as they drive their tanks over children. Who knows;
it may give them second thoughts.
Anyway, I was really looking forward to the SOAD show, because for
most of the band's career I, like many of you, had dismissed it and
so had never seen it play live. The dang thing was being held at
the Fillmore, too, part of SOAD's "guerrilla" effort, for which it
plays small (relative to how big the band is) venues and tickets go
on sale at the last minute and only at the box office, so only the
real die-hards show up. The group opened the show with "B.Y.O.B.,"
an indicator that it was going to dispense with the new stuff quickly
and stick mainly to older material, which is a pretty ace thing to do
(no one likes going to see Rod Stewart if dude's not gonna play the
hits). The crowd was the expected mix of old-school heavy metal perps
in black Iron Maiden T-shirts and meatheads from Fremont who like
Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. The guy-to-girl ratio was about 3-to-1,
and there was enough secondhand pot smoke to bake Free Willy.
The pit was up and running right from the start, swirling like
a whirlpool, counterclockwise (pits swirl the opposite direction
in Australia). Throughout the night, you could tell how hard the
band was rocking based on the size of the maw: monster truck tire,
sumo wrestling ring, backyard swimming pool, Il Duomo. I have
a theory that, like yours truly, the members of System of a Down
(in addition to Tankian there are guitarist Daron Malakian, bassist
Shavo Odadjian, and drummer John Dolmayan; they're all Armenian,
in case you're wondering about the names) must have grown up doing
musical theater, because there was something wonderfully operatic
about their performance. Tankian growled as well as he crooned as
well as he screamed, and during songs like "Chop Suey" -- as Malakian
(backed by a battery of Marshall half-stacks) beat his guitar as
if he'd caught it stealing his wallet, and Dolmayan (shirtless,
ripped like an American Gladiator) drove the beastly noise like a
herd of Clydesdales trying to outrun a tornado -- the singer flew
around the stage and inspired audience members to throw their hands
dramatically up in the air like Willem Dafoe in Platoon; this strange
gesture was made throughout the night, and it seemed to express both
utter stupefaction and a religious awakening.
For the most part, the band played songs from 1998's System of a Down
and 2001's Toxicity, delivering 24 tunes in just under two hours with
no encore. The audience knew every single word, even to older songs
like "Sugar," the mammoth track with the strange detour into jazz
that closed out the set. Two songs earlier, SOAD played its megahit
"Toxicity," the first foreboding guitar notes of which had the effect
of water sweeping out into the ocean in anticipation of a tsunami.
When the distorted wave broke over the Fillmore, the invisible membrane
that surrounds a pit became porous, and moshers bled out into the
crowd like those ravenous zombies from 28 Days Later, effectively
turning everyone they came in contact with into one of them until
the entire floor was thundering. Pockets of fury melted into and out
of one another like storm clouds -- you could feel the floor shaking
from the balcony. I've never seen anything like it.
That is the beautiful, natural thing about a mosh pit: You have
dozens and sometimes hundreds of individual rockers, each responding
to the music with his own intensity, expressing themselves through
bumping into, pushing, and sometimes even hitting one another,
though all in the spirit of good fun (my favorite name ever for a
hardcore band belonged to one I saw with Andrew in the basement of a
library in D.C., Good Clean Fun). When you combine all that energy, it
creates an entirely new organism, a creature with a life of its own.
That's how I know that System of a Down rocks really damn hard. That
night at the Fillmore the band had created a monster.