A biography for Serj Tankianhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.”
“I'm a huge Beatles fan, but I've only really gotten into them as an adult.”
“I am more interested in how people interpret the phrase 'Elect The Dead' than what I may or may not have intended. I named the album after the track, which is a spiritual song about love, life and death and is the heaviest song on the album without having any heavy instruments.”
“In the last few years I've been listening to jazz more than anything else. I listen to a lot of world music and experimental here and there.”
“I write music when I'm free and for no particular project in mind.”
“As long as people are living their truth or their vision, whether they're activists or not, that's the important thing.”
“A lot of pop music is based on trying to make people remember it so that they'll buy it. To me, it was not about that.”
“I've always tried to listen to a lot of different music from around the world.”
“Day is just a collection of hours.”
“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.”
“I like African music, and I'm a huge Ravi Shankar fan.”
“I'd rather let the music speak for itself.”
“I think every artist should follow their vision; their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for. That said though, I think also artists have, continuously good artists, have been good for their times.”
“With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music - you can't do that in jazz. You can't do that with classical.”
“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.”
“Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.”
“Capitalism unchecked is not a democratic system.”
“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.”
“Pretending that we live doesn't make us alive.”