Every System of a Down Song by Jimmy Carlson

In the Rankings: Every System of a Down Song

Jimmy Carlson

Following the 90s, mainstream metal was choking on its own figurative vomit. Pantera was soon to release their final album, Metallica had run the course of their odd hard rock phase and had nowhere left to go but down, the golden age of thrash metal was long since gone, and nu metal was running out of ideas to recycle. Many groups would help to fill the void, yes (Tool was yet to reach their peak, Slipknot had just taken off, and the “core” genres were still in a pioneering phase, to name a few), but there is arguably no metal band more synonymous with the early 2000s than System of a Down. Few groups in history have combined brutal heaviness with goosebump-inducing melodic sensibility and political awareness with total absurdity in such a complete, satisfying musical whole as SoaD have in their five albums, and probably none with the same level of commercial success. They also happen to be one of my favorite bands of all time.

This term, I decided to make a list of every System of a Down song ever, ranked (theoretically) from best to worst. This decision came with a mixed bag of feelings and opinions for me. Before I embarked on this challenge, I was of the firm opinion that SoaD was a band with fewer bad songs than the top speed in miles per hour of a naked mole rat (like 5, or something). I saw legitimate and unique artistic value in everything they wrote, and frequently found that my favorite song of theirs was

Art: Aviva Sachs

Aviva Sachs

whichever I had most recently listened to. At the same time, however, I was always interested in flexing the amount of time I had spent listening to and thinking about SoaD on everyone around me. Therefore, when it came to deciding what to write about this term, I was left with only one choice. In order to impress my enormous erudition surrounding System of a Down’s discography upon the waiting world, I would have to go against my own beliefs and place every one of their songs in a strict hierarchical relationship to one another based on raw musical quality, as perceived by yours truly.

However, despite the overwhelming power of intellect and determination I put into my song-ranking efforts, I found it difficult to be consistent in my judgements. I decided from the outset that this would be a purely qualitative list, essentially based on a loose sense of relative goodness which depends heavily on context and which is always changing, and that led to some contradictions. I would hear one song, and then hear anoth-

1. Chop Suey *feels overrated but isn’t 2. Aerials *most emotional, best lyrics 3. Spiders 4. Prison Song *no this song isn’t too high it belongs at number 4 5. Toxicity *harder to cover than it sounds 6. Innervision 7. Know *neck-breaker award 8. Hypnotize 9. Lost in Hollywood *best non-metal 10.Needles 11. B.Y.O.B 12.Deer Dance 13.Mr. Jack *most likely to make you defecate 14.Mind *most impossible to rank 15.P.L.U.C.K *most underrated 16.Violent Pornography 17.Soil *best guitar solo, best f-bombs 18.Streamline 19.Question! *best chorus?? 20.Suite-Pee 21.Highway Song 22.Dreaming 23.Sad Statue 24.I-E-A-I-A-I-O 25.Holy Mountains 26.Attack *thrash award 27.War? 28.DDevil *pet song, best snort 29.A.D.D 30.Sugar *most overrated 31.Ego Brain 32.Soldier Side *most sad 33.Suggestions 34.ATWA 35.Forest 36.Revenga *moody award 37.Roulette 38.Psycho 39.Kill Rock N’ Roll 40.Radio/Video 41.U-Fig 42.Cigaro 43.Stealing Society 44.Tentative 45.Bubbles 46.Nüguns 47.Lonely Day *awful taste, great execution 48.Genocidal Humanoidz *best guitar-as-gun imitation 49.Boom! 50.Shimmy 51.Pictures 52.Protect the Land 53.Thetawaves 54.Science 55.Bounce *obnoxious award 56.Jet Pilot 57.This Cocaine Makes Me Feel Like I’m On This Song *best song title 58.Chic N’ Stu *best song about pizza 59.Vicinity of Obscenity 60.Peephole *best trombone 61.X 62.She’s Like Heroin 63.F**k the System 64.Arto

65.CUBErt *best dolphin impression 66.36 *how does Serj even do that 67.Old School Hollywood *I like to think of this song as a mistake 68.Darts er, and decide which of the two seemed to be the more interesting, satisfying, or beautiful piece of music; later a third song would enter the discussion whose own musical qualities would seem to invalidate all that. The only solution was to keep ranking anyway. What came out of it all is a list which makes sense (to me) when comparing any two songs on it, but which has very limited consistency when it comes to the entire ranking. If I were to review this list, I would probably make a lot of changes, and that’s not to mention other peoples’ opinions. I think that anyone capable of making their own SoaD song ranking would, and should, take objection to a large portion of my decisions here (though they would of course be wrong). SoaD is a band who applied a similarly intense degree of creativity and energy to every one of their albums and almost all their songs in my humble opinion, and so any listener, even if they are trying to avoid ranking songs simply based on which they like and listen to the most (as I did), will have a different sense of which songs are stronger or weaker.

Aviva Sachs

Finally, a disclaimer: this list contains only songs listenable through Apple Music, so none of the songs from the Japanese release of the self-titled album, and none of the random covers. With that out of the way, here are the rankings!

So there you have it! All five albums plus the 2020 EP split into 68 pieces and scattered over the page in an order that theoretically reflects their relative musical quality, whatever that happened to mean to me as I was listening to them. Oh man, this did take a long time. As you can see, I also decided to spice things up with some awards for songs that stand out in special ways, of which there are many, more than I chose to acknowledge. As for how the albums compare to each other, they are remarkably even. Even though some stand out as having a higher concentration of songs in certain areas on the ranking (looking at you, Toxicity), every album has songs all over the list, with only Steal This Album! having a much lower ranking on average (38) than the other albums (which would probably change if the flow of the album were considered). The highest average ranking just barely goes to the self-titled, surprisingly enough, with 29, probably because of how experimental and provocative the songs are. With that, I got no more thoughts, so go forth, ask your people what is right, let your mother pray, don’t ever try to fly, don’t ever get stuck in the sky, don’t eat the fish, but do eat all the grass that you want, and live at your own pace.

Billy Bratton