I was into Toxicity (2001) in a way that I was into very few other records at the time. It’s not that I was more into it than other music. Quite the opposite, actually. I recognized very clearly the limits of form and the internal missteps of the record, even as I spun it over and over in my closet-sized freshman dorm room. I listened to Toxicity critically. I listened to it the way I listen to music now, picking through elements individually, trying to quantify the dynamics between them, judging what worked and what didn’t.

I guess I should back up a little. This is a rough stage in my musical development, one in which I parsed music I didn’t really like instead of seeking out music that I did. Chet Betz (who met me during this period) has since characterized that poor little bastard as the kid “who would geek out over the new Jimmy Eat World record and shit.” He’s not wrong, unfortunately. I was a pud. I knew the qualities I had liked in music before but instead of finding those qualities in new artists I was bemoaning their faint traces in whatever dreck crossed my path. (I also owned the D12 album.) For whatever reason, though, this critical intensity was leveled most steadily upon System of a Down.

A major theoretical component of this opinion was as follows: “In an odd and mostly incorrectly utilized way, Serj Tankian can wail.” So now, in 2008, when I see a video of Serj sitting behind a baby grand piano in an abandoned city street like, say, Jason Mraz, I reach back through time seven years and exchange a high five with that silly prick taping Rolling Stone pages to his walls. This is premature.

Even though the visual backdrop of “Sky Is Over” is pure “How to Save a Life,” Serj hasn’t backed off a jot nor a tittle from caterwauling opaque, vaguely anti-establishment hog shit. “Even though we can’t afford / The sky is over,” he warns, as he scribbles on a vanilla sky using a digital effect roughly as awe inspiring as the touch-up feature in iPhoto. As the digitized guitars swell to sub-My Chemical Romance Queen-aping pomposity and Tankian waddles passionately toward the camera, the audience is left wondering what the fuck he is getting at. He pretty much just keeps singing that chorus I quoted above, and that chorus does not make sense. “Don’t litter?” the audience asks itself. “Reduce carbon emissions?” Then, completely lost, “Fuck Bush?”

Then as the video ends, we see a message scrawled almost illegibly in the heavens. It reads (I shit you not) “Civilization Is Over.” And though even my freshman self would surely have considered this ending lame, I still reach through time and punch him in the throat out of pure spite.