System Of A Down had released just one radio single, the jazzy post-hardcore oddity Sugar, when they flew to Europe in October 1998 to open for Slayer on tour. Having already supported them in the States, System guitarist Daron Malakian had developed a strategy for getting the thrash giants’ impatient fans to pay attention.
“I figured out that the best way of dealing with them was to challenge them a little bit,” he told me for the 2014 book Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History Of Metal. “I’d encouraged them to heckle us, and if they weren’t yelling, ‘SLAYERRRR!’ by the middle of our show, I’d call them a bunch of pussies. I wanted to give them a bit of a hard time before they gave us a hard time.” In late 1998, the growing media buzz that surrounded System had yet to translate into real-life excitement, and Slayer’s European fans seemed ambivalent to their quirky, art-damaged metal. After a frustrating show in Berlin, in which the audience remained nonplussed at the sight of these four Armenian-Americans cavorting around the stage, Daron told his bandmates that he had a plan.
“I said, ‘Look, if these guys don’t applaud for us after we play the first song, Know, we’re gonna play it again, over and over, until they react,’” he said in 2014. “We played Know and the crowd was pretty silent. So John started Know again, and we all played it. Halfway through the song, they were actually cheering for us. My attitude was, ‘You’re gonna love us whether you like it or not, and if you don’t, you’re gonna hear this song over and over again.’”
That unrelenting determination, unwillingness to compromise and insistence on defying convention didn’t
