“Rick Rubin didn’t like it at all!” Watch Serj Tankian eat his first banana terracotta pie – and explain why he wrote a System Of A Down song about it
· louderBy Matt Mills
( Metal Hammer )
published 9 October 2024
19 years after first singing about banana terracotta pie on Vicinity Of Obscenity, System Of A Down singer Serj Tankian has tried one
Stop the presses: Serj Tankian has finally eaten a banana terracotta pie.
The System Of A Down singer famously wrote Vicinity of Obscenity, a track on the band’s 2005 album Hypnotize, which uses the dish’s name for its chorus. In a new interview with Mythical Kitchen, Tankian not only tries it, but offers some insight into why he wrote one of the strangest hooks in metal history.
“It’s Dada-esque, basically,” the frontman says. “I like creating relationships with things that don’t have a pre-existing one. I was thinking of banana… I don’t even know how it came up in my head, but banana terracotta pie. Where is the terracotta? What does that have to do with the price of beans, right?”
Tankian also says that System Of A Down’s longtime producer, Rick Rubin, hated Vicinity Of Obscenity upon first listen, not understanding the track whatsoever. However, he came to appreciate it by the time it was recorded.
“What I do remember is our producer, Rick Rubin, at first he was just like, when we were playing it in rehearsals, he didn’t like it at all!” Tankian says. “He’d just be like, ‘What is that?!’ By the time that we actually went through recording it and he’d heard it enough times, he said, ‘It’s one of my favourite songs on the record. I can’t imagine putting this record out without this song.’ It’s one of those that just hassles you into loving it.”
In a Reddit AMA (“ask me anything”) in 2012, Tankian was asked what inspired Vicinity Of Obscenity. His response was simply, “Dadaism”: an early 20th-century art movement that used nonsense as a form of anti-establishment protest.
Rubin, who’s co-produced every System Of A Down album, recently gave an interview where he said he couldn’t stop laughing the first time he saw the band live.
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“If you saw System Of A Down when I saw System Of A Down, playing at [Hollywood nightclub] The Viper Room with 200 people going crazy, and them doing these Armenian folk dances and playing heavy metal… I laughed the whole show,” the producer told Rick Beato. “It was ridiculous! But I loved it. But any thoughts of, ‘This could be big,’ you can’t have that thought. It would be insane.”
System Of A Down haven’t released a studio album since Hypnotize, although they did put out two singles, Genocidal Humanoidz and Protect The Land, in 2020.
Serj Tankian Eats His Last Meal - YouTube
Matt Mills
Contributing Editor, Metal Hammer
Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Prog and Metal Hammer, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Guitar and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.
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