Mezmerized by Hypnotize
Graphic by Téa Sklar
Twenty years ago, Armenian-American metal band System of a Down released their final (and arguably best) studio album: Hypnotize. With its blend of provocative political statements and musical artistry, Hypnotize cemented the band’s place in music history. In fact, the album’s message is so relatable to listeners that System of a Down has managed to reach an entirely new generation with the same lyrics that attracted fans two decades ago.
System of a Down has always been known as a political band, and Hypnotize definitely followed in that tradition. “Attack”, the first song on the album, sets the tone immediately: we’re here, we’re loud, we’re in your face and we’re going to stand up for what we believe in. With lines like “The cold insincerity of steel machines have consumed our euphoria”, newer fans of the band can relate to the anti-capitalist message within the song. In fact, I could argue that this lyric will only become more powerful and more relatable as the years go by and our world becomes more reliant on services like robots and AI chatbots, to the point that they are “transforming us into muted dreams”.
The song continues to criticize government propaganda and the actions that the government takes against innocent civilians and institutions while creating citizens that mindlessly work for nothing other than the good of the system. And while this stance may seem a bit dystopian for 2005, it seems to line up perfectly with how many view our world today. The feeling of helplessness that’s been intertwined into our everyday lives in 2025 is more perfectly reflected in “Attack” than in most other songs in the past two decades.
Following the helpless feeling established in “Attack”, “Tentative” is written from the perspective of an innocent victim of war. It tells the tale of citizens that are at the mercy of warring governments with nowhere to run or hide. Lyrics like “Where do you expect us to go when the bombs fall?” and “No one’s gonna save us now, not even God” highlights what races through these victims' minds as they realize that nobody is going to save them from this fate. This idea of the inevitable death of innocents in a rich man’s war, while inspired by bombings in Lebanon during the singer’s childhood, can be extended to places such as present-day Palestine.
Wrapping up the album, “Soldier Side” combines the ideas introduced in both “Attack” and “Tentative” while adding its own perspective to the mix. As the title suggests, “Soldier Side” shows the listener that even the people fighting the war are victims of it through the soldier’s perspective. The song describes mothers mourning their sons as they’re drafted for a war, knowing that they’ll never come back home. Their sons, the soldiers, are led into war with hope, knowing that that hope is baseless. Lyrics like “Young men standing on the top of their own graves; wondering when Jesus comes, are they gonna be saved?” promotes the message that war is one giant death sentence with no way out.
It’s also important to mention that this song has a much more somber tone than the rest of the album. While the rest of Hypnotize tried to portray its message in an easily digestible way, “Soldier Side” took the opposite approach, forcing listeners to really understand the horrors of war without all the sugarcoating of loud instrumentals.
Although I couldn’t explore every nook and cranny of Hypnotize, it’s important to understand that these songs have remained relevant for a reason: while the specific conflicts and people involved in them have changed, the effects that war and suffering have had on innocents has not. When rich men that stay locked away behind their money and power dictate the outcomes of millions of lives, those millions will always suffer for the rich man to become richer.