System of A Down drummer John Dolmayan has been very online as of late, offering his opinion on a variety of topics – everything from the Black Lives Matter protests to Gina Carano, and his opinion seemed to shock longtime fans of the band, who were more used to frontman Serj Tankian's more progressive viewpoint.
Suddenly, the two brothers in law (they are married to a pair of sisters) were throwing political barbs at each other in public. Tankian insinuated Dolmayan was a hypocrite. Eventually, the band's manager had to stage a conference call to make sure everything is cool. Tankian addressed their current relationship in a new interview with Consequence of Sound.
He says “We’re very good friends, we’re family, and he’s my drummer in my band, so of course we’ve talked about many, many different things, including political views. When you don’t agree with someone after a while about a certain topic … look, it doesn’t mean that we don’t agree about other stuff. We agree a lot about Armenian stuff, for example, a lot about family stuff, a lot of other things, a lot of personal stuff. But when it comes to American politics, we happen to be on the polar opposite ends of it, and we’re both very passionate and vehement about our views, which is fine.”
Tankian continued “I love and respect John very much, but I don’t love and respect his American political views. And that’s fine. And I can live with that and he can live with that because we respect and care for each other. And it’s really just that. Have we talked about it? Yeah. But do we talk about it often? No, because there comes a point where when you don’t see eye to eye on something, you’d just rather talk about something else.”
Tankian is promoting his new solo EP, Elasticity, which comes out on March 19 via Alchemy Recordings/BMG. Listen to the lead single here.
