Michael Moore

St. Petersburg Times (Florida) March 27 2003

Michael Moore helps band go 'Boom!' By GINA VIVINETTO, Times Pop Music Critic

One of the most provocative, political hard rock bands today, System of a Down, is in cahoots with Academy Award-winning documentary director Michael Moore. The band, of Armenian descent (recognize its members by their interesting beards), recently had Moore direct the video for its antiwar tune Boom!. This week, Moore won an Oscar for Bowling For Columbine, a documentary examining gun violence in America and got some boos for his antiwar rant onstage.

The video features footage from war protests around the world as well as satirical animated images of President George Bush, Saddam Hussein, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden riding atop rockets.

Daron Malakian, the band's guitarist, said in a statement that going to war with Iraq is an "extremely personal" issue for him "because I have family who live there."

"I visited Iraq when I was a teenager, and I can tell you first-hand that the people who I met there are really nice, ordinary people who don't war with us or with anyone."

WAR TUNES ON THE WEB: If anything hammers home that the Internet has forever changed the way we access music and how artists access fans, it's the instant availability of war-related tunes on musicians' Web sites. Artists in support of and against the war in Iraq are quickly getting their music on the Web.

Some, such as Thurston Moore, guitarist for Sonic Youth, have taken matters further, with new sites devoted to war-related music. Moore created www.protest-records.com, which allows visitors to download antiwar tunes, including rare cuts and live material the guitarist has collected, among them a song by Kathleen Hanna of Le Tigre (formerly of the legendary riot grrrl band Bikini Kill).