System of a Down

Malakian's Ozzy obsession started at six or seven -- "he'd appear in my dreams having dinner with my parents," he's said -- and "Iron Man" was the first riff he ever learned. The debt got tested in December 1999 at a Birmingham show billed as Black Sabbath's last: System opened, and Malakian balked at covering "Snowblind" in front of the band that wrote it -- "we ain't doing a Sabbath cover before Sabbath" -- until Sabbath drummer Bill Ward came to the dressing room and told him to do it anyway. They'd already cut the song in the studio a year earlier, for the tribute album Nativity in Black II.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1972

SnowblindBlack Sabbath

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2000

SnowblindSystem of a Down

listen forBoth versions ride the same central riff -- the same lurching, doom-heavy chord progression about a cocaine crash -- but the differences are the point. Sabbath's original stays patient and bluesy, Ozzy's voice riding well behind the beat. System's cover pushes the tempo, sharpens the guitar tone into something closer to thrash, and lets Tankian's voice tear where Ozzy's slides. Malakian summed up the gap himself: "our version is so fucking different. It was the System Of A Down version of 'Snowblind.'"

At 14, Malakian took a stack of thrash cassettes on a trip to Iraq, wearing headphones through the visit while relatives asked what the hell he was listening to -- "I might have been the first person to take heavy metal to Iraq," he's said. Reign in Blood, Show No Mercy, and South of Heaven were "like religion to me" at that age, the records he credits with teaching him guitar in the first place. He'd later sum up System's own sound in one line: "It's as if Slayer and the Beatles had a baby."

listen: upstream & hereshare

1986

Raining BloodSlayer

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2005

B.Y.O.B.System of a Down

listen for"Raining Blood" opens cold, no build-up, straight into a tremolo-picked, palm-muted sprint that never lets up for four minutes. "B.Y.O.B." takes that same whiplash attack -- the riff refusing to sit still, tempo lurching between a full sprint and a half-time stomp -- and breaks it into pieces, cutting away into groove sections and falsetto hooks before slamming back into the thrash. Where Slayer commits to the assault as the whole meal, System serves it in bursts, the same violence with more room to catch your breath between hits.

Asked in 2003 to name the records that shaped him, Tankian went past metal entirely to a singer from his childhood: Harout Pamboukjian, "one of the biggest Armenian folk singers in the world," whose 1970s records, Tankian told SPIN, "were really Zeppelin-influenced." It's the closest System's folk strand comes to a named source rather than a genre absorbed secondhand -- an artist Tankian actually owned records by, growing up in an Armenian community in Lebanon before his family moved to Los Angeles. No interview ties him to a specific System song, which keeps this the loosest thread in the band's lineage.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1983

Hey Jan GhapamaHarout Pamboukjian

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2005

Holy MountainsSystem of a Down

listen forNo source connects "Holy Mountains" to Pamboukjian specifically, so treat this as a family resemblance rather than a documented line. "Hey Jan Ghapama" is built around a communal, singalong melody -- the kind of tune a wedding hall full of people already knows -- with no metal in it anywhere. "Holy Mountains" opens the same way: Tankian alone on a haunting, folk-scaled vocal line before Malakian's riffs ever enter, the melody arriving first and the metal built up around it rather than the other way around.