Serj's Third Album - Harakiri

[serjery]

Funny enough, Mezmerize was probably their most radio-friendly album and is still their highest rated album by critics...personally I think it's their best album by a landslide.

[holysong]

[Cracker]

Imho, "radio-friendly" means, to a certain extent, lame.

In my generation we bought Cheech & Chong or George Carlin or Richard Pryor comedy albums just because we'd never hear that shit on public radio. Same with any- and everything by Frank Zappa and similar artists. I think it's awesome that there are still brave new artists putting out the truth in ways that won't EVER be radio-friendly. Serj's music will hopefully NEVER be for the brain-dead TV & "pop"-addicted Zombie masses.

I just hope there are enough fans with money to still make it worth their while. It's far too easy to steal music these days & I'm not judging because I've done it too. Even back in the '70's & '80's if you couldn't afford to buy music you could find someone who had a stereo system where you could play those vinyl albums and tape them to cassette. Poverty always finds a way.

Being Radio Friendly usually does mean lamest, but Zappa had 'Yellow Snow' and that was kind of his only song playable on radio it is also one of his best, no matter how radio friendly and popular.

I think that the difference between pirating now and then is the social side of things. Instead of trading tapes and having to sit around a friends house to listen to an album and then bringing a counter offer to the table it is just a lot more anti social, and that is what I kind of miss. I'm JUST old enough to have experienced this cassette swapping. And I still have some old cassettes with crap like Linkin Park on and Korn because a friend I had was into them at the time. We were about 8 at the time. But I remember fondly sitting up at night on a few occasions hosting our own direct to cassette radio show and just swapping his CD and mine over and playing each other a track we liked at the time. I felt like sharing that for some reason.

ANYWAY - To relate this to Serj somehow. I think that he has a good strong set of fans that are exclusively his, not strictly System fans. I'm not a Serj fan... not anymore. Maybe once. But I think what I respect most still is he does not try and write radio friendly songs all the time, and neither does Daron. FFS Daron had a single called "Fucking" and Serj had a chorus saying 'Fuck Let's Figure it Out, No Bullshit' to play those on the radio in a 'clean' state would be hilarious. And whilst I respect that he doesn't pander, I think he does make things simpler and more 'brain dead' politics. But then again, I think maybe he is cutting out the filibuster chit chat and the monotonous bullshit that politicians fill their media campaigns with instead of them actually doing things. And that's good too.

I have no idea what I'm going on about, it'll make more sense in the morning. Flarbaun garbunarger

[SoLuTioN]

Hm hm hm, have a look at this, especially at the date... Seiously: I don't know what I should think about this guy anymore. I really like him, but he works hard to destroy his reputation... Sure, he told us that he used the iPad to write a few songs, but there were no words about stealing whole melodies from Beatbox Apps...

[2eroSOAD]

I finally got the album yesterday and I've listened to it a few times, and I'm loving it. It's very solid and powerful, not one single ballad, and even with the album being very rock and up tempo there's still room for electronic elements that are put together way better than they were Imperfect Harmonies. It's awesome!

[anniemannie3]

I didn't had any expectations for Harakiri after Imperfect Harmonies, but after listening to it I was really surprised.

I was much the same. It took a REALLY long time for me to actually like some of the songs on IH, so I didn't really have high expecations for this release. I only just listened to the album around a week ago and since then, it has been on constant replay in my car. Some of the tracks like 'Figure It Out', I just can't listen to! The repetitiveness of the lyrics just drives me crazy! Also, with most of the songs I had to double check that it was still the same track when it suddenly changed into what sounded like a totally new song! However, I am totally loving 'Ching Chime' and 'Occupied Tears'! Definitely my favourite two tracks on the whole record! He's done a good job with this album, in my opinion! Not quite as good as ETD, but definitely beats IH! Fingers crossed his tour for this album works out in his favour so he can hopefully travel down my way again!

[pedro]

Hm hm hm, have a look at this, especially at the date... Seiously: I don't know what I should think about this guy anymore. I really like him, but he works hard to destroy his reputation... Sure, he told us that he used the iPad to write a few songs, but there were no words about stealing whole melodies from Beatbox Apps...

I'm pretty sure that if Serj was this so-called thief, savageApps would already have sued him or something, but hell, the iTunes description of the app proudly presents Serj as one of the users. That, plus, Serj has been on and on with this iPad thing since the beginning of last year, when there was only that tiny 'next year!' ching chime thingy. Hell, he could be the author and they used the song, he could be stealing music, we'll never really know unless somebody from savageApps or Serj himself says something about it.

[SoLuTioN]

I'm pretty sure that if Serj was this so-called thief, savageApps would already have sued him or something, but hell, the iTunes description of the app proudly presents Serj as one of the users. That, plus, Serj has been on and on with this iPad thing since the beginning of last year, when there was only that tiny 'next year!' ching chime thingy. Hell, he could be the author and they used the song, he could be stealing music, we'll never really know unless somebody from savageApps or Serj himself says something about it.

In my opinion it's quite simple: Serj didn't say that he used beats and samples from this app so I have to believe that he doesn't want us to know that he used them. It's no big deal to say in the booklet that he used this app and took samples from ist.

[leftshoe18]

Serj said that he used the iPad for some of the writing. What's the usage license for that app?

[SoLuTioN]

"Using the iPad" for me is not the same as taking samples from apps and pretend they were your own...