2003 promotional single by System of a Down
"Boom" is a song by American heavy metal band System of a Down. It was released as a promotional single from their third studio album, Steal This Album! (2002).
Background
"Boom!" was released as the second and final promotional single from Steal This Album!. As in the case with most songs from Steal This Album!, it has only been played live on very few occasions, with only one confirmed performance. In a Reddit AMA, drummer John Dolmayan stated, "We have played Boom! a few times but because it's a spoken word song, it doesn't have the same impact live."[1]
The song was leaked on the Toxicity II bootleg under the name "Everytime".[2]
Composition
Music
The song uses a simple AABA structure. In her essay "Boom! Goes the Global Protest Movement: Heavy Metal, Protest, and the Televisual in System of a Down’s 'Boom!' Music Video", Clare Neil King suggests that this structure enables protestors to quickly join in. It uses a Phrygian dominant scale common in heavy metal music, but also often used to create a non-Western or exotic feel. King argues that in Boom, use of this scale hints at "the location of the Iraq war and the rich Arabic culture threatened by violence".[3]
Lyrics
MTV described the song as being about "the horror of war and how governments throw exorbitant sums of money into the military and overlook other key domestic and international issues".[4]
Music video
For the music video, the band worked with filmmaker Michael Moore. The video uses footage from the anti-war protests on February 15, 2003. The video also shows a cartoon of George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Tony Blair, and Osama bin Laden riding rockets over a city, referencing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Shortly after its release, the video was banned from MTV Europe,.[5] The Globe and Mail reported a viewer's offence at the video's imagery of the US president alongside terrorists, with another telling MTV the station would never be on in their house again.[6]
Billboard reported guitarist Daron Malakian as saying "The possibility of the U.S. going to war with Iraq is an extremely personal issue for me because I have family who live there [...] we’d like to have the 'Boom!' video help change the way people think about the solution to our global problems. We want to make the idea of dropping bombs, of waging war seem as antiquated and ridiculous as it is today for an Afro-American to have to sit at the back of the bus."[7]
