It seems almost unimaginable now that a metal band as massive and universally loved as System Of A Down - a band with numerous Billboard number one albums and a couple of songs in the Spotify billions club, no less - were once greeted with outright hostility as a relatively unknown opening act.
To have it all make more sense, we probably need to bear two key things in mind. Firstly, their sheer size makes it easy to forget just how fundamentally weird System Of A Down are. To metal crowds in the late 90s, fed on a scene dominated by Metallica, Korn, Pantera and Marilyn Manson, a bunch of Armenian-American misfits playing a politically-tinged mix of heavy metal, scrappy punk rock, Armenian folk music and Zappa-esque, avant-garde absurdity was like nothing they'd heard before. Oh, and secondly: fucking Slayer crowds.
