The 2000s File Feature
Empty Walls
From System of a Down to Solo Stage: The Making of "Empty Walls" In May 2006, System of a Down announced an indefinite hiatus at what seemed like the peak of…
01 The Story
From System of a Down to Solo Stage: The Making of "Empty Walls"
In May 2006, System of a Down announced an indefinite hiatus at what seemed like the peak of their commercial trajectory. The band had just won a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance for "B.Y.O.B." and had sold tens of millions of albums worldwide across five studio records. The pause left fans uncertain and each member of the band free to pursue projects they could not have undertaken while under the band's collective gravity. For frontman Serj Tankian, a Lebanese-Armenian-American singer, poet, and multi-instrumentalist, the hiatus opened a creative window he moved through decisively.
Tankian used the break to assemble his debut solo album, a project he titled Elect the Dead. The record was released on October 23, 2007, through Reprise Records and his own imprint, Serjical Strike Records. It was an ambitious undertaking: Tankian played the majority of instruments himself, calling in System of a Down drummer John Dolmayan and former Primus and Guns N' Roses drummer Bryan "Brain" Mantia for percussive support, alongside guitarist and bassist Dan Monti, opera singer Ani Maldjian, and string players including Antonio Pontarelli. The resulting record was dense, atmospheric, and unambiguously political, signaling that Tankian's solo voice would carry the same activist charge that had defined his work with System of a Down.
"Empty Walls" was chosen as the lead single from Elect the Dead and served as the album's opening track. It was released as a digital download on September 10, 2007, roughly six weeks ahead of the album, with a physical CD single following on October 15. Tankian wrote and produced the song entirely himself, an act of creative ownership that defined the tone of the whole album campaign. The track runs three minutes and forty-nine seconds and is classified in the alternative metal genre, combining the densely layered guitar attack audiences expected from Tankian's work in System of a Down with a more orchestrated structural ambition.
On the US Billboard Hot 100, "Empty Walls" reached a peak of number 97, a modest showing on the mainstream chart that reflected the song's limited pop-radio crossover. The track's real commercial life existed on rock-format charts, where it performed considerably more strongly. It climbed to number 4 on the US Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and reached number 3 on Alternative Airplay, establishing Tankian as a credible solo force in rock radio markets. In Canada the single peaked at number 72 on the Hot 100, and in the United Kingdom it reached number 78 on the main singles chart while topping the UK Rock and Metal Singles chart entirely. Year-end chart summaries for 2008 placed "Empty Walls" at number 24 on US Alternative Airplay and number 33 on US Mainstream Rock, reflecting the song's durability across many months of airplay.
The music video, directed by Tony Petrossian, was released to YouTube on September 12, 2007, two days after the digital single. It became one of the more discussed music videos of that year in the rock community. Rather than featuring Tankian as the primary visual subject, the video centers on children in a daycare or preschool setting whose games and play gradually reveal themselves as disturbing re-enactments of the Iraq War and its surrounding geopolitical theater. The children construct structures that collapse under fire, hold up a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," and enact scenes recognizable as references to the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Tankian himself appears only briefly in the video, dressed in a formal top hat and suit, observing the children rather than performing for the camera. The disconnect between innocent childhood play and the graphic political content it represented made the video a widely shared piece of antiwar visual commentary. A later reupload to the artist's official channel appeared on October 26, 2009.
The antiwar theme ran throughout the song and the album title alike. The phrase "Elect the Dead" was understood by Tankian as a critique of political leadership that sent soldiers to their deaths, and the album's content addressed the Iraq War, media censorship, and civilian suffering. Some commentary framing "Empty Walls" focused specifically on the Bush administration's decision to prohibit media coverage of military caskets returning from Iraq, reading the song as a protest against a government that conducted war behind a wall of enforced invisibility. In that reading, the "empty walls" of the title represented not just the hollowness of official rhetoric but the deliberate blankness imposed on public perception of the war's human cost.
The album Elect the Dead debuted at number 4 on the US Billboard 200, selling approximately 66,000 copies in its first week, a strong opening that validated the solo venture as a genuine commercial proposition rather than a side project. It charted inside the top twenty in several other countries, giving Tankian an international profile independent of System of a Down.
An acoustic version of "Empty Walls" appeared on the limited edition pressing of Elect the Dead, and a club remix credited as the "Victorious Club Mix" was produced by DJ LethalRush. Three years after the original release, Tankian joined the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra for Elect the Dead Symphony, a 2010 live album that restaged the debut record's songs with full orchestral backing. "Empty Walls" was performed as part of that program, demonstrating the song's structural adaptability and its continued resonance as a piece of politically engaged music. Tankian went on to release further solo albums, including Imperfect Harmonies and the harder-edged Harakiri in 2012, while also composing film soundtracks. System of a Down eventually reunited for touring, but "Empty Walls" remained the clearest statement of what Tankian's solo creative identity looked like when he first stepped outside the band's shared framework and made something entirely on his own terms.
02 Song Meaning
War Made Invisible: What "Empty Walls" Communicates
"Empty Walls" arrived in September 2007, deep into the second term of the Bush administration and the fourth year of the Iraq War. Serj Tankian, the Armenian-American frontman who had spent a decade writing politically charged music for System of a Down, was now speaking without the mediation of a band consensus. The song's title became its central metaphor: walls that are empty are walls from which images and information have been removed or withheld. In the context of the mid-2000s American political climate, the most resonant application of that metaphor was the federal prohibition on media photography of military caskets returning from overseas. The administration had determined that images of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base were harmful to public morale and had banned their publication in the press. Tankian's song treats that decision as the emblematic gesture of a government conducting an unpopular and costly war behind a curtain of enforced ignorance.
The recurring appeal in the song's refrain to "see from behind those empty walls" is therefore both an invitation and an accusation. It challenges the listener to look past the managed surface of official communications, to acknowledge the human costs that political institutions work to keep out of sight. The "walls" in the title are simultaneously physical structures from which images of the war's consequences have been stripped, rhetorical barriers erected by governments to control public narratives, and the mental compartmentalization that allows civilian populations to support or passively accept distant violence without confronting it directly.
The song's relationship to the Iraq War is reinforced most powerfully by its music video, directed by Tony Petrossian and released two days after the digital single. The video's strategy was to displace the horror of war into a children's daycare setting, where small children play games that reveal themselves as re-enactments of specific events from the conflict. Children raise a "Mission Accomplished" banner, referencing President Bush's premature declaration of victory in May 2003 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Other children mime scenes recognizable as the toppling of a Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square and prisoner mistreatment associated with Abu Ghraib. The decision to use child actors was deliberate and unsettling: it argued that adults had so normalized warfare that its logic had filtered into childhood play, that the next generation was being raised to understand organized violence as natural and even entertaining.
Tankian himself appears in the video only briefly, dressed in a formal top hat and suit, standing apart from the children as an observer rather than a performer. That visual choice was itself meaningful: the artist as witness, not participant, watching normalized atrocity with a kind of formal remove that mirrors the position the song asks its audience to abandon. The implicit argument is that passive observation, the willingness to stand by while terrible things happen, is its own form of participation.
The album title Elect the Dead extended the same political analysis. The phrase critiques electoral systems that send soldiers into mortal danger through the decisions of elected leaders, framing the dead soldiers as the true consequence of democratic choices made by voting populations who then look away from the results. Tankian drew on his Armenian heritage and his deep familiarity with state violence and historical memory to write from a position of cultural experience rather than abstract principle. His family background in the Armenian genocide gave him a framework for understanding how governments suppress inconvenient history and how populations can be kept ignorant of atrocities committed in their names or against their neighbors.
The song is not a lament so much as a confrontation. It does not dwell in grief but in outrage, presenting war's emptiness not as tragedy but as fraud. The political weight Tankian brought to "Empty Walls" was consistent with his co-founding of the Axis of Justice organization alongside Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello in 2003, a nonprofit that linked musicians with political and social justice movements. That activism informed the song's urgency: it was not written as art for its own sake but as a deliberate act of counter-communication aimed at audiences who Tankian believed were being systematically misinformed.
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