It’s a hideous Sunday afternoon in the suburbs. A morning that began with a hovering, omnipresent mist and temperatures below 40 descends by steps into an afternoon of wind-driven sleet. The shivers of ice pellets hurl themselves into you horizontally. Gales and gusts transform mere precipitation into a thousand minute daggers of frozen antipathy, nature’s frigid curse thrown back at you for past transgressions. It’s 2:00PM and traffic has been snarled for the last two miles. All the acolytes, freshly released from morning services and glutted at the alter of the brass-and-ferns, are making their way through the sludge and slush to commence the final stage of their day of worship, the High Mass of Mall. Somehow the Gods have conspired to place you here, in the parking lot of Best Buy, and when you throw open the passenger side door this is what greets you. A thousand tiny pellets of glacial buckshot slam into your face at right angles, mocking the very existence of the hooded jacket you so thoughtfully dug out of storage 90 minutes ago.

It’s best not to ask.

A twenty-second trot from car to supernatural motion-sensored door and you’re sucked into the space of the store, the glass panes seamlessly parting like the Red Sea at Moses’ beck and call, releasing the physical force of the cultural vacuum behind it. Raw nature pushing, the physics of emptiness pulling, you really have no choice. You’re just in. The void snaps shut behind you and for better or for worse you are contained within the beast. If you squint, the all-smiles greeter could be Jonah.

Super-mega-stores are built on the same architectural blueprint as medieval cathedrals. A central archway (arches often removed, but still a central archway) extends from the entry vestibule creating an x-axis nave. In the distance, usually about three-quarters of the way down the central aisle a second axis slashes across the y-plane. North transept. South transept. Cruciform.

Parallel aisles flank the nave. Small niches on either side house individual chapels. …To your left, Poet’s Corner, to your right, CDs and DVDs. Up ahead the chapels of the Lady and Edward the Confessor. Laptops 35% off. Behind the Coronation Chair the quire is filled with 50” flat-screen TVs. Hey look, The Daytona 500 is in rain delay! Is this real, Memorex, or a fever dream of dying?

“You okay?” the lovely Mrs. asks.

“I’m fine. Cold.”

It’s best not to ask. Why is it that I’ve never considered listening to even a single one of the “best sellers?” Is this a statement about the void of our culture or am I just being a snob? Who the hell is 50 Cents? How is Ozzy still alive, much less popular? Okay, I can see the appeal of t.A.T.u. even if it is a load of shit. Why doesn’t that System of a Down CD have a cover insert?

Now, look, I’m all about artists getting paid for their creativity, but shit man, if Sony is going to release a disc riffing on Abbey Hoffman’s counter-cultural touchstone Steal This Book, I think I’m morally obliged to comply, no? I mean, if they name a record Steal This Album, aren’t you by law somehow required to do exactly that? Sure, most of the suburban kids who comprise the target market for said album will simply pony up mom and dad’s cash and then display their legally purchased consumable item as a mark of subversive authenticity, but that doesn’t mean you have to pose like that, now does it?

Stealing music isn’t hard. All you need is a reasonably thick jacket or coat, non-autistic motor functions, and patience. There are only two tricky parts to it, really. The first is the transfer of merchandise from the display case into the interior lining of your coat. This is where most people are going to get caught. You need to position your body in such a way as to block out any nearby surveillance cameras, but you need to be calm and cool enough to not look like you’re doing that. The best idea is to wander through other sections, away from the display rack you’re casing, and mentally map camera wells from there. If you look straight up into the techno-eye while standing in front of the merch you’re interested in, you’re probably going to catch some Wilbur security guard’s attention. That is completely antithetical to what you want to happen.

Once you get the product onto your person, you have to exit the store. This is the second great pitfall for would-be anti-capitalists. Those magnetic detectors are pretty damned tricky to get around. One thing you can try is bag swapping, but this is always dangerous. The idea is to have a plastic bag, one like the bags the cashiers give real customers, on your person from the start. When you make the transfer of product, you work the product into the bag as well. Then, as you’re walking towards the exit, let the bag work its way out of your jacket. When you get to those damned sensors, act like you see a friend in the parking lot and raise your hand high to wave at them. Done properly, this gets the non-demagnetized merchandise above the scanner but doesn’t look too terribly sketchy. But, and I cannot stress this enough, this is a really dangerous way to approach things, and as often as not, you’re going to get some attention. The kind of attention that leads to detention or long, lung-ripping sprints.

By far the better method is to simply wait for someone who has just bought a major appliance to exit. Some legitimate customer sets the sensors off every ten minutes or so, and if you’re mostly subtle about waiting on the moment, you can sweep through while the alarm is going off for that guy.

Of course, the easiest thing to do is to download Kazaa. By my reckoning, every System of a Down song ever recorded is available, most of them three or four times, including the entire track lists from their three major releases.

At this point, assuming you’re not in the windowless back room of a mega-store being ruthlessly interrogated by the local Barney Fife until the real cops arrive, your next question becomes “What the hell to do with a System of a Down CD.” I am personally finding this to be a much more complex question than I had originally expected. My assumption was that I would take a cursory listen, yell “Ick! Nu-metal!” and that would be it. My experience with the band prior to this little outing was 30 seconds of a video as I was flipping past MTV and I just assumed them to be easily discarded pseudo-subversive pop pap. What I got was a little different, though.

The first thing that strikes me is the angular rhythms and flourishes of math rock. My basic notions of radio rock are straight-four signatures beat out with little creativity or syncopation. This is, by and large, what you get on FM airwaves across the country, from Zeppelin to Aerosmith to Pearl Jam to Creed. And while straight time isn’t necessarily a bad thing (Thee Michelle Gun Elephant smash out 4/4 in a brilliantly simple reduction, for example, and hell, John Bonham could work magic with a 2/2 beat), when it is combined with the banality of most modern radio rock you get something akin to gruel without salt. System of a Down doesn’t rely so heavily on un-complicated down beats as I had expected. There are measures of 5/8, maybe even an 11/12 if I counted correctly, sprinkled in this thing. That stuns me a bit, in a good way. I mean, they’re not going to take on a Purkinje Shift cover any time soon, but they know their technical chops regardless. I’m reminded of certain moments from the Archers of Loaf catalogue, at least with regard to time signatures. That’s pretty darned cool.

The next thing that strikes me is the political activism of the lyrics. This is reminiscent of both good punk rock as well as Rage Against The Machine style metal. Now granted, System, much like Rage, have agreed to capitulate and participate fully within the system they so angrily dismiss, but even as such, they’re still at least interesting politically. And while I can’t get the lyrics to Dillinger Four’s New Punk Fashions for the Spring Formal out of my head (“It’s like the Marketing department has finally figured out that ‘the pit’ can always make more room/I’d love to sneer at the camera for your revolution, but I just can’t afford the fucking costume”), I still can’t completely dismiss the rhetoric out of hand either. And again, that is what I was expecting to do.

Finally, I’m completely enthralled by Serj Tankian’s voice. From what I can gather, he’s of Armenian descent, which may or may not have something to do with it, but when he sings, you here a lot of different things colliding. Things you wouldn’t normally expect. First, you get the basics of thrash-metal and punk lyricism. This is probably obvious, but the vocal tracks on System of a Down songs walk a tightrope between John Lydon’s sneer and Phil Anselmo’s sheer lyrical punishment. Innumerable hardcore screamers have tried to turn this trick before, and most of them end up in the rubble pile beneath the wire, but Tankian manages to traverse the terrain intact. That in and of itself is rather notable. Add to it an element of Mike Patton circa Epic playfulness combined with a ghost of Geoff Tate circa Empire and the stakes are raised even further.

But by far the most interesting thing for me is the near-eastern elements Tankian’s voice recalls when he drives into the higher registers. Actually these are present in all but the most Pantera moments of his singing, but they’re most noticeable when he jacks up the octave. Because when he ratchets up to the high tenors for choruses and refrains, Serj Tankian sounds voice takes on a lilting tremolo that invokes almost bodily the Muslim call to prayers, that haunting counter-melodic intonation one hears when the Koran is sung aloud (as must be done to properly understand it’s poetic beauty.) Now, I’m sure this statement is irreconcilably heretical to most of Islam, but hell, I’m American, so what’s to lose at this point, right? And maybe I’ve offended Tankian himself by suggesting that he is more of a creation of his ancestry than he wants to be. But I’m telling you, if you listen to this band, you’re going to hear an almost unthinkable mixture of speed metal, punk rock, and the hypnotic meta-rhythms of Islamic worship services.

Weird, huh? But so goddamned interesting it’s painful.

You know, I’m going to be listening to this band for a while now. I know they’re all corporate and insanely popular and all, so I’m gaining no indie cred at all for it, but shit, this is just engrossing music. There’s so much going on here, so much that I never expected to hear, so many traces to map…

I’m giving Steal This Album six sponges. Yeah, I really am. And I’m going to go steal their other albums too, while waiting, surprisingly impatiently, for their next offering. How very odd.