Soil

No really a meaning, but THINK ABOUT IT!

Daron from System Of A Down said this on a live show before playing Soil: "We only have 15 more minutes on this motherfucker (show). It's going to take a little while (problems on stage), but we wont go away, they are going to kick us out, they are going to kick us all out but we wont go away. Even if they try to kick you out and put you in jail for anything you do, dont stop doing it, dont go away, dont go away because we cant be without you, System Of A Down aint shit without you. People think we sing about politics, People think we sing about sex, People think we sing about drugs. We sing about our life, were fucking playing, thats what were fucking doing. I am so pissed off today and you dont even know it. This song is about death... and friends that die... and life that dies... and it goes like this [starts playing soil]".

Its funny you know, that actually is the compleate meaning of the song but he just said it in a different way, now i am tierd as hell to write the meaning, maby some other day i will, but for now, think about that.

its about a friend of one of the s.o.a.d members, i geuss

at a live concert, serj said that this song whas about a close friend of them, who died

his friend killing himself and he asks god why did he take him away from them.

i think evil living in skin is saying everyone has evil in them, even his friend who he loves has the evil to kill himself. i dunno, that makes it sound liek he's blaming his friend and later he blames someone else or possibly god

what i thought about it when i first listened to it, maybe i am totally off line but here goes

Don't you realize evil lives in the mother fucking skin

the guy cant get away from the evil, the origional sin that mankind contains, or so we are told. his father left him, this just proves it to him, he sees it all around him and maybe in himself and he cant stand it so he kills himself

A man can't avoid what he is meant to do When he is meant to do it even if he doesn't really want to

like someone just dismissing his death as fate or maybe someone saying that man's insticts make him do things that he doenst want to or that even disgust him.

it could even be someone dismissing the guys near suicidal action before he dies- 'out of control boy', they wont take him seriously, boys will be boys, men are immasculated, no one knows he wants to die

Your men fall unrealized

noone knew his potential, no one bothered to discover his pain, 'fall' seems such a small word for such a big thing- men are negated by what is expected of them

"Twenty-five years, images in red." Seems like a pretty chilling image to me. Perhaps it was a childhood friend who committed suicide quite young, and the writer (whomever in the band it is) can't get the image of his death and the blood out of his mind, so he wrote this song as a kind of cartharsis. Or, perhaps the red images are in the mind of the person who committed suicide, some kind of traumatic incident from his childhood, that has tormented him his whole life before he finally tops himself. I guess you'd have to sit down and talk to the band to really find out all the details, but it's a damn chilling song all the same. And a damn good one.

lyrically it's a great song, but musically it doesn't get good until toward the end.

What is with people saying this song is about Jesus? Jesus didn't blow his head off.

I was giving it some thought, and I think the meaning I draw from "Evil lives in the motherfucking skin" is that 'evil' is a surface phenomenon in the way it manifests. Ie, you can be a bad/evil/ugly person inside, but that only exists in reality (to other people) if you project it outwards (to the skin).

You can be 'evil' inside, but if you control it and don't project it outwards, then to others you are not evil. Likewise, you can be 'good' inside, but if what you allow on the surface is evil, then that's how you present.

I think it's about the internal/external duality of concepts like good and evil and asking a question of: are you what you think you are or are you what others think you are, ie are you actually what you present to others?

This in the context of more extreme external projections that manifest from things like psychological illness makes a lot of sense. I often wonder whether people that are psychologically ill (with things like personality disorders etc) are actually good or evil inside, because if you judge what's on the surface, they can seem pretty evil.

i realize im hella late but i have a strong feeling about the meaning of this song. i have a friend who\'s dad committed suicide and this friend has always been literally obsessed with suicide and death. For a long time he believed it was his destiny to follow in his fathers footsteps . \nevil lives in the mother fucking skin . \nur born with it and it cannot be washed away.\nofc he would blame himself for his fathers suicide and ofc there was only one price to pay for it. his own life.

Not sure if its about teenage suicide, thus Serg is asking God "Why the fuck did you take him away from us". or perhaps its an incident of teenage shooting/murder, thus serg is asking the murderer why they killed his friend.