System Of A Down just turned a sold-out London stadium into one giant swipe at Oasis. At Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Monday night (July 13), guitarist Daron Malakian used a song about a tapeworm to fire off the band’s latest shot in a feud that’s been simmering for more than two decades.
Setting up the Toxicity track “Needles“, whose chorus centers on a tapeworm, Malakian gave the parasite a very deliberate name. “We have a song about a tapeworm,” he told the crowd. “Today, I’m going to name the tapeworm ‘Oasis.'” He then had all 50,000 fans roaring the song’s hook back at the Britpop legends: “Pull Oasis out of your a**!”
The bad blood traces back to the early 2000s, when Oasis‘ Noel Gallagher told U.S. radio how relieved he was to be “alive to hear the shittiest band of all time” after first getting an earful of System Of A Down.
It’s not the first time Malakian has leaned into the rivalry, either. The two bands crossed paths repeatedly on the North American stadium circuit last year, and when System rolled into Chicago to play Soldier Field days after Oasis had, Malakian posted an Instagram shot of himself outside the venue with the sign digitally altered to read “F**k Oasis,” captioning it, “Wow!!! I kept ending up at the right place at the right time in Chicago!!!!!”
There’s an added layer of irony to the London moment, too. The “your a**” line Malakian weaponized against Oasis only exists because the band nearly tore itself apart over it. As frontman Serj Tankian has recounted, the original lyric read “pull the tapeworm out of my a**,” and the argument over changing that one word — “my” to “your” — got heated enough during the Toxicity sessions that producer Rick Rubin feared the group might break up on the spot.
The Tottenham show was a milestone in its own right, marking System Of A Down‘s first UK appearance in nearly a decade and filling the 65,000-capacity venue. Queens Of The Stone Age and reunited sludge veterans Acid Bath handled support, but the night — and the loudest chant of the evening — belonged to the headliners and their newly christened tapeworm.
