Chop Suey! - System Of A Down

Bans, conspiracy theories and the shadow of 9/11 – System Of A Down’s Daron Malakian looks back on the most popular metal tuy nhiên of the 21st century

In the days after 9/11, US truyền thông media conglomerate Clear Channel sent an internal memo lớn each of the 1,100 radio stations it owned. It included a danh sách of more than 160 ‘lyrically questionable’ songs that programmers & DJs might want khổng lồ consider not playing in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers.

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Our fans thought, ‘Hey, these guys are prophets, they’re saying things that hadn’t happened yet.’

Daron Malakian

Drowning Pool’s Bodies was on the list, as was AC/DC’s Shot Down In Flames, every single Rage Against The Machine song and – what?!? – Alanis Morissette’s Ironic. Also in there was System Of A Down’s Chop Suey!, the first single from the LA band’s second album, Toxicity, which had been released that very week. The lines ‘I don’t think you trust in my self-righteous suicide/I cry when angels deserve lớn die’ were deemed too much for post-9/11 America khổng lồ take, và the tuy nhiên was quietly pulled from the Clear Channel network.

“In music, that’s a badge of honour,” says System guitarist Daron Malakian. “So many great rock bands have been banned. It’s almost like you’re not part of the cool group if you’re not banned once or twice. I think it made the tuy nhiên more popular.”

He’s wrong, strictly speaking. Chop Suey! wasn’t officially banned, but the edict could have stopped System’s rapid career upswing dead in its tracks. Instead, it barely dented the song’s momentum. Alternately jarring, soothing, bullish and confusing, it reflected the shattered mirror that was America’s psyche at that precise moment – the perfect soundtrack khổng lồ those disorientating times.

Today, Chop Suey! stands as System Of Down’s most famous song, và a 21st-century metal landmark. Its 600 million-plus Spotify plays are greater than any single Metallica song and bigger than the two most popular Slipknot songs combined. Last year it notched up one billion YouTube views – the first metal tuy nhiên to pass that figure, give or take Linkin Park’s In The End.

“When I wrote it, I did not think Chop Suey! was gonna be any different khổng lồ any of our other songs,” says Daron. “But that was the one that pushed xuất hiện the door for us.”

People connected to lớn Chop Suey! in the period immediately before, during và after 9/11. Và almost trăng tròn years on, they haven’t stopped connecting to it.

Modern metal’s greatest tuy vậy was born in the back of an RV travelling down some long- forgotten highway between stop-offs on the tour for System’s debut album.

“I was just hanging out by myself on a bed at the back,” says Daron. “There was an acoustic guitar I used khổng lồ take around with me. I just started playing that acoustic guitar, & that’s when I started writing Chop Suey!.”

It didn’t tumble out fully formed, nor was it the only song he had flying around his head. It was one of a batch of ideas that the guitarist spent the best part of a year working on in private before he presented them lớn his bandmates & producer Rick Rubin as contenders for Toxicity.

Where the songs from System’s first album were designed to lớn set off depth- charges in moshpits everywhere, this new song was simultaneously more experimental và more melodic. It shifted from broken-glass riff to lớn quasi-rapped mutant-funk verses lớn a simple two-line sunburst of a chorus. Even at that early stage, it could only have been a System Of A Down song.

While the initial version had a recognisable shape, Daron’s original lyrics were completely different: ‘Tell me/Tell me what you think about tomorrow/Is there gonna be a pain and sorrow/Tell me what you think about the people/Is there gonna be another sequel?’ System singer Serj Tankian would alter song’s opening, turning it into an memorable clarion call: ‘Wake up/Grab a brush and put a little make-up.’

(Image credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns)

Like many of System’s songs, the finished lyrics were vivid but opaque, designed to lớn be shouted along to but not necessarily understood. Precisely what ‘Why’d you leave the keys upon the table?/Here you go create another fable’ means is still up for grabs.

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“It occurred to me how we are judgmental towards people, even in death,” explains Daron. “If someone died in a car accident, you’d say, ‘Oh, poor thing.’ But if they died in a oto accident while they were drunk, that would change your whole perception of how they died, và judging his or her death a in a different way. For some reason, that thought was weird to me. I was probably smoking weed or something…”

If the song’s meaning was slippery, there was no denying the power nguồn of its hymnal cornerstone lyric: ‘Trust in my self-righteous suicide.’ That was the line that unlocked the song, & also gave it its working title: ‘Suicide’.

The band và Rick Rubin worked on the album at Cello Studios, Hollywood. “There were late, late hours,” says Daron of the sessions. “I was in my early 20s và there was a lot of experimentation of substances. Let’s leave it at that…”

When it came khổng lồ picking a first single, the decision was unanimous: Chop Suey!. They just had to vì something about the title, ‘Suicide’. “Because it wasn’t really about suicide,” says Daron. “It was a lazy title.”

Lazy & potentially provocative. Received wisdom is that the label strong-armed the band into changing it for fear that radio wouldn’t go near the song. “Not true,” counters Daron. “Nobody pressured us. We were, like, ‘It’s our first single from the album, vày we want khổng lồ give the radio a reason not to play it?’”

He had a ready-made replacement title: Chop Suey!. It’s partly a play on words – ‘suicide’ chopped in half – and partly a left-field nod to lớn old black và white gangster movies he’d watched as a kid. “It was something they used khổng lồ say: ‘We’ll make chop suey out of him!’ It meant, ‘We’re gonna kill him.’ It tied in with the whole death thing.”

Chop Suey! was released on August 13, 2001, three weeks ahead of Toxicity. Its hyper-kinetic đoạn phim – filmed in the courtyard of a once-seedy Sunset Strip khách sạn that Daron và bassist Shavo Odadjian remembered crawling with hookers và junkies back when they were kids - reflected the song’s shifting personality, while the guitarist’s bug-eyed nerviness & henna-tattooed torso screamed ‘Step away from the weirdo!’

The music & visuals channelled nu metal’s original freaks-on-a-leash spirit, but it was all a world away from the army of wallet-chained mooks that had sprung up in the wake of Korn and Limp Bizkit’s mega-success. MTV hit the video clip hard, pushing it to an audience who had missed System’s debut album. That was when Daron got the first inkling that he’d written a hit.

“We were on tour when the đoạn clip came out,” he says. “I hadn’t seen it, but we went khổng lồ this mall & suddenly people recognised us: ‘Can we take a picture of you?’ That had never fucking happened to lớn me before.”

Chop Suey! was the perfect primer for Toxicity’s why-use-one-idea-when-72-will-do approach, and its success helped its parent album shift 200,000 copies in the US in its first seven days. But exactly a week after Toxicity’s release, Al Qaeda flew two planes into the World Trade Center & the song formerly known as ‘Suicide’ was yanked from the airwaves.

That’s when things started getting weird. The tinfoil-hatted wing of their fanbase zeroed in on the line ‘self-righteous suicide’. In their fevered imaginations, Chop Suey! had predicted what was coming.

“Our fans were starting to lớn say, ‘Hey, these guys are prophets, they’re saying things that hadn’t happened yet,’” says Daron. “‘Self righteous suicide’, ‘Aerials in the sky’ Toxicity track Aerials>, Jet Pilot.’ I was, like, ‘Wow, that’s cool they think that. Let’s make them believe we actually did it.’”

Metal’s industrial-conspiracy complex was way off base, of course. So were Clear Channel, whose tacit ban failed khổng lồ halt Chop Suey!’s rise. Despite 9/11 - or maybe because of it – the song burrowed deep into America’s psyche.

“It has this very experimental side that wasn’t like anything the radio was playing at the time, but also a really melodic side that really caught people,” says Daron. “There’s this naturally hooky thing that comes out of me whenever I write. It’s not just Chop Suey!. I’d extend it to lớn BYOB, Toxicity, any of the other System Of A Down songs that were radio hits.”

Chop Suey! fired the starting gun on System Of A Down’s superstar phase, helping propel Toxicity to No.1 in the US & elevating its creators khổng lồ arena headliner status and beyond. But it also heralded nu metal’s final hurrah: Toxicity was the scene’s last true blockbuster album. “Do we even fall in the nu metal category?” says Daron. “I don’t think we sound lượt thích any of those bands. Personally, I think we sound lượt thích System Of A Down.”

Genre labels may be fluid, but Chop Suey!’s success isn’t. The digital metrics are indelible: one billion YouTube views & 623 million Spotify streams. More impressively, its cultural impact can be measured by the head-spinning array of covers out there down the years: metal versions (most notably by Motionless In White), classical versions, cello versions, tiny drum versions, chill-out versions, a version by comedian Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live and, inevitably, a version by pre-teen mạng internet drum prodigy Nandi Bushell. As recently as December 2020, it was covered in lockdown by US metalcore band August Burns Red.

“It’s a song lượt thích Livin’ On A Prayer or Don’t Stop Believin’,” says August Burns Red guitarist JB Brubaker, who fell in love with it as a punk-loving kid back in 2001. “It’s transcended generations và is just one of those songs that everyone recognises. Lớn me, it’s a track that defined an era in rock music.”

Chop Suey! may have taken on a life of its own in a way that System Of A Down could never have imagined, but for the man who wrote it on a bed in the back of an RV travelling between gigs more than two decades ago, it remains oddly personal.

“It makes me feel proud that what we vị still holds up, and that people still connect with it,” says Daron. “But it’s funny that this little tuy nhiên that I had such a tiny moment with in that RV has become this thing that people can’t imagine their lives without. That’s special lớn me.”

Published in Metal Hammer #346

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to lớn music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine và staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.

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