Daron Malakian wrote the whole thing alone, in the back of a tour RV, while the band rolled between shows. No studio, no co-writer in the room, just a guitar and the motion of the road. That origin tells you something about the song’s shape. It does not sit still. It opens almost gently, an acoustic-flavored hush, and then it detonates: thrash-speed verses that stop and start like a machine catching, a melodic chorus that arrives almost as relief, and a quiet spiritual bridge that drops the volume out from under you entirely. Rick Rubin produced it at Cello Studios in Hollywood, and the contrast is the point. Listen for the Greek bouzouki woven into the chorus, an instrument from the band’s own corner of the world, sitting inside a metal song like it always belonged there.
It was the first single off Toxicity, the band’s second album, and it became the song that carried them out of the underground. System of a Down were four Armenian-Americans out of Los Angeles, formed in 1994, and they had always written from a place of friction: politics, heritage, the things polite radio would rather not host. Chop Suey! is the one that broke through anyway.
A title that looks like a joke, a question about how we judge the dead.
Here is where you should slow down. The title looks like a throwaway, a dish on a takeout menu. It is not. Malakian has been clear about what the song is actually about, and it is heavier than the takeout joke suggests: the way society sorts the dead, the way we decide some deaths deserve sympathy and others contempt, depending on how a person died. He has said plainly it is not an endorsement of anything dark. It is an argument about judgment.
So you have a song that sounds like four ideas fighting for the same two minutes, fronted by a title that hides what it means, written by one man in a moving van, and built around a folk instrument from his grandparents’ part of the world. Every piece of it is doing something other than what it first appears to do. The verses sprint, the chorus opens its arms, the bridge goes quiet and almost prayerful, and then the whole thing resolves in a way that has kept people coming back for two decades.
Play it once knowing none of this. Then play it again knowing the title is a key, not a joke. It is a different song the second time.
Surface any pearl, in any order, to hear what's really going on.
“Nobody knows what "Chop Suey" actually means.”
It's the word "suicide," chopped in half. "Suey-cide." The title sits there in plain English and nobody hears it. The word "suicide" never appears once in the lyrics; the band hid it where you'd least look: the name on the sleeve. Malakian has said it also winks at old gangster-movie slang, "make chop suey out of him." The most-streamed metal song ever is named after the one word it refuses to say.
“The bridge quotes scripture, so someone in the band was devout.”
"Father, into your hands I commend my spirit," Jesus's dying words in Luke 23:46. By Rick Rubin's account, Tankian didn't go looking for them. He reached up at a bookshelf in Rubin's home library, eyes off the spines, pulled a book down at random and pointed at a page. That was the page. The most famous line in the song arrived by accident, and it's the last thing Christ ever said.
“"Chop Suey!" was a massive radio hit.”
On the US Hot 100 it peaked at No. 76, System of a Down's lowest-charting single ever. The reason: Toxicity hit No. 1 the week of the 9/11 attacks, and post-9/11 radio quietly pulled the song. Yet it went on to become their biggest track by a mile: the first metal song to a billion YouTube views, 1.7 billion Spotify streams and counting. The song radio buried is the one the world never stopped playing.
Foster the People · Torches · 2011
Pumped Up Kicks
The sunniest song of 2011 is whistling about something far darker.
Pumped Up Kicks, explained →
The newsletter
One new dive in your inbox. The fact that changes the song, nothing else.
No spam, unsubscribe anytime.