When you think of System of a Down’s “Chop Suey,” what’s the first part you hear? Wake up, most likely. Bonus points for grab a brush and put a little make-up. But what about the bridge? The iconic section toward the end of the song seems to shift gears entirely, taking on a sacred air of betrayal and forsakenness that seemingly comes out of nowhere.
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Depending on whether you believe in the power of fate, the cosmos, the universe, or some higher power, “out of nowhere” might be exactly where it came from. But hey, when it works, it works.
How System of a Down Wrote The Bridge For “Chop Suey”
American heavy metal band System of a Down released “Chop Suey” on their 2001 album Toxicity. The album’s opener quickly became one of the band’s most iconic songs. The driving rock song about self-righteous suicide came to define that era of nu-metal. Commercially speaking, the song didn’t perform that well. Controversy surrounding the darker lyrics and the fact that in a post-9/11 world, radio stations were especially careful about what they played on-air meant that “Chop Suey” received little airplay.
Of course, as is often the case in a musical genre founded on independence and rebellion, the divisiveness of “Chop Suey” only helped further solidify it as a metal anthem among fans, regardless of what the charts had to say about it. However, for a brief moment in their recording process, the band—specifically Serj Tankian, the singer—wasn’t sure he had enough material to finish the song. Unsure of what to write, producer Rick Rubin did what Rubin always does. He provided a bit of cosmic hit record magic.
“We were kind of at an impasse,” Tankian later recalled. “We were just tired. So, [Rubin] said, ‘Let’s go to my house.’ We went to his house. He had a huge library on the wall, and he said, ‘Let’s try an experiment. Let’s use the universal experiment and pick a random book, open to a random page, put your finger on something. And that became the middle eight part.”
How Rick Rubin’s Experiment Completely Transformed The Song
Even before famed producer Rick Rubin’s clever “universal experiment,” System of a Down’s “Chop Suey” was covering some heavy subject matter. The band originally intended on naming the song “Suicide” or “Self-Righteous Suicide.” They settled on “Chop Suey” as a combination of shortened versions of the word “chopped” and “suicide.” However, with the addition of the bridge completely transformed the song into something more profound.
Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit. Why have you forsaken me? In your eyes, forsaken me, in your thoughts, forsaken me, in your heart, forsaken me. The lines come from an excerpt from the Book of Matthew in the Bible where Jesus is speaking to God, his father, on the crucifix. To SOAD singer Serj Tankian, the Christian story was an easy fit with the rest of the song, which already included lines like I cry when angels deserve to die.
“This song took a completely different turn,” Tankian said. “The chorus was still there. Self-righteous suicide was still written. But the whole story of Christ and being forsaken and the anger toward God in a way for being forsaken became part of the self-righteous suicide, and it just became, like, bigger. You can use the word random, or you can use the word universal, but it was very much that.”
Photo by Bob Berg/Getty Images
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