“It occurred to me how we are judgmental towards people, even in death,” explains Daron. Precisely what ‘Why’d you leave the keys upon the table?/Here you go create another fable’ means is still up for grabs. Like many of System’s songs, the finished lyrics were vivid but opaque, designed to be shouted along to but not necessarily understood. (Image credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images) 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.’ Even at that early stage, it could only have been a System Of A Down song. It shifted from broken-glass riff to quasi-rapped mutant-funk verses to a simple two-line sunburst of a chorus. Where the songs from System’s first album were designed to set off depth- charges in moshpits everywhere, this new song was simultaneously more experimental and more melodic. 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 to his bandmates and producer Rick Rubin as contenders for Toxicity. It didn’t tumble out fully formed, nor was it the only song he had flying around his head. I just started playing that acoustic guitar, and that’s when I started writing Chop Suey!.” “There was an acoustic guitar I used to take around with me. “I was just hanging out by myself on a bed at the back,” says Daron. Modern metal’s greatest song 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. And almost 20 years on, they haven’t stopped connecting to it. People connected to Chop Suey! in the period immediately before, during and after 9/11. “But that was the one that pushed open the door for us.” “When I wrote it, I did not think Chop Suey! was gonna be any different to any of our other songs,” says Daron. Last year it notched up one billion YouTube views – the first metal song to pass that figure, give or take Linkin Park’s In The End. Its 600 million-plus Spotify plays are greater than any single Metallica song and bigger than the two most popular Slipknot songs combined. Today, Chop Suey! stands as System Of Down’s most famous song, and a 21st-century metal landmark. Alternately jarring, soothing, bullish and confusing, it reflected the shattered mirror that was America’s psyche at that precise moment – the perfect soundtrack to those disorientating times. Instead, it barely dented the song’s momentum. Chop Suey! wasn’t officially banned, but the edict could have stopped System’s rapid career upswing dead in its tracks. It’s almost like you’re not part of the cool group if you’re not banned once or twice. “So many great rock bands have been banned. “In music, that’s a badge of honour,” says System guitarist Daron Malakian. The lines ‘I don’t think you trust in my self-righteous suicide/I cry when angels deserve to die’ were deemed too much for post-9/11 America to take, and the song was quietly pulled from the Clear Channel network. 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. It included a list of more than 160 ‘lyrically questionable’ songs that programmers and DJs might want to consider not playing in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers.ĭrowning 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. In the days after 9/11, US media conglomerate Clear Channel sent an internal memo to each of the 1,100 radio stations it owned.
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