System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” tore up the airwaves — before getting banned post–9/11. This is the story of the song, as told by the band and the people around them. jeremypgordon reports
System of a Down during the “Chop Suey!” video shoot at the Hollywood Area Hotel. Photo: L. Cohen/WireImage “We were just being ourselves,” System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian tells me by way of explaining how weird his band was. Consider this: It’s the mid-1990s and four Armenian Americans from Los Angeles start a band, playing a fermented style of heavy metal that draws deeply from the traditional music of their homeland.
‘We Were Kids, Bro’ When you talk to the people around System of a Down, everyone agrees: One show was all it took to become a convert. “These guys come out with this homemade banner that said ‘1.2 million Armenians dead by the hands of the Turks,’ and Serj looked like Charles Manson, and they were playing thrash from another culture,” said manager Mark Wakefield, of the first time he and a friend saw the band. “Our jaws dropped.
Daron Malakian : The first album, we were still a club band, and my headspace was, How do we start a fucking badass mosh pit? It’s totally different playing big arenas and amphitheaters, and I wanted to start writing songs that brought the band into a bigger setting. Serj Tankian : [smiling] Twenty years ago, you want me to remember my emotions on a particular day going into a studio?
Tankian: The middle part was kind of empty, and I was at a loss what to do with it. I remember taking a break and going with Rick Rubin to his house, and using the universal method of pointing to a book, bringing down the book, reading it, and letting that be your guide. It had to do with Jesus and “Father, why have you forsaken me” — that whole thing. The puzzle came together perfectly.
David “Beno” Benveniste : The song was originally called “Suicide”; you can hear that at the beginning, when it says, “We’re rolling ‘Suicide.’” Benveniste: An old friend of mine was a big producer at the time named Damon Elliott. When we were mixing with Andy Wallace in New York, Damon was mixing in another room. He walks in and goes, “Beno, what’s up — oh, what the fuck is this?” He heard the song, and he’s sitting there going, “Oh my God, man, this is a fucking hip-hop song.” And I was like, “This thing is gonna fucking go; we are going to have a smash here.
Marcos Siega : The video commissioner at Columbia asked me to document the band on a trip to Burning Man. They were doing a few gigs, and I saw them live for the first time. I remember thinking the roof was going to come down; there was an overwhelming insanity in the mosh pit. The idea for “Chop Suey!” was, “How do I capture them being in that space?”
‘Do I Get Excited? Am I Sad? What Is It?’ Upon release in August 2001, the single and its music video made an immediate impact. Though the song peaked at No. 76 on the Billboard Hot 100, it received overwhelming airplay on rock radio stations, and the video ran regularly on MTV. “I was getting calls from every industry person going, ‘Oh, my God, what is that?’” Benveniste remembered.
Dolmayan: We were in rehearsals, and they used to do something called “Furious Five at Night” on KROQ. We’d gotten information that we were going to be No. 1, so we stopped rehearsing, went to my car, and listened. And we were No. 1 there for like 48 weeks straight. Malakian: The day after 9/11, we were supposed to take a flight to New York. Obviously, that flight didn’t happen. And the thing that was surprising for us was that people thought we had written these songs like prophets. We had songs called “Aerials,” “Jet Pilot,” “self-righteous suicide” in our lyrics. That’s when I realized that people were starting to take our band seriously.
Tankian: I had written a statement called “Understanding Oil” and posted it a few days after 9/11. It dealt with the mishaps of U.S. foreign policy in the last 50 years before 9/11, and how those events could have contributed specifically to the arming of dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, and the inability of the modern youth there to have employment, and how foreign policy is implicitly tied to terrorism — which is really a plain and simple way of looking at it.
Wakefield: Our immediate concern was damage control. Howard Stern, who was hugely influential at the time, spoke out against System of a Down, and Serj had to go on and explain himself. Tankian: What they were doing at the time was any song with the word “suicide” or “sky” was taken off the radio. In retrospect, that’s a little weird.
‘I Don’t Think We’ll Make Another Album’ Over the next few years, the band released music at a furious output: Steal This Album, composed of leftover material from the Toxicity sessions, arrived in 2002, while Hypnotize and Mesmerize both dropped in 2005. Then, the band went on hiatus at Tankian’s behest, as he cited dismay over their musical direction. They reunited in 2011 to tour, but their attempts to record a new album have fizzled out.
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