Chop Suey!
by System of a Down
- 128
- BPM
- G minor
- Key
- 6A
- Camelot
- 42
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
System of a Down put out "Chop Suey!" on August 13, 2001, as the first single from its second album, Toxicity. It earned the band its first Grammy nomination, for Best Metal Performance at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards.
Daron Malakian said the song is about how people are regarded differently depending on how they pass. Everyone deserves to die, he explained, and someone who died of drug abuse might be told they deserved it. The midsection, "Father into your hands I commend my spirit," came from Serj Tankian, who was short on ideas and picked it at random from Rick Rubin's book collection. The song was first titled either "Suicide," according to bassist Shavo Odadjian, or "Self-Righteous Suicide," according to Rubin. Columbia Records pushed back, or was expected to, and the name changed. Odadjian said "Chop Suey" is "suicide" chopped in half.
Marcos Siega directed the video in the parking lot of the Oak Tree Inn Motel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, with about 1,500 fans watching. Tankian eats chop suey with some of them in one scene, the only reference to the dish. Toxicity was No. 1 on the Billboard 200 during the week of the September 11 attacks. Clear Channel placed the song on a list of titles considered inappropriate. It was never banned. The video reached one billion YouTube views in November 2020.
Chop Suey! runs at 128 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.88 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 469 ms. It is in G minor, Camelot 6A, which shares its notes with Bb major and mixes cleanly with C minor and D minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.