Chop Suey!: The Renamed System of a Down Hit and Its Random Bridge
System of a Down's biggest song began life as Suicide, got its bridge from a random book in Rick Rubin's library and hit radio weeks before 9/11.
Our Short lets Rick Rubin tell how a random book finished this song. Another legend says panicked executives got outsmarted by a takeout pun. The truth is messier, because the people in the room don't fully agree.
Toxicity
System of a Down · 2001
Written on a Bed in an RV
Daron Malakian started the song alone on a bed in the back of the band's RV, with an acoustic guitar, while they toured their first album. In 2001 the band recorded it with Rubin at Cello Studios in Hollywood.
Cello Studios, Hollywood
2001 · the Toxicity sessions
The working title was Suicide, after the line that unlocked the song. Malakian has said it was about how we judge people even by the way they die. He admits he was probably smoking weed when that thought hit, and later called the title lazy, since the song was never really about suicide.
Who Renamed It?
Here the stories split three ways. Rubin told Rolling Stone in 2016 that Columbia rebelled against the original title and that he wanted to go to the mat to keep it. The band picked Chop Suey! instead, which he found kind of funny.
Not true. Nobody pressured us. We were, like, 'It's our first single from the album, do we want to give the radio a reason not to play it?'
Daron Malakian
Shavo Odadjian remembers Malakian walking in with the fix: chop the word suicide in half. Malakian insists nobody pressured them. It was the first single, so why hand radio an excuse? The pun had a second layer. In the old gangster movies he watched as a kid, making chop suey out of someone meant killing him.
So no censors were fooled, and the only actual chop suey in sight is in the video, where Serj Tankian eats some with fans.
A Random Page
As Rubin told Joe Rogan in 2022, Tankian had no words for the bridge, so in the library of Rubin's old house he told him to pull any book off the wall, open it anywhere and read the first phrase he saw. That phrase went into the song.
I didn't look at titles and stuff, I just grabbed something, opened it to a page, pointed my finger to it and that is the middle eighth of 'Chop Suey!'
Serj Tankian
Tankian tells it almost the same way, adding that they meditated first and he never looked at the title. Nobody has named the book. The words echo two sayings the Gospels of Luke and Matthew give Jesus on the cross, and Rubin has called the bridge "real heavy, biblical and grand." Calling it a Bible, as the Short does, is a guess.
Released Into a Different America
The single came out on August 13, 2001, and Toxicity followed on September 4. It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Odadjian got that news from his manager on the morning of September 11, with the attacks unfolding on his TV.
220Kcopies
Toxicity's first US week, good for a No. 1 debut
Days later, Clear Channel sent its stations a memo of "lyrically questionable" songs, and Chop Suey! was on it for its lines about suicide and death. It was advice, not a ban. The song still reached No. 7 on the Modern Rock chart and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance, losing to Tool's "Schism." Malakian calls the episode a badge of honor.
On the Hot 100 it stalled at No. 76. Then the video passed a billion YouTube views in November 2020, and in August 2026 the RIAA certified the song diamond.
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// Quick quiz
Where did the words in the bridge of Chop Suey! come from?
Rubin told Serj Tankian to pull any book off his library wall, open it anywhere and use the first phrase he saw.
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