“We were on tour when the video came out,” he says. That was when Daron got the first inkling that he’d written a hit. MTV hit the video hard, pushing it to an audience who had missed System’s debut album. The music and visuals channelled nu metal’s original freaks-on-a-leash spirit, but it was all a world away from the army of wallet-chained mooks that had sprung up in the wake of Korn and Limp Bizkit’s mega-success. Its hyper-kinetic video – filmed in the courtyard of a once-seedy Sunset Strip hotel that Daron and bassist Shavo Odadjian remembered crawling with hookers and junkies back when they were kids - reflected the song’s shifting personality, while the guitarist’s bug-eyed nerviness and henna-tattooed torso screamed ‘Step away from the weirdo!’

“It was something they used to say: ‘We’ll make chop suey out of him!’ It meant, ‘We’re gonna kill him.’ It tied in with the whole death thing.”Ĭ hop Suey! was released on August 13, 2001, three weeks ahead of Toxicity. It’s partly a play on words – ‘suicide’ chopped in half – and partly a left-field nod to old black and white gangster movies he’d watched as a kid.

He had a ready-made replacement title: Chop Suey!. We were, like, ‘It’s our first single from the album, do we want to give the radio a reason not to play it?’” Received wisdom is that the label strong-armed the band into changing it for fear that radio wouldn’t go near the song. “Because it wasn’t really about suicide,” says Daron. They just had to do something about the title, ‘Suicide’. When it came to picking a first single, the decision was unanimous: Chop Suey!. “I was in my early 20s and there was a lot of experimentation of substances. “There were late, late hours,” says Daron of the sessions. The band and Rick Rubin worked on the album at Cello Studios, Hollywood. If the song’s meaning was slippery, there was no denying the power of its hymnal cornerstone lyric: ‘Trust in my self-righteous suicide.’ That was the line that unlocked the song, and also gave it its working title: ‘Suicide’. I was probably smoking weed or something…” For some reason, that thought was weird to me. “If someone died in a car accident, you’d say, ‘Oh, poor thing.’ But if they died in a car accident while they were drunk, that would change your whole perception of how they died, and judging his or her death a in a different way. “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. 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.

Waimalu chop suey