"Chop Suey!" by System of a Down
A nu-metal song too weird for the genre, with a suicide reference chopped into its very title. 'Chop Suey!' landed on Clear Channel's post-9/11 list of songs radio was told to avoid — and became the defining track of every Kazaa queue and school-bus headphone share anyway.
System of a Down released 'Chop Suey!' as the first single from Toxicity on August 13, 2001 — weeks before the September 11 attacks. The Armenian-American band's sound was already strange by nu-metal standards: whiplash quiet-loud dynamics and production by Rick Rubin and Daron Malakian that made every transition feel like a jolt. The title carried a buried joke the band explained openly — 'Chop Suey' is 'suicide' chopped in half, the song's working title, and the recorded intro still keeps the count-in 'we're rolling Suicide.'
Toxicity hit #1 on the Billboard 200 the week of September 11, and in the aftermath Clear Channel circulated a list of songs considered inappropriate for radio in the post-9/11 climate. 'Chop Suey!' was on it — never a formal ban, but close enough to become part of the song's lore. The semi-suppression arguably amplified it: the single peaked at only #76 on the Hot 100, yet it was culturally inescapable — every school bus, every burned CD, every file-sharing queue. The band earned its first Grammy nomination for it (Best Metal Performance, 2002), and the music video passed one billion YouTube views in November 2020. 'Chop Suey!' is the standing proof that chart position and cultural dominance are two different measurements.
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