What the song is about
The lyrics are usually described as surrealist, and the verses invite that — a rush of imperatives about waking up, grabbing a brush, putting on makeup, all delivered at a speed that makes them feel like fragments. But the chorus is not surreal at all, and the band has explained it.
Daron Malakian's account is the load-bearing one:
The song is about how we are regarded differently depending on how we pass. Everyone deserves to die. Like, if I were now to die from drug abuse, they might say I deserved it because I abused dangerous drugs. Hence the line, "I cry when angels deserve to die."
That unlocks the whole thing. "I cry when angels deserve to die" is not a claim that angels are bad. It is about the reflex by which we decide, on hearing that someone has died, whether they had it coming — and about how that judgement attaches itself even to people we would otherwise call blameless, if the manner of their death is the wrong kind. Everyone dies. Only some deaths are treated as deserved.
The famously repeated line in the chorus — the one about self-righteous suicide, and not being trusted — sits inside that frame. It is the voice of someone whose death is about to be judged rather than mourned, anticipating the verdict.
Read this way the verses stop being nonsense. Waking, washing, dressing, doing your hair: a person going through the ordinary business of a morning, in a song about how that same person's death will be catalogued.
Why it is called Chop Suey
Because it could not be called what it was called.
The song was originally titled "Suicide", according to bassist Shavo Odadjian, or "Self-Righteous Suicide", according to producer Rick Rubin. The name was changed in response to real or anticipated resistance from Columbia Records — a major label was not going to put a single called "Suicide" on radio in 2001.
The replacement is a joke about the censorship. Odadjian has explained it: "Chop Suey" is "suicide" chopped in half. The band did not drop the subject, they cut the word up and left the pieces in the title, which is a fairly precise summary of how the band handled that whole album.
The original title also survives on the record itself. Most pressings of Toxicity include an intro on which Serj Tankian can be heard saying "we're rolling 'Suicide'" while drummer John Dolmayan counts the band in. If you have ever wondered what he is saying at the start, that is it — the song announcing its real name before the first note.
The dish itself appears exactly once in the entire project: a brief shot in the video of Tankian eating chop suey with some fans. That is the only reference to it in either the song or the film.
Where the ending comes from
The section everyone remembers — the slow, keening passage near the end, beginning "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit" — is scripture. It is among the sayings of Jesus on the cross, from the Gospel of Luke, and the surrounding lines ("why have you forsaken me") come from the same episode in the other Gospels.
The way it got into the song is less solemn than the passage sounds. Tankian was struggling for ideas for the midsection and picked the lines more or less at random from Rick Rubin's book collection in the studio.
It works anyway, and arguably works better for being found rather than composed. A song about whether a death is judged deserved ends by quoting the most famous execution in Western culture — one that has been argued about on exactly those terms for two thousand years. The band did not need to make the connection explicit, and does not.
Why it sounds like two songs
The structural trick has been described as "sonic whiplash": slash-and-burn verses against a chorus that is startlingly melodic. The song moves between them without transition, several times, in three and a half minutes.
Tankian's vocal is the other half of it. His delivery in the verses has been compared to the precision of a drill sergeant — clipped, metrical, almost barked — and then he opens up completely for the chorus and the ending. Very few metal singers of that era could do both, and the song is built to require both.
Malakian wrote the music and produced the record with Rubin. It was recorded at Cello Studios in Hollywood.
The music video
The band's first collaboration with director Marcos Siega, shot in the parking lot of the Oak Tree Inn Motel at 5265 West Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles — their own city. The band performs on a stage surrounded by roughly 1,500 fans.
The visual effects are simple and disorienting: editing that makes the members appear to walk through one another and teleport on and off the stage, and heavy use of the SnorriCam, a rig strapped to the performer so that they stay fixed in frame while the entire world lurches behind them. For a song that keeps switching modes without warning, it is a well-matched device.
The Armenian flag appears midway through — all four members are of Armenian descent, and it is a recurring statement in their work rather than a set-dressing choice.
The video passed one billion views on YouTube in November 2020.
Directed by Marcos Siega, 2001 — the official video on the band's channel.
September 11 and the radio list
The timing could hardly have been worse. "Chop Suey!" was the first single from Toxicity, and Toxicity was the number one album on the Billboard 200 during the week of the September 11 attacks.
In the aftermath, Clear Channel Radio circulated an internal list of songs considered inappropriate for airplay, and this one was on it — largely on the strength of the line about self-righteous suicide. It is worth being precise about what that was and was not: the song was never banned. Stations were advised against playing anything on the list, and many complied, but no prohibition existed.
The song survived the episode comfortably. It peaked at 76 on the Hot 100 and 17 in the UK — modest numbers that badly understate what it became. Loudwire ranked it number one among the best hard rock songs of the 21st century and, with Kerrang!, named it the band's best song. Spin placed it fourth among nu metal tracks of all time, and in March 2023 Rolling Stone put it at 37 on its 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time.
Twenty-five years on it remains the band's signature song and one of the most-streamed metal recordings ever made — a single about how society sorts the dead into deserving and undeserving, released a month before the country had to do exactly that on an enormous scale.