What Do the Lyrics of “Chop Suey” Really Mean?

“Chop Suey” Lyric Analysis

“Chop Suey” is a song about death, judgment, and mental health. “Chop Suey” is not a straightforward or simple song. There are layers of meaning that can be interpreted in different ways. However, most readings of the song agree that it is broadly about death, the way that people tend to judge the way others die and the importance of maintaining good mental health. The song is broadly organized into three types of content: Instructions for “you” regarding mundane tasks. The song opens, “Wake up / Grab a brush and put a little makeup / Hide your scars to fade away the shakeup…” These instructions for the “you” (or, the listener) cover boring daily stuff like getting ready for work or school, but there are sinister undertones. The “you” has scars that need covering and they forget their keys in the opening verse. Things aren’t as they appear. The hook, which is explicitly about suicide. “I don't think you trust / In my self-righteous suicide / I cry when angels deserve to die.” We’ve moved from “you” to “I” in the hook, and the subject matter takes a turn for the darker. The iconic “I cry when angels deserve to die” reflects the things are “off” energy from the first verse. Pleadings based on passages from The Bible. The song’s bridge contains religious lyrics including, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit / Father, into your hands / Why have you forsaken me? / In your eyes, forsaken me?” Here, the speaker just laments being forgotten by god. So…what does all this mean? The speaker in the bridge who cries out in pain is presumably the “suicide” speaker from the hook (they both are obviously in a dark place). The third speaker could be the “you” speaking from the first verse. Or maybe they’re all the same person! The song seems to revel in the confusion and paradox, which reflects the same confusion that a person with suicidal thoughts might feel about life. The hook reinforces the feeling that nobody has any right to draw conclusions about what someone might be going through, as an “angel” may “deserve to die”—and maybe that’s not always something we have the right to judge.

What does the title “Chop Suey” refer to?

“Chop Suey” is an intentionally goofy pronunciation of “Suicide.” The story goes that System of a Down wanted to name the song “Suicide,” for obvious reasons, but Columbia Records didn’t like the idea of the band’s lead single being called that. They came up with “Chop Suey” as a kind of play on words based on the way the band pronounces the word “suicide” in the hook (“Suey-side”). The other interesting thing about the title is that it looks kind of like the thing the song is partially about (someone falling apart). Daron said it was a good visualization—like the word “suicide” but cut in half. He also said it reminded him of gangster movies. To quote Daron, “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.” The band members have sort of pushed back against this story in recent years. They now say that they voluntarily changed the title because “Suicide” was an obvious and “lazy” title. What actually is chop suey? Chop Suey is a traditional Chinese dish. It’s a stew made with fish (or some other meat), onions, bamboo sprouts, and rice.

What SOAD Says about the Song

Daron Malakian says the hook is about judgment after death. The band’s lead guitarist, Daron, says that “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.’” This comment is likely why some people interpret the song to be about fame. People often look at celebrities they admire as “angels,” so when they end up losing a battle with mental health, people are often extremely judgmental about how they died.

Serj Tankian got the hook from a random religious book. Serj, the lead singer and second guitarist, was struggling to come up with the lyrics for the second half of the song. Rick Rubin, the producer of the song, told him to pick up a random book from his bookshelf and read it for inspiration. This is where the “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” language comes from. As Serj remarks, “it just lends itself to this feeling that the universe wrote those lyrics.” The “found text” component of the song helps to reinforce the feeling of absurdity the song generates by flipping back and forth between different kinds of content and narrators.

Rick Rubin loved how unusual and over-the-top the song is. The famous producer Rick Rubin, who was the producer for System of a Down’s album, described the song as “heavy, biblical, and grand.” He goes on to remark how “it's so unusual that it goes between these crazy rhythmic explosive verses into this emotional, anthemic ending...It's just a very unusual song, and the fact that it became a hit is really unusual because it's such bizarre music.” Fun Fact: Rick Rubin originally hated the first verse. “I was shocked when Serj first sang the verse to me. It's like, ‘You really want this to be the verse?’ And he's like, ‘Yeah.’ He loved it.”

Music Video Analysis

The frenetic music video reinforces the strangeness of the lyrics. The bouncing around in subject matter and speaker (“you” to “I” and back again) are all reflected in the content of the song’s music video. For example, there’s the iconic moment where the band members melt into one another during the hook, signaling the interchangeability of the subject of the song. There is also a sequence where the band randomly disappears and reappears repeatedly as if any permanence they have as people is nothing more than a fleeting fever dream. Beyond the unique moments, a lot of the music video’s aesthetic is very much a product of its time. The “band on a stage with a big crowd on all sides” was a frequent video method for nu-metal and pop punk bands of the time. Sum 41, Alien Ant Farm, and Linkin Park all famously did the same thing.

Why is “Chop Suey” still so popular?

The song’s dramatic shifts and odd structure are very hard to forget. “Chop Suey” was released in 2001, and Lil Uzi Vert covered the song on his Pink Tape record 22 years later. In other words, the song is still a hit. A lot of this just boils down to how unforgettable the song is. There are the giant shifts from sing-songy melodies to scream-o, radical jumps from downbeat to upbeat music, and inexplicable lyrics all bundled up in a song titled after a Chinese dish. It’s just too weird for people to stop listening to it. It’s also likely that some of the sillier elements of the song make it hold up better than the other songs from the early 2000s about suicide. Groups like POD, Papa Roach, and My Chemical Romance were all writing about similar subject matter at the time, but their collective emphasis on sincerity and seriousness likely helped make “Chop Suey” stand out more over time.

The Controversy of “Chop Suey”

“Chop Suey” was actually banned after 9/11 for promoting terrorism. “Chop Suey” came out in August of 2001, so it was still seeing a lot of radio play by September. But after the World Trade Center terror attacks, the line “I don’t think you trust in my self-righteous suicide” took on a darker meaning. Clear Channel, the company that owned almost all of the popular US radio stations, banned “Chop Suey” from playing on the air. Not-so-fun fact: Rage Against the Machine’s entire discography was also banned, as were most of AC/DC’s songs, a few Beatles tracks, and “Ironic” by Alansi Morissette. What did the band say? The band leaned into it! Lead guitarist Daron said years later, “Our fans were starting to say, ‘Hey, these guys are prophets, they’re saying things that hadn’t happened yet’…‘Self-righteous suicide,’ ‘Aerials in the sky’ [from the Toxicity track “Aerials”], ‘Jet Pilot.’ I was, like, ‘Wow, that’s cool they think that. Let’s make them believe we actually did it.’”