System of a Down’s ‘Chop Suey!’ Hits One Billion Views on YouTube
It’s certainly no surprise — “Chop Suey!” has been a System of a Down staple song since it dropped as the first single from the band’s 2001 masterpiece, Toxicity. It immediately made a huge impact on rock radio and earned the band a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance. As YouTube numbers prove, the song’s relevance has endured.
“I remember when I wrote ‘Chop Suey!’ we didn’t even have a tour bus yet,”
“We were still in an RV and I was playing my acoustic guitar in the back of the RV where there was a bed. I never write on the road. That’s one of the few, very few songs that I wrote while I was on the road, I remember writing the song when the RV was on the highway. I don’t know where we were, probably [driving] to the next gig, and it all came to me just hanging out in the back of the RV playing my acoustic guitar.”
“I can always feel when I write something good and I can always tell when I write something that needs a little work. I thought it was really good, but did I think it was going to turn into this huge song that was gonna get on MTV and become a huge hit for System of a Down? No. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that it was gonna be our first [hit] single. I didn’t think it was gonna be so huge, but at the time I thought it was good. I was a fan of it.”
