Robbed hit of the week 4/17/23 - System Of A Down's "Chop Suey!"...

 

 

"Chop Suey!" - System Of A Down

from the album Toxicity (2001)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #76

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from the hard rock band System Of A Down, who originally formed in the "valley" suburbs of Los Angeles in the early 1990s. Coming from Armenian-American heritage, Serj Tankian, Daron Malakian, and Shavo Odadjian were in a band called Soil, and when that group split came together again as System Of A Down, adding drummer Andy Khachaturian. After a series of demos, and Khachaturian leaving to be replaced by John Dolmayan, the band got signed to producer Rick Rubin's American label distributed to Columbia Records. 

 

In the summer of 1998, the band released their eponymous debut album, which peaked at #124 on the Billboard 200 sales tally and go on to sell over a million copies. The first single from the record, the anarchy anthem "Sugar", made both the Mainstream (#28) and Alternative (#31) Rock radio charts. That was followed by the more brooding and dark "Spiders", which also got to the mainstream (#25) and alternative (#38) rock lists. Despite the lack of pop radio interest in the admittedly militant and loud noise attacks in the singles, their following grew exponentially, helped by MTV getting on board.

The group returned in 2001 with their sophomore effort Toxicity. The record was preceded by the single "Chop Suey!". Originally dubbed "Suicide" (the "Suey!" part is a nod to that), the song spits out a series of rhymes that may or may not have alluded to self-harm, in a cadence that throws one off guard. Then they go into the very blatant chorus which changes to tempo and throws out the "suicide" word. It was nothing like anything on the radio at that point (even Metallica didn't have turns of phrases like that), and the music video, which had the band playing in front of a horde of adoring fans who knew the lyrics already by that point, and again with help from MTV the song put the band on a different level.

While "Chop Suey!" was the band's first to make the top ten on Billboard magazine's Alternative Rock radio chart at #7 (and #12 on the Mainstream Rock counterpart), and was their first to make the "pop" Hot 100, it stalled in the lowest quarter of the chart (though sticking around for 20 weeks) in January of 2002. Internationally, the single reached the top-40 in Australia (#14), the United Kingdom (#17), Belgium (#18 Flanders), Canada (#21), and the Netherlands (#25). The Toxicity album, released in September of 2001 (a week before 9/11), topped the Billboard 200 sales tally for a week, staying a hefty 94 weeks on the chart, and going on to sell over six million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2002, "Chop Suey!" was nominated for Best Metal Performance, losing to "Schism" by Tool. 

The second single from the record was the title track "Toxicity", which spent a week at #3 on the Alternative Rock chart and #10 on the Mainstream Rock list, while rising to #70 on the Hot 100. That was followed by "Aerials", which went all the way to #1 on the Alternative (three weeks) and Mainstream (#1) radio lists, as well as #55 on the Hot 100. "Aerials" was nominated for a Grammy in 2003 for Best Hard Rock Performance, which went home with Foo Fighters with "All My Life". The group would eventually find themselves in the pop Hot 100 by the end of the decade. 

(8/10)

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Here's the band performing the song in Germany in 2002...

and lastly, in Armenia in 2015...