contributed to the atypical configuration of their sound. It’s as if their position as ethnic outsiders in one of the largest cities in the U.S. Their families had survived the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century they grew up in the United States with ancestral scars from a massacre still officially denied by its perpetrators, which lent them keen eyes for political suppression and internal propaganda. Raised in Los Angeles’s Armenian-American community, all four members of System of a Down were primed to see through the myth of American exceptionalism that would justify the coming warmongering of George W. One minute Serj Tankian’s shucking syllables like pistachio shells, saying nothing the next he’s appealing to the Lord God Himself in a rich, reverent baritone, singing the words Jesus spoke to his father on the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” The bait-and-switch between abrasion and allure makes the song irresistible, a songwriting tactic that would elevate System of a Down from the glut of hard rock that occupied a sizable portion of pop radio through the turn of the millennium.
“Chop Suey!” became a hit all the same, a nu-metal chimera that crashed unintelligible babbling into the chorus’s gorgeous vocal melody. “Chop Suey!” contained the word “suicide,” so it joined Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me” and Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” on a roster of tracks that might conceivably remind listeners of the recent national trauma. Its lead single, “ Chop Suey!,” famously landed on a Clear Channel blacklist of songs to avoid broadcasting in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Toxicity came out one week before September 11th, 2001.
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