Rick Rubin explains how he helped System of a Down create ‘Chop Suey’
Sometimes the process of writing a song comes all too easy, as though through divine intervention or even just through the fact that a songwriter needs to write it from deep within themselves. However, on other occasions, even just one part of a song appears elusive, and this seemed to be the case with System of a Down’s ‘Chop Suey’ produced by Rick Rubin.
Rubin told Joe Rogan about the difficulty in writing the bridge of ‘Chop Suey’, although he noted that there is always a way around the issue. He said: “My experience is, when you are open and looking for these clues in the world, they are happening all time, and they are often happening right when you need them.”
“There’s a song, a System of a Down song called ‘Chop Suey’, and it has this big bridge section in it where Serj [Tankian], the lyric writer, didn’t have words for this part of the song,” Rubin noted. Looking for any sort of inspiration, it looked like SOAD were running out of time. Rubin added: “We’re in the library in my old house, and he said, ‘I don’t have words for this’, and we were finishing, and it’s like, ‘okay, any ideas?’ He didn’t have any ideas”.
However, Rubin had such great experiences in those kinds of situations that he knew there was no need to panic. He continued: “I said, ‘okay, pick a book off the wall.’ He [Tankian] picked a book off the wall. I said, ‘open it to any page, and tell me the first phrase you see.’ He opened it, and the first phrase he saw, that’s what’s in the song, and it’s a high point in the song.”
The part in question is the “father, into your hands I commend my spirit […] why have you forsaken me?” bridge. The inspiration was likely taken from the Bible as, in Luke 23:46, Jesus says, “I commend my spirit”, so the line may well have been taken from there. Then again, in Isaiah 49:14, the Bible also reads, “The Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me.”
While Rubin doesn’t explicitly says where Tankian got the line from, he admitted, “It’s incredible; it’s like magic. It’s the part, ‘father in my hands, you have it, why have you forsaken me?’ It’s wild. The context, it doesn’t really make sense in what’s going on [but] it’s just rad.”
‘Chop Suey’ was SOAD’s breakout hit, and Rubin more than played his hand in shaping the legendary song. Elsewhere he noted: “It’s an unusual song because the verse is so frantic. The style is so broken up and unusual. It’s both difficult to sing and arguably difficult to listen to, but then the chorus is this big, soaring, emotional, surging, beautiful thing. It’s just real heavy, biblical and grand. It’s so unusual that it goes between these crazy rhythmic explosive verses into this emotional, anthemic ending.”
