Death and the Father: ‘Chop Suey’

The figure of the Father is a staple of Heavy Metal lyrics, not least because these often tend to engage with Christianity, a religion centred on the figure of the Father. Three songs in which the father as Father makes notable appearances are Chop Suey, Chop Suey, by System of a Down, and Enter Sandman and The Thorn Within by Metallica. All three songs use samples of Christian prayer or scripture within their text, emphasising the connection between father figure and God. I will begin with a reading of ‘Chop Suey’.

Chop Suey

Chop Suey is made up of three sections: verse, chorus and bridge. The verse consists of a list of statements in the second person:

Wake up

Grab a brush and put on a little makeup.

Hide the scars to fade away the shake-up.

Why’d you leave the keys upon the table?

Here you go, create another fable.

The first three lines are instructions which can be read as commands to conform to a set of social standards, especially as lines two and three concern appearance. The flow of instructions is broken by the question ‘Why’d you leave the keys upon the table?’ the trivial nature of which highlights the aggression of this passage. The accusation that the addressee is creating ‘another fable’ hints at a general habit of dishonesty.

In the second iteration of the verse, the phrase ‘you wanted to’ repeated after lines 2-5, which could be interpreted as a suggestion that the primary victim of this dishonesty is the self. ‘You wanted to’ could refer to a desire to perform each of the actions listed above, or it could be read as a general desire to conform, which results in the necessity of such traumatic acts as hiding scars and creating fables. This is an interesting reflection on free will, especially read in the quasi-religious context of the rest of the lyrics.

The chorus is a first-person soliloquy about suicide:

I don’t think you trust in my self-righteous suicide

I cried when angels deserve to die

In my self-righteous suicide

I cry when angels deserve to die

The introduction of the first-person problematises the first stanza, as it does not clarify whether there are one or two subjects involved in this discussion. Specifically, it is unclear whether the ‘you’ in the chorus is the same subject as the ‘you’ in the verse. One can read it as an altercation between self and double, or as a confrontation between insider and Other.

In the bridge, the figure of the Father is introduced with a dramatic repetition of the word, which can be read as a cry of despair or an invocation. This Father can be interpreted as God or the speaker’s father, depending on whether you want to be religious of Freudian. The invocation leads into a prayer of despair:

Father into your hands

I commit my spirit,

Father into your hands

Why have you forsaken me?

In your eyes forsaken me?

In your thoughts forsaken me?

In your heart forsaken me?

The above supports the idea of the father as God, as it is a mixture of two of Jesus’ statements on the cross:

'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit' (Luke23:46)

'My God, My God, why have you forsaken me' (Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34).

The structure of the verse with its repetitions of ‘forsaken me’ is reminiscent of the prayer ‘God be in my head’:

God be in my head and in my understanding
God be in my eyes and in my looking
God be in my mouth and in my speaking
God be in my heart and in my thinking
God be at my end and at my departing

The prayer ends with death; similarly, Chop Suey’s text progresses from a dialectic pattern of question and answer to the final command:

Trust in my
self-righteous suicide

This indicates the speaker’s embracing of death, which could be read as an attempt to seize control of the body from the Father through the murder of the self. Perhaps the suggestion is that it is not possible to separate the self from the figure of the Father without bringing about its complete destruction.