First Metal Video To Reach 1 Billion YouTube Views – System Of A Down – ‘Chop Suey!’

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System Of A Down’s video for ‘Chop Suey!’ has become the first metal video to reach over one billion views on YouTube.

‘Chop Suey!’ was the bands breakthrough single from their second album, 2001’s ‘Toxicity’.

The song’s music video was uploaded onto YouTube in 2009. The music video was directed by Marcos Siega, and uses the Snorricam technique along with perspective effect editing to give the appearance that the band members are merging through each other. The video was filmed with a crowd at a LA hotel parking lot.

If you’ve never watched it before… how? here it is, watch it now!

This is by far not the first achievement by this song or album, with the song becoming the bands signature song, topping the Billboard 200 and breaking them into the mainstream. The album has also be certified triple platinum by the RIAA.

In an interview from Loudwire back in 2018, Guitarist Daron Malakian reflected on the songs success, saying “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 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.”

More recently the band have just released their first pieces of new music in 15 years, raising over $600,000 for The Armenia Fund.