As debut singles go, it would be hard to find one that pointed further away from mainstream success than System Of A Down’s Sugar. Described by singer Serj Tankian as a “psychotic, schizophrenic” version of Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name, its lyrics contained paranoid rantings about ‘mushroom people’ and its violent video was filled with images of war, nuclear explosions and gun-toting old ladies. Despite it all, the song was the first step on the four-piece’s road to becoming one of the biggest metal bands of all time.
Although we’re used to System’s scatterbrained sound nowadays, back in the late 90’s, they were wildly different to what the burgeoning nu metal scene was handing out – and that was by design.
“We were trying to be a heavy band that you couldn’t buy in the store,” guitarist/co-vocalist Daron Malakian told Metal Injection last year. “That was what I was writing: the band that I wanted to buy, the band that I wanted to take home. We were playing clubs, so we wanted our shit to start moshpits, but we wanted to do it in a different way. We were mixing things together that we felt were abstract.”
System formed in 1994 from the ashes of a bunch of different L.A. bands, and they had a bizarre set of influences. Tankian grew up loving Depeche Mode and The Cure; drummer John Dolmayan told MCM in 1998 that the band were inspired by “everything from the Beatles to Slayer, and everything in between… jazz, funk, hardcore, metal, rap”. Maybe most uniquely, due to the members’ shared Armenian heritage, the sound of East European and West Asian folk music seeped into their sound.
Needless to say, the band stood out like a sore thumb, but that quickly proved to be a benefit. After a few years of playing around the Sunset Strip, they were the most talked-about acts in a scene that was beginning to produce some of metal’s hottest new artists. The members already thought of themselves as a success story. “To me, forming this band and playing the Sunset strip, that was making it,” Malakian recalled.
Things were about to get bigger still. In ’97, iconic producer Rick Rubin – who’d already made stars of Run-DMC, Public Enemy and the aforementioned Slayer – walked through the door of one of their shows.
“One day Rick Rubin came to the Viper Room and loved it,” Daron continued. “His way of loving it was that he said he couldn't stop laughing.”
In his 2024 memoir, Down With The System, Tankian recalled seeing “Rubin and his dark, shaggy beard” in a booth laughing at the show. Rather than be offended, the frontman took it as a sign that Rubin “got” the band, and he approached him after the show to tell him he’s be honoured if Rubin would produce System’s debut album. Thus started a chain of events which led to the band signing with Rubin’s American Recordings Label and, yes, him twiddling the dials on 1998’s System Of A Down record.
The recording was apparently enjoyable for all involved, and System even got a co-sign from their heroes in Kiss, who were rehearsing in the studio next door to them. “They started talking to us, so we gave them some CDs,” bassist Shavo Odadjian told Kerrang! in 1999. “The next day they came back and complimented us on the album. That was the moment I had to sit down and say, ‘Wow! What are we doing here?’”
Despite getting that thumbs up from Gene Simmons and company, the band knew that their wild brand of music made commercial success unlikely. “When we started, people were saying that the style we were playing would mean we never got signed,” Odadjian remarked. “You have to be like this band, you have to be like that band…”
Still, System needed a first single from the album – and, befitting their entire attitude up until this point, they refused to pick their most commercial-sounding song. Sugar had been written in the early days of the band, with Tankian admitting that the vocal hook had been in his head for some time. However, he didn’t know what to do with it until Odadjian brought in an “oddly jazzy bass line”, which inspired the song’s now-iconic lyric.
“I raided my trusty notebook for this weird phrase about ‘kombucha mushroom people’,” Tankian wrote. “I’d heard someone somewhere talking about kombucha mushrooms and it was such an odd-sounding collection of words that it made me think of some sort of bizarro cult, so I added some verses that had that kind of feel.”
Like much of System’s early material, Sugar was a head-fuck rush of punk energy, metallic rage and bug-eyed chaos, but what was it actually about? Well, not even Tankian knows.
“My vocals on Sugar are intentionally all over the place,” he wrote. “There are parts where I’m doing this sort of fast, poetic rambling in a psychotic, schizophrenic kind of voice… To this day, I don’t really have any idea what the song is about, other than it being angsty and kind of our ‘Fuck you!’ song – not unlike Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name.”
Sugar was promptly picked as System’s first-ever single, and with it came a promo video that seemed to revel in being as feral and disorderly as the song itself. Directed by Nathan Cox – who would go on to direct videos by fellow nu metal stars Korn, Linkin Park and Disturbed – it started with a nod to 1976 movie Network, with a newsreader having a rage-filled meltdown as he reads that day”s headlines, before the band play live in front of a massive American flag. Strobe lights flash, bombs drop, military men march and an old lady gleefully takes a pistol out of her purse.
It was exhilarating, but far too extreme for MTV, who refused to play it during daytime hours. All the same – once Sugar came out on May 24, 1998 – the buzz around the band was so intense that the song started inching its way into mainstream consciousness.
“I was sitting in the car listening to KROQ,” Tankian remembered. “A
DJ called Jed The Fish had a nighttime show during which he’d play up-and-coming artists and experimental music. I hadn’t grown up with dreams of being a rock star or imagining my songs being blasted from car radios on summer nights. But I felt something undeniably transcendent when Sugar was blasting from this particular car radio.”
By the time the System… album was released on June 30, 1998, the band were one of the hottest names to drop in metal. Sugar went on to sell more than a million copies in the US alone.
What happened in the aftermath has gone down in history: an Ozzfest run, opening for Slayer, and eventually the success of 2001’s Toxicity, affirming System Of A Down as one of the biggest rock bands of the era. But never forget that, against all the odds, a weird little song about kombucha mushroom people is whatkicked it all off.
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