This bluegrass version of System Of A Down's Chop Suey is both magnificent and very, very wrong

System Of A Down
(Image credit: System Of A Down/YouTube)

In the current issue of Metal Hammer, the magazine counts down the greatest songs of the 21st Century so far. Sitting atop the chart? System Of A Down's crazed classic Chop Suey!

Now word reaches us that the brilliantly named YouTube Channel There I Ruined It, which specialises in deliberately ruining songs by changing their genre, has re-imagined Chop Suey! in a way Serge Tankien could surely never have predicted. 

It's System Of A Hoedown. Gone are the staccato riffs and frantic, stop-start rhythms, to be replaced by bluegrass banjo, line-dancing, a pig and a chicken. It's completely awful. And yet, somehow, it's also totally magnificent. 

Joining Chop Suey! in There I Ruined It's gallery of sonic perversion are Queen's We Will Rock You reconfigured as a lurching snippet of Dixieland jazz, a perplexing disco rendition of Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues, and a driving hard rock take on Taylor Swift's Shake It Off that even includes some pyro. 

"I take your favourite songs and ruin them forever," boasts the Channel's About page, although, quite frankly, we think some have benefitted from There I Ruined It's fiendish musical butchery. 

The new issue of Metal Hammer is available to buy online.

Fraser Lewry

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 38 years in music industry, online for 25. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.