1325 E Madison, 324-8000.

For the past couple of months, Chop Suey has become what the now-dead I-Spy failed to become: a thriving music venue for the underbooked hiphop and electronica scenes. A steady stream of national and international acts--Dead Prez, Cut Chemist, Saul Williams, DJ Krush--easily fills the club's midsize faux-Chinese interior (designed by Capitol Hill club owner Linda Derschang and her partners, who recently sold the business to Chris Dasef, owner of Pioneer Square's Temple Billiards). With several significant (if not alarming) music-related closings occurring in Seattle--Nation, Fallout Records, Sit & Spin, Bedazzled Discs, and so on--it's a bit of a relief to recognize the shimmer of a success story against an increasingly bleak local backdrop. And though it's not easy to say precisely why something thrives under certain cultural and economic conditions while many others fail, one can make a few general observations.

One certain source of Chop Suey's current success is Yo, Son!, a weekly Sunday-night hiphop event. Yo, Son! was designed and inaugurated shortly after the club opened just over a year ago by Marcus Lalario, who ran (and still runs) a successful drum 'n' bass night at the Baltic Room, and Kerri Harrop, who was then Chop Suey's booker. Lalario and Harrop worked together to give the hiphop night a particular definition and identity.

"One of the reasons that Yo, Son! is so successful is because it started out with people from various scenes around town, and the fact that [resident DJs] DJ DV One and DJ Scene are able to cross all of these different genres," explains Harrop. "One of the things that Marcus always insists upon is that it was his connections with the hiphop crowd and my connections with the rock crowd that brought this kind of melding of those two groups together."

Though designed to blend rock and hiphop sensibilities, Yo, Son! primarily drew Capitol Hill's b-boys and b-girls, who hadn't had a local hiphop venue of that size since the closing of ARO.space (which once brought hiphop acts like Slum Village and Cali Agents to the neighborhood). Another draw for b-boys and b-girls was that Yo, Son! was clearly not going to be a corporate rap night, but an event affiliated with Seattle's underground hiphop collective Stuck Under the Needle. A press release that SUTN e-mailed out last year drew the line in the sand: Yo, Son!'s DJs would not play that "horrible mainstream, crossover shit with the blingy eight-bar rap and the R&B diva on the hook."

But Yo, Son! didn't take off right away. Like all success stories, its rise from anonymity to celebrity depended on one crucial moment--a moment that transformed not only Sunday nights but the club as a whole. "The night that it took off was Memorial [Day] weekend [May 26, 2002, almost five months after Chop Suey opened]," says Lalario. "We did it for free. Plugged it. Four hundred people showed up, and that was it. They kept showing up.... Though the crowd is changing, the mood is still the same. The DJs work hard to keep it eclectic."

Yo, Son!'s success was made visible by the extraordinarily long lines that stretched out of the club and around the block; indeed, on some nights there's even a tent to protect those waiting from the rain. Soon after Sunday night was established as the club's anchor, Chop Suey started taking a deeper interest in DJ-based programming. This new direction found its definitive moment in Harrop's dramatic departure late last summer. Though Harrop had helped create and launch Yo, Son!, clearly she wanted what the management was becoming less interested in: a rock club.

Harrop was replaced by Steven Severin, who had recently left I-Spy on poor terms. Though not entirely disconnected with the rock world, Severin had made his name in the underground hiphop and electronica scenes. Replacing Harrop with Severin meant only one thing: There would be more shows offering something of a live complement to Yo, Son!'s themes and agenda-- shows featuring underground hiphop acts like Peanut Butter Wolf and old-school hiphop performers like Big Daddy Kane.

"We are still trying to keep it extremely diverse," says Severin. "We are still trying to do two rock shows a week, two DJ shows a week, two hiphop shows a week, and then whatever on the extra day gets thrown in, maybe bingo or hoot--just something different."

I ask Severin, who manages Chop Suey with Quentin Ertel and Brittany Curtis, if location has anything to do with Chop Suey's success.

"I think location has a ton to do with it. I mean, we are in a really good location: People can walk to shows and walk back home.... You know, we tried everything up at Nation on the weekends, but people would not come, and we threw some amazing shows. It was just hard to get people down there. So location is certainly important."

And those there, ladies and gentlemen, are a few of the parts and pieces that make up what is now Chop Suey's success story.