Impenitent Transgressor: Why Slayer Matters
Written by Jon Epstein
Sunday, 19 May 2013 03:20
One of the things I am most proud of is a letter I received in the Fall of 1990 from Tipper Gore, the estranged wife of former vice president Al Gore and cofounder of the Parents Music Resource Center chastising me for the conclusions I had drawn in my then just published research on the relationship between musical preferences and adolescent behaviors. In that research I examined the musical preferences of middle school students in Winston Salem and looked for relationships between their preferences for specific genres of popular music and their involvement in various activities. Specifically, I looked for any relationship between heavy metal and rap fans and documented behavior related issues.
I found that, in a nutshell, musical preference is a poor indicator of potential behavior problems, and that the more committed a young person is to a music based subculture, regardless of which subculture they were involved in, the less likely they were to exhibit behavior problems. My conclusion was, therefore, that music such as heavy metal was not a negative influence on adolescents, and was actually the opposite. The use of popular music of any sort in the young person’s search for independence, autonomy, and ultimately their attitude about themselves as responsible adults,was normal and should be encouraged by parents and educators.
I then went on to criticize and condemn the work of one of the central P.M.R.C. supported researchers, Paul King, as being absolute quackery and ultimately dangerous in its application, a process later called “demetaling” by some mental health practitioners. I also pointed out that the notion that heavy metal was “Satanic” was groundless, and that the idea, current at the time, that satanic cults were using heavy metal to recruit teens into their ultra-secret covens displayed a complete lack of understanding into the lives of teenagers, not to mention their completely fantastical description of Satanism that bore no resemblance to the actual religion of Satanism, and further had absolutely no support from any legitimate source whatsoever, and was flat out ridiculous as a result.
Ms. Gore was unhappy with my findings. She expressed her belief that I was a bad person. My brazen contradiction of the work her organization endorsed made that evident, she said. Furthermore, she felt I owed Paul King an apology. He was, after all, a doctor.
I never made that apology. I did however, become a doctor.
Check.
Later that year I received a letter from Princess Diana’s personal secretary informing me that Her Majesty, The Princess of Wales, would like to thank me for my clarity, reasonableness, and educated approach to understanding youth subcultures. I then went on to give the keynote address at the global Conference on Youth.
Checkmate.
My research into heavy metal turned out to be a case of perfect timing ultimately leading to my earning a doctorate, the publication of two books and numerous articles on subcultures, being invited to speak both here in the States and in Europe, televised lectures at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a number of expert opinions written regarding several lawsuits brought against heavy metal bands and their record labels.
The one band that was always used to point out that I was wrong about…well all of it….was Slayer. The fact that Slayer even existed, I was told, was irrefutable evidence that Satan was afoot. The logic went like this: Slayer is Hell’s house band, Slayer is a heavy metal band, making Satan a Metal-head, and therefore all Heavy Metal is Satanic by definition.
The absolute hysteria about anything related to Slayer intrigued me. The first time I had become aware of the band was when their music was used in the incredibly bleak 1987 film about “alienated youth” starring Crispen Glover and Keanu Reeves, ‘River’s Edge’. The band’s music was a brutal and relentless, and ultimately ironic, counterpoint to the absolute indifference and banality demonstrated by the film’s characters as they consider the bloated corpse of a friend, murdered by another friend, and left almost as an afterthought at the water’s edge, until she becomes a curiosity, and not much more, for the young people in the film.
It was a perfect fit. Slayer was soon to become the metal band of choice for disaffected, alienated youth of suburbia. This was a band that your parents (former hippies that they were) would definitely not get. Where there once were peace signs, paisley, and tie-dye, there was now pentagrams, screaming, rotting, skulls, and blood. Lots of blood. The hopeful, melodic, and nice music of a generation ago had become fierce, unrelenting, and very, very, angry. Unlike the anger felt by their parents towards “the man” or “the system,” however, this was a blind, undifferentiated rage directed at EVERYTHING. Slayer, I concluded, was a primal scream at a world of broken promises, failed political systems, social safety nets that caught nothing, unimaginable brutality, immense suffering, technological treachery, and total indifference. Slayer was a great big super compressed bucket of “fuck you” thrown in the face of Ned Flanders everywhere.
The Flanders of the world were frightened by Slayer’s imagery, confused by their music and appalled at their subject matter. More than that, they were terrified that Metal fans everywhere seemed delighted by their confusion and fear. They hated Slayer, and everything remotely associated with heavy metal by extension, and through the efforts of the P.M.R.C., a number of church based anti-metal groups, and the mental health professionals working with “At Risk Youth,” stories of Satanism, suicide, self-mutilation, violence, and substance abuse began to make the headlines all across Middle America. The Prince of Darkness (who, as it turns out, is Ozzy Osbourne) has taken control of Hollywood (which was the easy part) and is using heavy metal music to seduce young people into his evil plan for the “End of Days.”
It was later revealed through prophesy that Slayer was to be the Tribulation headliner. Motley Crue, it was rumored, had signed on to open. Clay Aiken had originally been scheduled as the entertainment for the rapture, but recent events brought to light concerning where he likes to put his penis have put confirmation of his performance on hold.
That last bit didn’t happen. I have no idea who is scheduled to perform as humanity shuffles off to Buffalo.The other part about Christian fundamentalists claiming that listening to Heavy Metal caused teenagers to join Satanic blood cults and ritually murder their parents in cannibalistic sex orgies, did.
The media loved it. So did Slayer.
It is easily argued that Slayer owes its commercial success in a large part to the Satanism Scare of the 1980s. They were, literally, the poster children for that era’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll is the Devil’s Tool” bible thumping crusaders. I personally attended, (and was forcibly removed on occasion), a number of “professional development” events for public school educators and adolescent mental health professionals during this time period where we were told that if a child was a fan of Slayer, they were psychologically disturbed, and hence a danger to themselves and others, because Satan (and sometimes, admittedly, a lesser demon) had infected their soul and rendered their spirit open to his ministrations. Hospitalization in an adolescent psychiatric facility specializing in “demetaling,” preferably with a Christ centered philosophy, was the preferred solution to the growing metal menace.
“Pray for us, Saint Simeon, for we are so easily deceived…”
It didn’t help that the Anti- Metal assessment of Slayer was largely correct. The band’s image, presented in album art work, posters, T-shirts and various other memorabilia, is grim, horrific, and disturbing. Images of corpses, Nazi iconography, occult symbolism, gratuitous amounts of blood, decapitations, self mutilations, necrophilia, cannibalism, psychopaths and multiple examples of purposefully sacrilegious and anti-Christian ideas are legion. Album titles such as ‘Hell Awaits’, ‘God Hates Us All’, and ‘Christ Illusion’ make the meaning of the images clear should the (very, very slow) viewer fail to grasp their significance.
The band’s lyrical themes cover similar topics ranging from venomous anti-religious tirades and explorations of the motivation of pop culture anti-heroes like Jeffrey Dahmer or Ed Gein to chemical warfare and ecological apocalypses. The lyrics themselves are exceptionally verbose, pedantic, and laborious, sung in a monotonous out of key half snarl. Anger has its own melody, its own clipped and slightly too fast cadence, and in Slayer it sings like a bird. In this case most like a very agitated Loon.
Still, when it comes to music, Slayer has had an undeniable influence on modern heavy metal. In popular music terms, Slayer is as “heavy” as you can get with the basic hard rock line-up of two electric guitars, bass, and drums. Slayer, in this regard is very old school. There are no sequencers, no keyboards, and minimal use of anything other than analog electronics. The guitar sound is intensely over-driven and distorted with an emphasis on the mid range tone pioneered by Slayer and now a heavy metal standard. This aggressive tone is used to full advantage by guitarists Kerry King and the late Jeff Hanneman who rely on tri-tone power chords and highly syncopated rhythms, accented occasionally by minor key arpeggios and screamingly fast, feedback drenched, weeping guitar solos that swing in and out of key like psychotic jugglers. Behind this cacophony of minor key distortion bassist Tom Araya provides a steady root note chug while drummer Dave Lombardo hammers double bass drum 16th notes relentlessly while providing a rhythmic structure to the band’s music with his amazingly intricate use of snare rolls and cymbal play that is strangely reminiscent of the late Gene Krupa.
Some may ask, what does all of this mean? In short, it’s awesome. To quote my friend Sam; “Slayer swings.” Slayer’s music is unbelievably compelling. It is virtually impossible to not move when listening to Slayer. Some respond because the music moves them, others because they are trying to escape. Either way, they move. This becomes a truly epic phenomenon in a concert setting.
In the early Nineties, I was the associate editor of a well respected Midwest music monthly, and ultimately attended 6 or 7 Slayer shows between 1990 and 1994 in Cleveland, Ohio. In all the rock music events I have attended, and I have literally been to hundreds, I can honestly say that nothing prepared me for the sheer physicality, aggression, and explosiveness of the audience’s responses to this band. On one particularly memorable evening at the (now defunct) Richfield coliseum, the onetime home of the Cleveland Cavaliers, during Slayer’s set on the Clash of the Titans tour I witnessed the ENTIRE crowd erupt into a slam dancing, body surfing, stage diving, trellis climbing (which quickly became plummeting to the floor and being unceremoniously arrested), mosh pit. The ENTIRE audience. Thousands of screaming, undoubtedly inebriated, angry, alienated, and hella-psyched metal heads indiscriminately running into one another, diving into one another head first from the front of the stage or any elevated place including other concertgoers, arms and feet flailing, bottles, boots, belts and teeth flying, bodily fluids quickly making the floor both sticky AND slippery adding to the chaos.
As I headed towards the cheap seats at the very top back of the building (see: I WAS moving…quickly) I saw a wheelchair bound young man in the handicapped section ramming into his friend decked out in a helmet, leg braces and holding two canes, one of which he was using to push back at his friend in time to the music. Hieronymus Bosch would have loved it. It was “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” panel three, made real.
It was a scene of terrible beauty, the fleeting triumph of the invisibles, the undesirables, the castoffs, and the “deviants”. For a brief moment their communion with Slayer made them the most powerful, dangerous, and unpredictable people in the world. Tomorrow all 5000 of them would disappear into anonymity again, but not tonight. Tonight, they mattered… a moment in time… not a threat, just the powerless finding something real and revealing in all its heavy metal glory until it to disappears into nothingness just like everything else.
From that night forward, Slayer has had my respect. Admitting that I not only respect them, but actually like their music (a lot) has been a point of curiosity among my academic peers, who say they understand even though they don’t, and frowned upon by many of my more traditional musician friends, who can’t understand how I can listen to such obvious “mediocrity.” Fortunately, it doesn’t matter if they get it. I do.
All of this came into hyper focus when Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman died last week, the metal-head misfits, losers, and all the other beautiful nobodies lost one of their greatest champions. Slayer fans, mattered to him. Hanneman wasn’t interested in personal celebrity, and rarely spoke on record with members of the press. One of the few times he did, however, revealed much about this man’s character. In an interview published in the early years of the band’s success, he was asked about punk rock and its relationship to heavy metal. His answer was that it seemed to him that his band Slayer was attracting both types of fans to their shows, and that it was his hope that he was providing, in some small way, an avenue for there to be more understanding between different types of people. Not nearly as evil a plan as we were lead to believe, but equally subversive.
Can you imagine what would happen to the war machines if everyone suddenly decided to be more understanding of our differences? Not a scenario that is likely to happen anytime soon, but in the meanwhile I still have my Slayer CDs.
So Tipper, if you are reading this, perhaps you’d like to send me another letter and we can instead of discussing the evil incarnate that Slayer represents, we can talk about their musicianship, their Grammys, and the fact that their fans are alive and well and mourning the death of one of their heroes. Jeff Hanneman. A hero – as a musician not as one of Satan’s minions.That job is currently being filled by Justin Bieber.
*An earlier version of this essay appears in The Camel City Dispatch 5/13/2013
Dr Jon Epstein is a lecturer, writer, musician, and teacher currently living in Winston Salem with his family. He has written extensively on the topics of heavy metal and youth. He holds a PhD in Social Theory from Kent State University.
[Photo of the author with Tom Araya taken by Jane Scott, Cleveland, 1994]