Off the Charts: Slayer

It's raining blood...Hallelujah!

By Newt Briggs

Tipper Gore was right: Rock 'n' roll is evil. It corrupts innocent minds, turns Young Republicans into slobbering paint huffers and inspires frightful acts of ultra-violence that cannot be explained by delinquent parenting or adolescent rebellion against America's false Puritanism. "I don't like or approve of loud rock and roll," a British cultural luminary told Rolling Stone in February 1976. "It could well bring about a very evil feeling in the West." Mind you: These weren't the lunatic portents of the Christian right; they were the confessions of glam rock's elder statesman, David Bowie.

Yet not even Ziggy Stardust--that extraterrestrial prophet of platform boots and sexual ambiguity--could have foreseen the dark tidings of Slayer, which slouched like Yeats' rough beast out of Huntington Beach, Calif., in 1981. More menacing than any of those limp-wristed Euro-dandies who swore allegiance to Aleister Crowley in the 1960s and '70s, Slayer spat death and gore over jackhammer rhythms that approached 250 beats per minute. Along with Metallica--yes, that Metallica--Slayer heralded the dawn of speed metal, a musical style so relentlessly technical that not even jazz would exceed its virtuosity.

Unfortunately, the physical demands of the genre left little room for lyrical indulgence--a fact confirmed by the single-minded lameness of Slayer's lyrics. Alternating between semi-literate serial killer monologues and Nietzschean calls to self-empowerment, Slayer albums are inevitably crafted out of a songwriting vocabulary of about a dozen words, including evil, hate, God, Satan, hell, kill and blood. 1983's Show No Mercy, for example, uses them all--hate (2), blood (6), kill (7), God (8), Satan (10), hell (10) and evil (12). So does the Rick Rubin-produced 1986 speed-metal masterwork Reign in Blood--hate (1), God (1), hell (2), evil (2), kill (2), Satan (5) and blood (15).

Considered in this context, Slayer's trademark horror-core seems less frightening and more formulaic than the band's detractors would otherwise suggest. Although certain cultural bugbears have linked Slayer's violent lyrics with the 1996 rape and murder of California teenager Elyse Pahler, the real motive for the crime, according to a Rolling Stone report, was that the killers believed they "needed to commit a `sacrifice to the Devil' to give their own death metal band, Hatred, the `craziness' to `go professional.'" Slayer may have created the template for skull-crushing death metal, but it certainly didn't advocate murder as a means to music celebrity. Just try to remember: Before Slayer was Slayer, it was Dragon Slayer--a wannabe SoCal hard rock band named after the interminably cheesy 1981 fantasy film. In fact, one could argue that the members of Slayer are really just ordinary blue-collar louts (albeit ones who prefer blood and corpses to boobs and cold beers).

Ą Slayer frontman Tom Araya was studying to become a nurse when he was recruited to bark and play bass on Slayer's debut LP for Metal Blade Records. In order to supply adequately brutal lyrics for the band's songs, Araya became a voracious reader of true-crime novels, which he still believes give his lyrics an authenticity lacking in other extreme metal. "I guess we all have demons," he recently told Edge magazine, "but I really cannot think of any. I had no problems growing up, no demons. I'm just up there yelling at the world. It's my opportunity to do that."

Ą Instead of recording a new album this year, Slayer released Reigning in Blood, a live DVD that features a stage prop that literally rains costume blood onto the band. "It was messy," Araya told Rolling Stone. "I couldn't play because the initial dump at the beginning of the song got all over me." Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman had other concerns: "I was worried it was going to turn my hair pink because I have blond hair, but it came right out. It seems to clean off fairly easily," he told the Cleveland Free Times.

Ą Slayer's other guitarist, Kerry King, played the uncredited guitar solo on the Beastie Boys' "No Sleep Till Brooklyn." "That was such a whim thing to do," King said to Open Up and Say, an online music magazine. "We were in the studio at the same time, and I didn't even know any of them. They were on Def Jam and they needed a lead and I went, 'Okay,' and went down there and did it and that was it. I did get to be in their video, which was cool because we didn't have any videos at the time." Rubin, who also produced the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill, appears in the video wearing a Slayer T-shirt.