Night Beat (48 page)
“I know that a song like that,” says Araya, “where I’m writing it as if I
am
the person who is doing the killing, freaks people out. They say, ’How could you sit there and think that way?’ Well, it isn’t hard at all. In fact, it’s very easy. I sit there and I ask myself, ’Now how would it feel if I really wanted to kill somebody?’ And I know: I’d feel an exhilaration. I’d feel awesome.
“See, when I wrote ’Dead Skin Mask,’ I had just read this book called
Deviant,
about Ed Gein. As I read it I was trying to understand this guy—why he did what he did, and how he got that way. The fact that he could seriously skin these people and preserve their body parts . . . I mean, this guy had noses and ears. He had garter belts made from female body parts. This guy was fucking
out
there. Can you imagine doing that and thinking that it’s okay, and not really knowing the difference between right and wrong? That’s just fucking amazing, to do things like that with no heart at all. And then I came across another book about this guy named Albert Fish, who a long time ago murdered all these little boys and then ate their penises. He said he tried eating their testicles, but he found them too chewy.”
As he speaks, Araya’s face gradually lights up, until by the time he gets to the part about chewy testicles, he is smiling delightedly. After a moment or two, he catches what he’s doing and blushes. “You know,” he says, “I can sit here and talk about mutilation with a smile on my face and laugh because of the things these people do, but I
do
know the difference between wrong and right. I mean, I sit and think about murder, and sometimes I think it would be real easy to do. And then I write the stuff, and for me it works as kind of a release. I figure, well, I’ve thought about it, I know what it would feel like—and that’s good enough for me.”
LISTENING TO Tom Araya talk about the titillations of murder can be as unnerving as listening to Slayer’s music—in fact, even more so. At least with Slayer’s music it’s possible to make a case that, by presenting horror in such unflinching and unromantic detail, some of the band’s boldest songs actually work as critiques of violence and evil. But after talking to Araya, you have to wonder if some of the songs aren’t precisely what they sound like: namely, celebrations of the ruin of life.
Actually, either interpretation—critique or celebration—seems fine by Slayer, who is probably more adept than any other band at depicting terrible realities without giving any indication of how the band views the moral dimensions of those realities. But by completely sidestepping any moral reaction, it’s possible that Slayer has misjudged just how deep the horror runs in the stories it has chosen to tell. Killers like Ed Gein or Albert Fish may be fascinating to read or talk about, or to see portrayed on the screen, but the truth is, real human lives were tortured and destroyed at their hands, and the horror and misery didn’t end there: The surviving families and friends of both the victims and the killers had to live the rest of their lives with the effects of those crimes, and with the knowledge of all the hopes that were forever transformed and sealed off in the seasons of their bloodshed.
This
is the sort of horror that never knows an end—the sort that lasts beyond death or fiction or art—and it may be a greater evil than Araya and his band are prepared to comprehend or address.
At the same time, for all his creepy interests, there’s really nothing unpleasant or evil-seeming about Araya himself. In fact, he comes across as a basically funny, courteous, and sweet-tempered guy who has a deep affection for his family and his fans, and who only becomes really unpleasant when he witnesses a security guard roughing up some exuberant fan. In short, Araya is a bit like many of the rest of us: On one hand he can be fascinated by the depictions of evil in a true-crime book or a piece of fiction like
The Silence of the Lambs,
but when the real violence spills over into his own world, he is genuinely repelled.
And sometimes that violence can spill over in unexpected ways. For example, during the recent Persian Gulf War, Slayer received several letters from troops stationed on the front line, some of whom stated they were anxious to kill the Iraqis (“the fucking ragheads,” as one soldier fan put it) and thanked Slayer for providing them with the morale to do so. Closer to home, Geraldo Rivera presented a show a year or so ago called “Kids Who Kill.” It featured a panel with five adolescents, all of whom had killed either other kids or family members, and all of whom cited a passion for thrash or speed-metal bands—particularly Slayer. To some critics, incidents like these might suggest that Slayer’s art is a dangerous one, that it works as an endorsement of violence or might even help embolden it. Well, perhaps. But at the same time, what would it be like if the music of Slayer
didn’t
exist? If the band disappeared or were silenced, would that absence diminish the frequency of murder? Would it have had any impact on the killings committed by the children on Geraldo Rivera’s show?
Jeff Hanneman, one of Slayer’s lead guitarists (and the author of “Angel of Death”—the song that got the band thrown off CBS Records), doesn’t think so. “Obviously,” he says, “a lot of our fans
do
identify with evil—or at least they think they do. But the truth is, when you come across one of the most hardcore Slayer fans—one of these guys going
Sa-tan! Sa-tan! Sa-tan!—
and you say, ’Now calm down, dude; do you really believe in Satan?’ he might go,
’Yes!
Sa
-tan!’
And then you go, ’No, no—do you
really
believe in Satan?’ he’ll go, ’Uh, well, no, not really.’ You know, to him it’s cool because it’s evil, and evil is rebellion.
“I mean, these are just normal kids—at least normal by today’s standards,” Hanneman continues. “You have to remember, this society has changed a lot, and some of these kids are coming from some pretty rough family realities and some pretty hopeless conditions. This music is a way of reacting against all that. They go to a show, thrash around for a few hours, and then they go home and hopefully they’ve worked some stuff out of their systems. Whereas when they listen to something like Mötley Crüe, with some song about a hot girl . . . well, they can relate to that, but they’ve got this anger inside that they need to get out and Mötley Crüe doesn’t help them do that.
“Basically, I think we’re doing a positive thing,” says Hanneman. “But if some kid goes overboard, I can’t take responsibility for that. I mean, we all have an inborn capacity for violence, but most of us know where to stop. If somebody goes over that line, then their boundary is obviously gone, but that has more to do with how they grew up than with our music. Sometimes we’re a little bit over the borderline about killing and stuff like that, but it isn’t like we’re out there giving them knives, saying, ’Here, cut your throat. Hurt somebody.’ That isn’t what we’re doing.”
Rick Rubin, who has produced Slayer since the mid-1980s, has his own view of the band’s impact on its listeners. “There’s no question,” he says, “that a lot of really troubled people like this band. You can see them some nights at the show: kids who are living with boredom and stress every day of their lives, kids who really have no ambition and nothing to live for. And I think that these kids recognize that the people in this band are troubled spirits as well. There’s a kinship there. All these people—both the band and its audience—have these feelings in common. Slayer exists because people feel this way—because some kids kill, or want to kill. But Slayer is simply a reflection of that condition, not the cause, and you shouldn’t blame a mirror for what it reflects. If you don’t like what Slayer represents, then change the world, and make it a better place. Do that, and bands like Slayer won’t exist.”
TO A CASUAL listener, most speed-metal bands might seem rather interchangeable. After all, most of them tend to boast predictably dire names (some of the more memorable current ones include Morbid Angel, Suicidal Tendencies, Atrocity, Entombed, Carcass, Coroner, Repulsion, Dismember, Deathcore, Abomination, Hellbastard, Napalm Death, Pungent Stench, Death Strike, and, uh, Defecation), and nearly all of them trade in predictably dire topics like, you know, death, the devil, and damnation. What’s more, they all feature guitarists who blast out grinding sheets of rhythm and noise, and vocalists who yell or growl impossibly wordy descriptions of perdition at impossibly breakneck clips.
But these are simply the givens of the genre—the shared traits that give any pop style its claim to singularity or separateness. Within the kingdom of speed-metal, each band is singular unto itself, but there is probably none that is more inspiriting than Anthrax. Like Slayer or any other number of bands, Anthrax often deals with questions of rage and despair. But in contrast to these other bands, Anthrax wants to know where those dark feelings come from, and how they affect the lives of the people in the group’s audience. If speed-metal can lay claim to its own Clash or Who—a band that tries to make sense of its audience’s moment in history and how that moment can be transformed into the basis for community—then clearly, that band is Anthrax.
In part, Anthrax’s commitment to the ideals of community owes as much to the band’s interest in punk as to its roots in metal. Like most of the other musicians on this tour, the members of Anthrax first developed their passion for heavy metal in the middle and late 1970s, when artists like Kiss, Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC were defining the frontier of rock & roll bravado. But in 1976, all that changed. Punk groups like New York’s the Ramones and England’s Sex Pistols took heavy metal’s style and stripped it of its excesses—its overreliance on flashy lead guitars and pretty-boy cock-rock—and transformed it into something that was at once both more primitive and more radical. Indeed, punk bands drew new stylistic, generational, and political lines across the breadth of rock & roll, and they declared that if you did not stand on punk’s side of the line, then you did not stand anywhere that counted. As a result, the punk and metal factions didn’t get along very well, despite a common interest in passionate, guitar-and-drums-driven rock & roll.
But Scott Ian, who was a heavy metal fan attending high school in Jamaica, Queens, New York, when punk was at its peak, couldn’t see the reason for all the division and antipathy. “To me,” he says, “Iron Maiden was every bit as underground—and every bit as valid—as the Ramones or Sex Pistols.”
In 1981, when Ian and a couple of other friends co-founded Anthrax, he envisioned the group as drawing from metal’s style but punk’s spirit. At first not much came of the idea; others in the group were happy to stick with metal’s familiar styles and fans. But on Sundays, when the band wasn’t playing or rehearsing, Ian and Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante started hanging out at Manhattan’s legendary punk club, CBGBs, and making friends with members of the local hardcore scene. For a brief while, they even formed a side band—the legendary Stormtroopers of Death, regarded by many as a key punk-metal crossover group. In time, many of the hardcore kids started coming to Anthrax’s shows, and they brought with them some of their scene’s more colorful rites—like stage-diving and slam-dancing. The mingling of the two audiences made for some tense alliances at first; punks thought the metalheads had wretched fashion sense and bad politics, and the headbangers didn’t dig the punks’ violence. But by the mid-1980s, the punk scene had lost most of its stylistic inventiveness and some of its cultural clout, and the emerging thrash and speed-metal bands simply appropriated punk’s rhythmic intensity and its radical zeal as well.
These days, Anthrax can pretty much be exactly what it wants to be—a heavy metal band with a punk-informed conscience. Over the course of the group’s last four albums, Anthrax has become increasingly politically savvy and activist-minded, yielding some of the smartest songs about the social and emotional conditions of modern-day youth culture that rock & roll has produced in the last decade. But sometimes the band’s progressivism hasn’t set well with parts of its audience. In 1989, when the members of Anthrax appeared on the cover of heavy metal magazine
RIP
with their friends in Living Colour, a black metal band, the magazine received some ugly responses from several readers. Angered by the incident, and by the killing of black youth Yusef Hawkins in New York’s Bensonhurst area, Ian wrote “Keep It in the Family” and “H8Red,” a pair of scathing songs about race hatred that appeared on
Persistence of Time.
