Slayer
Slayer
Rock band
Independent Release Sold 60,000 Copies
“There is nothing in all modern pop like the moment Slayer takes a stage,” wrote Mikal Gilmore in a 1991 Rolling Stone article about the “Clash of the Titans” heavy metal tour. Slayer’s fans are known for their frenzied, often violent reaction to the music. The band’s songs are rife with depictions of satanism, murder, and disease; mere mention of albums like Reign in Blood raises the hackles of parents’ groups and religious organizations. Indeed, talk show host Geraldo Rivera’s notorious segment “Kids Who Kill” featured a group of young murderers linked by, among other things, their adoration of Slayer. But the group’s speedmetal stylings are more than just hip to the homicidal; its thundering arrangements and disturbing lyrics offer a potent alternative to the image-obsessed and commercially focused glam-rock that dominates the metal scene. “Slayer is about the dark cloud that hangs over the world,” explained bassist-singer-lyricist Tom Araya in a Def American Records publicity release, “and that’s the image and intensity that I want people to understand.”
For the Record…
Members include Tom Araya (born in Chile, 1962) bass, vocals; Paul Bostaph (replaced Dave Lombardo, 1993), drums; Jeff Hanneman, guitar; and Kerry King (born in Los Angeles, CA, c. 1967), guitar.
Group formed in Los Angeles, 1981; released first album, Show No Mercy, Restless Records, 1983; released first Def Jam album, Reign in Blood, 1986; signed with Def American Records, c. 1988, and released Seasons in the Abyss, 1990.
Awards: Gold album for Seasons in the Abyss, 1993.
Addresses: Record company —Def American Recordings, Inc., 3500 West Olive Ave., Ste. 1550, Burbank, CA 91505.
The group was formed in southern California in 1981 when guitarists Kerry King—then 14 years old—and Jeff Hanneman met at an audition. King met drummer Dave Lombardo when the latter was delivering a pizza to his neighborhood. Tom Araya’s family had fled political unrest in their native Chile and settled in the Huntington Beach area; Araya was a health care worker studying to become a nurse when he was invited to join the band. The quartet came up with their menacing moniker and began playing gigs, having stolen some lights as well as odd bits of lumber for drum risers. Araya’s brother was the group’s all-purpose technical assistant when Slayer made its inauspicious debut in a rented high school gymnasium.
Independent Release Sold 60,000 Copies
It wasn’t long before the band had built itself a following as a result of touring up and down the West Coast. By 1983 they had scraped together a few thousand dollars to record the independent album Show No Mercy. Featuring such songs as “The Antichrist,” it sold an astonishing 60,000 copies and proved to the major labels that Slayer’s bombastic satanism had access to a rich market. Mercy’s successor, Hell Awaits, contained songs with titles like “Necrophiliac” and “Crypt of Eternity”; a 1984 release, Live Undead, featured one studio song, “Chemical Warfare.”
It wasn’t until 1986, however, that the band released its first big-label effort, Reign in Blood, on Def Jam Records. With a mix of devil songs by King and more secular songs of evil and discontent from Araya, the album demonstrated that metal could achieve mass popularity without sacrificing its threatening content.
Producer and Def Jam co-owner Rick Rubin encouraged the band to push the limits of acceptability in its songs while using the studio to capture the big-guitar intensity of the music, which he described to the Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly as “quintessential speed metal.” Even so, Def Jam’s distributor, CBS, did not want to handle Reign due to its content; Rubin’s subsequent distribution deal with Geffen Records contributed to his eventual departure from Def Jam. Meanwhile, increasing mayhem at Slayer concerts climaxed in the death of a fan at a 1987 Hollywood Palladium show.
Under the Wing of Rick Rubin
The savvy Rubin nonetheless urged the band to increase the satanic references in its songs for the 1988 album South of Heaven. That record includes “Mandatory Suicide” and the antiabortion anthem “Silent Scream,” the title of which comes from a propaganda film vilifying abortion. The record sold impressively, despite—or perhaps with the help of—not-so-silent screams from parents’ groups and others shocked by Slayer’s material. The band’s unflinching focus, however, appealed to fans as much as did the propulsive force of the music. As a fan mused in Esquire, “Have you ever wondered why it’s evil you’re attracted to? You know, I do wonder why. There’s just so many people out there that are supposed to be on the good side, but they’re not for real. Politicians, teachers, parents, ministers, Christians, everybody. They’re hypocrites. The whole society. All the adults. They’re so phony.” The state of chaos in the world, she noted, reflects “the slayerness of it all.”
The band has remained philosophical about the apparent excesses of its fans. “Obviously, a lot of our fans do identify with evil—or at least they think they do,” guitarist Hanneman told Rolling Stone. But usually, he ventured, satanism is only “cool because it’s evil, and evil is rebellion.” Furthermore, “if some kid goes overboard, I can’t take responsibility for that.” Even so, as Gilmore noted, Slayer’s songwriters “are amazingly adept at depicting terrible deeds without giving any indication of how they view the moral dimensions of those deeds.” This, according to their loudest critics, makes the band partially culpable for the violence committed by their fans. In fact, the group shared with Esquire a fan letter from a soldier in the Persian Gulf during the war there in 1991: “Being a grunt [soldier] is pure motivation—like your music. It puts me in the right state of mind for war. You can count on four dead Iraqis for you guys. Keep kickin’ ass, dudes!” In the Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly piece on Rick Rubin, the producer referred admiringly to the “nothing-to-live-for Slayer audience,” joking with a companion that the group ought to sell nooses at concerts so “two or three kids could hang themselves every show.”
“Elemental Impact”
1990 saw the release of Seasons in the Abyss on Rubin’s Def American Recordings. It sold well and further demonstrated the band’s musical versatility; Stereo Review noted, “The elemental impact of this music ... never lets up,” while Entertainment Weekly called the record “very heavy metal of the thrash kind” and awarded it a B+. Slayer continued playing around the world, joining fellow headbangers Anthrax and Megadeth for the 1991 Clash of the Titans tour. Rolling Stone’s Gilmore described the “dense, pummelling quality” of the band’s live sound, reporting, “The bass rumbles, the drums explode at a rat-a-tat clip, and the guitars blare in buzz-saw unison—but it’s all played with a remarkable precision and deftness.” Other musicians shared this admiration: “I think that Slayer is, without a doubt, probably one of the best live bands in the world—I can’t overstate that,” Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine remarked during the Titans tour.
A double live disc, Decade of Aggression, hit the stores in 1991. It consisted of material performed at Wembley Arena in London and shows in Florida and California, including a version of the notorious “Dead Skin Mask,” a song about serial killer Ed Gein. The record is a pure document of the Slayer sound, recorded without overdubs or other refinements. “The riffs will trample your body, the solos will split your skull, there’s never been a live album like it,” enthused John Duke in Rock Power. A review in Q magazine called the album “excellent” and dubbed Slayer “the loudest and fastest band in the world,” noting, “no one does it scarier.” The group began work in 1992 on an album slated for release in the spring of the following year. They also announced in 1992 that Lombardo would sit out the band’s summer tour due to his wife’s pregnancy. Drummer Paul Bostaph, of the band Forbidden, sat in for the tour.
Slayer stormed the heavy metal scene in the 1980s by pushing the limits of acceptability and flouting the glamorously dark conventions of the form. Since then they’ve amassed a large, dedicated and—to some—disturbed and desperate following of young fans even as they’ve earned the veneration of critics for their musicianship. Controversy notwithstanding, Lombardo may have best summed up Slayer’s appeal when he told Esquire, “I’m more of a fan than I am a player in the band. I’m just like the kids I play for, I guess. I mean, I enjoy listening to the music. I get into it so much. The energy. The energy. There’s no weak point. It’s just, the music, the way I feel it. When I play, I give it everything. I know every kid in that arena would love to be doing the exact same thing if they could. I’m just one of the lucky ones.”
Selected discography
Show No Mercy (includes “The Antichrist”), Restless, 1983.
Hell Awaits (includes “Necrophiliac” and “Crypt of Eternity”), Restless/Metal Blade, 1984.
Live Undead (includes “Chemical Warfare”), Restless/Metal Blade, 1984.
Reign in Blood, Def Jam, 1986.
South of Heaven (includes “Mandatory Suicide” and “Silent Scream”), Def Jam, 1988.
Seasons in the Abyss, Def American, 1990.
Decade of Aggression (includes “Dead Skin Mask”), Def American, 1991.
(Contributors, with Ice-T) “L.A. ’92 Disorder,” Judgment Night (soundtrack), Immortal/Epic, 1993.
Sources
Entertainment Weekly, November 9, 1990.
Esquire, February 1992.
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, March 24, 1989.
Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1989.
Music Express, March 1991.
Q, December 1991.
Rock Power, September 1991.
Rolling Stone, July 11, 1991.
Stereo Review, March 1991.
Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly, fall 1990.
Additional information for this profile was obtained from Def American Recordings publicity materials, 1991.
—Simon Glickman
Slayer
Slayer
Rock group
"There is nothing in all modern pop like the moment Slayer takes a stage," wrote Mikal Gilmore in a 1991 Rolling Stone article about the "Clash of the Titans" heavy metal tour. Slayer's fans are known for their frenzied, often violent reactions to the music. The band's songs are rife with depictions of satanism, murder, and mayhem; the mere mention of albums like Reign in Blood raises the hackles of parents' groups and religious organizations. Television talk show host Geraldo Rivera's notorious "Kids Who Kill" segment featured a group of young murderers linked by, among other things, their adoration of Slayer. But the group's speedmetal stylings were more than just hip to the homicidal; its thundering arrangements and disturbing lyrics offered an alternative to the image-obsessed and commercially focused glam-rock that dominated the metal scene. "Slayer is about the dark cloud that hangs over the world," explained bassist-singer-lyricist Tom Araya in a Def American Records publicity release, "and that's the image and intensity that I want people to understand."
The group was formed in southern California in 1981 when guitarists Kerry King—then 14 years old—and Jeff Hanneman met at an audition. King met drummer Dave Lombardo when the latter was delivering a pizza
to his neighborhood. Tom Araya's family had fled political unrest in their native Chile and settled in the Huntington Beach area; Araya was a health care worker studying to become a nurse when he was invited to join the band. The quartet came up with their menacing moniker and began playing gigs. Araya's brother was the group's all-purpose technical assistant when Slayer made its inauspicious debut in a rented high school gymnasium.
It wasn't long before the band had built itself a following as a result of touring up and down the West Coast. By 1983 they had scraped together a few thousand dollars to record the independent album Show No Mercy. Featuring such songs as "The Antichrist," it sold an astonishing 60,000 copies and proved to the major labels that Slayer's bombastic approach had access to a lucrative market.
It wasn't until 1986, however, that the band released its first big-label effort, Reign in Blood, on Def Jam Records. With a mix of devil songs by King and more secular songs of evil and discontent from Araya, the album demonstrated that metal could achieve mass popularity without sacrificing its threatening content. Producer and Def Jam co-owner Rick Rubin encouraged the band to push the limits of acceptability in its songs while using the studio to capture the big-guitar intensity of the music, which he described to the Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly as "quintessential speed metal." Def Jam's distributor, CBS, did not want to handle Reign due to its content, and Rubin's subsequent distribution deal with Geffen Records contributed to his eventual departure from Def Jam. Meanwhile, increasing mayhem at Slayer concerts climaxed in the death of a fan at a 1987 Hollywood Palladium show.
Rubin nonetheless urged the band to increase the satanic references in its songs for the 1988 album South of Heaven. That record included "Mandatory Suicide" and the antiabortion anthem "Silent Scream," the title of which comes from a propaganda film vilifying abortion. The record sold impressively, despite—or perhaps with the help of—not-so-silent screams from parents' groups and others shocked by Slayer's material. The band's unflinching focus, however, appealed to fans as much as did the propulsive force of the music. As a fan mused in Esquire, "Have you ever wondered why it's evil you're attracted to?. … There's just so many people out there that are supposed to be on the good side, but they're not for real. Politicians, teachers, parents, ministers, Christians, everybody."
The band has remained philosophical about the apparent excesses of its fans. "Obviously, a lot of our fans do identify with evil—or at least they think they do," guitarist Hanneman told Rolling Stone. But usually, he ventured, satanism is only "cool because it's evil, and evil is rebellion." Furthermore, "if some kid goes overboard, I can't take responsibility for that." Even so, as Gilmore noted, Slayer's songwriters "are amazingly adept at depicting terrible deeds without giving any indication of how they view the moral dimensions of those deeds." This, according to their loudest critics, makes the band partially culpable for the violence committed by their fans. In the Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly piece on Rick Rubin, the producer referred admiringly to the "nothing-to-live-for Slayer audience," joking with a companion that the group ought to sell nooses at concerts so "two or three kids could hang themselves every show."
For the Record …
Members include: Tom Araya (born in Chile, 1962), bass, vocals; Paul Bostaph (replaced Dave Lombardo, 1993), drums; Jeff Hanneman , guitar; Kerry King (born in Los Angeles, CA, c. 1967), guitar; Dave Lombardo , drums (left the band in 1993).
Group formed in Los Angeles, 1981; released first album, Show No Mercy, Restless Records, 1983; released first Def Jam album, Reign in Blood, 1986; signed with Def American Records c. 1988, and released Seasons in the Abyss, 1990; appeared at the Monsters of Rock festival, 1992; issued Divine Intervention, 1994, and Undisputed Attitude, 1996; released Diabolus in Musica and appeared at United Kingdom Ozzfest, 1998; released God Hates Us All, 2001, and Christ Illusion, 2006.
Addresses: Record company—Def American Recordings, Inc., 3500 West Olive Ave., Ste. 1550, Burbank, CA 91505.
Musical Versatility
The year 1990 saw the release of Seasons in the Abyss on Rubin's Def American Recordings. It sold well and further demonstrated the band's musical versatility. Stereo Review noted, "The elemental impact of this music … never lets up," while Entertainment Weekly called the record "very heavy metal of the thrash kind" and awarded it a B+. Slayer continued playing around the world, joining fellow headbangers Anthrax and Megadeth for the 1991 Clash of the Titans tour. Rolling Stone's Gilmore described the "dense, pummelling quality" of the band's live sound, adding that "it's all played with a remarkable precision and deftness." Other musicians shared this admiration. "I think that Slayer is, without a doubt, probably one of the best live bands in the world—I can't overstate that," Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine remarked during the Titans tour.
The double live disc Decade of Aggression hit stores in 1991. It consisted of material performed at Wembley Arena in London and shows in Florida and California, including a version of the notorious "Dead Skin Mask," a song about serial killer Ed Gein. The record was recorded without overdubs or other refinements. "The riffs will trample your body, the solos will split your skull, there's never been a live album like it," enthused John Duke in Rock Power. The group began work in 1992 on an album slated for release the following year. They also announced in 1992 that Lombardo would sit out the band's summer tour due to his wife's pregnancy. Drummer Paul Bostaph of the band Forbidden sat in for the tour.
Slayer stormed the heavy metal scene in the 1980s by pushing the limits of acceptability and flouting the glamorously dark conventions of the form. Controversy notwithstanding, Lombardo may have best summed up Slayer's appeal when he told Esquire, "I'm more of a fan than I am a player in the band. … I enjoy listening to the music. I get into it so much. … I know every kid in that arena would love to be doing the exact same thing if they could. I'm just one of the lucky ones."
Controversies Continued
Bostaph eventually became a full member of the band, and made his first live appearance with Slayer at the Monsters of Rock festival in 1992. The band also recorded three songs for the Judgment Night movie soundtrack, including "Disorder" with Ice-T in 1993. Slayer continued to pursue controversial themes on its next full-length release, Divine Intervention, in 1994. The song "213" apparently referred to the apartment number where serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer had tortured and murdered his victims. Other songs referred to Reinhard Heydrich, a key figure in the design of the Jewish Holocaust in Germany during World War II. Album sales, however, seemed unaffected by these controversies, and the album reached number eight on the Billboard 200. Undisputed Attitude followed in 1996, an album featuring covers of classic punk songs, along with three originals.
Controversy erupted once again around Slayer in 1996. The body of 15-year-old Elyse Pahler had been found in March of 1996, the victim of a crime committed by three heavy metal fans eight months earlier. Pahler's parents brought suit against the band, noting the encouragement of similar crimes in "Postmortem" and "Dead Skin Mask." While the suit was dropped in 2001, the parents filed a second lawsuit against the band and its record label. Eventually, this lawsuit was also dropped, with the judge stating that he did not consider the band's music harmful to minors.
In 1998 Slayer released Diabolus in Musica (the Devil in Music), an album that found the group attempting to update its signature style of slash metal. Although critical reception was mixed, it rose to number 31 on the Billboard 200. Slayer also made an appearance at the United Kingdom Ozzfest in 1998. Slayer released God Hates Us All on September 11, 2001, the same date as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centers in New York City. The ensuing tour was disrupted due to restrictions on air travel after the attack. In 2006 Slayer released Christ Illusion, an album that sold briskly for a short time but quickly fell off the charts. The album cover also caused a great deal of controversy in India, with Christian groups objecting to the depiction of a partially decapitated Christ.
In the midst of these and other controversies, members of Slayer left the future of the band in doubt. While singer Araya had hinted at retirement, King told Live Daily that the band had not considered retirement. "I don't have any idea when that's going to be. The only farewell plans we have is when we do it, we're going to do it and that's going to be it."
Selected discography
Show No Mercy, Restless, 1983.
Hell Awaits, Restless/Metal Blade, 1984.
Live Undead, Restless/Metal Blade, 1984.
Reign in Blood, Def Jam, 1986.
South of Heaven, Def Jam, 1988.
Seasons in the Abyss, Def American, 1990.
Decade of Aggression, Def American, 1991.
(Contributors, with Ice-T) "L.A. '92 Disorder," on Judgment Night (soundtrack), Immortal/Epic, 1993.
Divine Intervention, Def American, 1994.
Undisputed Attitude, Def American, 1996.
Diabolus in Musica, Def American, 1998.
God Hates Us All, Def American, 2001.
Christ Illusion, Def American, 2006.
Sources
Periodicals
Entertainment Weekly, November 9, 1990.
Esquire, February 1992.
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, March 24, 1989.
Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1989.
Music Express, March 1991.
Q, December 1991.
Rock Power, September 1991.
Rolling Stone, July 11, 1991.
Stereo Review, March 1991.
Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly, Fall 1990.
Online
"Slayer," All Music Guide,http://www.allmusic.com (August 31, 2007).
"Slayer Looks to ‘Wear Out’ Crowds on Tour With Marilyn Manson," Live Daily,http://www.livedaily.com (August 31, 2007).
Additional information for this profile was obtained from Def American Recordings publicity materials, 1991.
—Bruce Walker and Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr.
Slayer
Slayer ★½ 2006
Deliberately gory schlock redo of vampire myths. Major Hawk (Van Dien) and his Army unit are sent to South America to deal with vicious vamps who can come out during the day. Hawk's ex-wife, scientist Laurie Williams (O'Dell), just happens to be in the area doing research and if she needs rescuing, well, Hawk's up for the mission. Most of the budget seems to have been spent on fake blood. 88m/C DVD . Casper Van Dien, Danny Trejo, Lynda Carter, Alexis Cruz, Jennifer O'Dell, Kevin Grevioux, Ray Park; D: Kevin Van Hook; W: Kevin Van Hook; C: Matt Steinauer; M: Ludek Drizhal. CABLE