The Devil's Music: Into The Abyss with Slayer, Sepultura & Cannibal Corpse
* I’ve been into extreme metal and other forms of subversive self-expression for over twenty years. I wasn’t born like that. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. Every month I will tell you the story of how and why I began waging war to my eardrum. This is how I got into the Devil’s Music. *
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Every teenager has a musical identity to some extent. It is that way today and it has been that way since the early days of rock n’ roll. Music has matured and intellectualized considerably since Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis’ devilish hips, but it has consistently cultivated an underage audience over the years with a variation of the following messages: a) here’s how you piss off your parents b) no one understands you or c) it’s OK to cry and wallow in your own misery if there’s a soundtrack for it. Music marketing survived time and transformations.
Why wouldn’t it? From 1950s rock radio to YouTube by the way of MTV, music has always found a way to reach an essentially penniless audience for free. Books are also technically free if you have a library card, but their effort-to-dopamine ratio is all screwed up. So kids define themselves via music. There’s punk kids, goth kids, hip-hop kids, techno kids and so on.
There comes a time where other variables start shaping your identity, though: your friends, significant other (or lack thereof), first experience with a soul-killing job, etc. That’s when you find out who really loves music and who were just figuring out who they were. Every true blue music lover has an experience that transfigure their lives, like that time rock critic Brent DiCrescenzo basically wrote the long form version of the nonsensical shit you say when you’re having an orgasm after listening to Kid A. In my case, it was the introduction to growling vocals.
First time I heard them were through the window of a ratty third floor apartment. I was 11 or 12 and hanging out with my cousin Erik, who had previously introduced me to Slayer. This otherworldly sound was blaring from somewhere up. Erik yelled out: “This a new Pantera record?”
The older, mop-haired kid (who wasn’t well-versed in English) said: “Nah man. This is a new band. It’s called Cannibal Cop."
It was the raddest shit I had ever heard.
That moment marked the beginning of a weird era in my friends circle, where we constantly tried to one up each other and find the most extreme artist possible. One could argue that I’m still living in that era like an aging glam metal enthusiast rocking it out at Applebee’s. We got respectively into Slayer, Sepultura, Cannibal Corpse (again), Morbid Angel, Deicide, Cryptopsy, Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir and do so. Then cam the era where I continued this bizarre game by myself: Mayhem, Anaal Nathrakh, Last Days of Humanity, etc. This is when I knew.
I was telling my therapist the other day that listening to music is the way where I truly express myself. That putting headphones on and listening to Devourment, Disgorge or any wild-ass band like that is the only moment where I don’t censor myself or adjust to social requirement in any way. My musical interests reveal something about me that nothing else does. It’s cliché to say you didn’t choose your favorite artists and that they chose you, but the more extreme and uncompromising they are, the more true it is and I pretty much reached the end of the spectrum.
What the fuck does it say about me? I’m not there yet. But if Slayer, Sepultura and Cannibal Corpse thought me anything about myself is that I was different. I tried to fight it. To reconcile myself with normalcy for many, many of my youthful years but Tom Araya, Corpsegrinder and the others had seen something in me that I wasn’t ready to accept yet. There was no place for me anywhere else. Bands like that, you either “get” them or you don’t because they stimulate a part of you that doesn’t really change or adapt to anything. A part of you that was always there and that’ll always be.
Metal musicians will break your ears with Satan being a symbol of existentialism and making your own choices, but the more extreme metal gets, the more essentialist is it.
