Tom Araya, the now retired frontman of Slayer, shared a fake video on his social media intended to inject lies into the current presidential election. When it was pointed out that the video was fake, Araya laughed it off, which got me thinking. Slayer's entire modus operandi was trying to offend and/or piss people off, and what does it say about someone if they spend their entire adult life doing nothing but trying to upset other people?
Slayer are not alone in the music world in this respect. There are tons of bands out there who exist for no reason other than shock value. I have talked before about the genres of music that rely on bodily fluids and functions for all of their material, and I have long since written off giving any of them the time of day. But I'm interested in the psychology of being one of those people.
We get a short amount of time in this life to make the most of the opportunity. We can learn, we can love, we can create things that make us happy. Happiness is an infinite supply, with no limit on how many of us can experience it. So why would you spend your life bringing people down? Why would ruining someone else's life make yours better?
As Tom commented the last time he pulled a stunt like this, "Sometimes you do stuff like that just to piss people off."
No, you don't. Not if you're a good person. Not if you're not an utter asshole. Using your voice or your power to create strife, anxiety, and misery is not a laughing matter. It's the sort of thing a psychopath enjoys. When you are in a position where you can quietly enjoy your retirement, where you can use your voice to bring hope and comfort to the people your music has spoken to, and yet you choose to stoke division and intentionally inflame people's fears and worries, I'm not sure what that says about a person.
My armchair psychology would say it's projection. The people who feel the need to constantly offend, who want to piss off other people to enjoy watching their anger, are people who have no happiness of their own. They are people who have been taught to believe life is a zero sum game, that every ounce of joy someone else experiences is one they cannot have for themselves. We see the ultimate example of that in our current political climate, but it's a pervasive string of thought.
Slayer pushed people's buttons back in the 80s when they wrote "Angel Of Death". It was controversial to write a song about the Holocaust, but it was done in a way that challenged good taste, but was not done in an offensive manner. It was more documentary than commentary, and stayed on the proper side of what is acceptable. Over the years, however, Slayer would get worse and worse, with Kerry King writing lyrics that devolved into basically saying, 'fuck God'. He was trying to get a rise out of people, not say anything of importance. "Angel Of Death" was shining a light on the evil man is capable of, perhaps warning us to be wary of it creeping into our society ever again. By the time he was writing "Cult", calling Christianity just that, or "Payback", where he wrote about wanting to "beat you til you're just a fucking lifeless carcass", he had nothing to say.
Shock value isn't much different than any other addiction. Once Slayer found the rush that came from being the scary voice people didn't want you to hear, they had to continue pushing the boundaries to get that same reaction. No one wanted Slayer to become a band safe for fifty year-olds to take their kids to see, wearing branded knit hipster hats, yet that's exactly what happened. In order to avoid being the dad-bod of extreme music, Slayer kept pushing themselves, which left us with men beyond middle age who thought at the level of teenagers, who thought writing the equivalent of a fart joke was still edgy.
It's no wonder to see them travel on the dark side of politics, buying into conspiracy theories and the cynical belief that telling the big lie often enough will cow people into accepting it. The band that warned us about the horrors of Nazis has something in common with one of their core propaganda efforts.
Maybe Slayer never did lose their edge. After all, Nazism is still off-limits. Isn't it?
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