Death metal can be a very silly sort of music, not at all grown up. In attempting to shock its audience, or more often, the people judging its audience, it often resorts to the grossout, deliberate over the top stories of horror and revulsion, with decapitations and biting off the heads of bats and such. All a bit childish, an adolescent rebellion against authority, bought for the shock value. Certainly a lot of death metal fans, not to mention the musician share Calvin’s motivation in the strip above…
At first sight Carcass may fall in that category, but the band (which split in 1995, but has since reunited) has insisted that they have legitamite reasons for their grossout lyrics: they want to revulse people into stopping eating meat! (Of course, this is one of those things I’ve read a long time ago and can’t find any evidence for anymore) This may explain titles like “Swarming Vulgar Mass of Infected Virulency” and “Vomited Anal Tract”…
Whether or not this helped convince anybody of the benefits of vegetarianism is doubtful; like so many death metal vocalists their lead singer is difficult to understand at the best of times and metal fans on the whole are a pretty unshockable lot
Reek of Putrifaction:
Exhumed to Consume
Cannibal Corpse is just as extreme in its lyrics, but perhaps somewhat more honest in their motivation:
“We don’t sing about politics. We don’t sing about religion…All our songs are short stories that, if anyone would so choose they could convert it into a horror movie. Really, that’s all it is. We like gruesome, scary movies, and we want the lyrics to be like that. Yeah, it’s about killing people, but it’s not promoting it at all. Basically these are fictional stories, and that’s it. And anyone who gets upset about it is ridiculous.”
Horror inspired, extremely violent and sexual (some would say: sexist) it’s no wonder such uptight countries like Australia and Germany banned their records and in the latter case, even the band performing songs from those banned records! But again, for me personally the lyrics are not the reason I like the band: it’s the music and the feel of it — heavy, sombre, aggressive — that I like.
Meat Hook Sodomy:
Butchered at Birth
So… Metal classics or just noisy filth?