I’ve recently taken a visit to an
American heavy metal website, partially owned by a major
record industry player, and taken a quick look through
their articles. Posted there, under a rather vague
warning that the video was “not safe for work” was a
video clip. The still showed a head under a boot, and a
knife at the throat. I thought that this might be a
video for another never-heard-of “brutal” death metal
band from Latvia or the like, and so, I clicked. What I
got was an absolutely heart wrenching and disgusting
clip of a man being beheaded – a young Russian soldier,
it appears. The rather tenuous link between the post and
the subject matter on the website was something along
the lines of “both are brutal”. The comments section
below raged, and it seemed that there were two distinct
camps: those that opposed the posting of the video on
the grounds that it was grossly inappropriate to host a
video of an actual murder on a music site, and those
that fell into the knuckle-dragging “hur hur hur this is
br00tal” camp. It set me to thinking about the nature of
violence and brutality in heavy metal and heavy metal
culture.
My default setting has always been that in general
terms, I am opposed to censorship. I should have the
right to decide what I can see, hear and read about and
form my own opinions on them. I don’t for one minute
think that it was ever appropriate that the obscene
publications act was used to prosecute (unsuccessfully,
thankfully) Dismember for the lyrics to “Skin her
alive”. However, it would appear that the death gurgles
of the decapitated soldier were actually used in a
Cattle Decapitation song. That raises a number of
questions within me, and they’re not easy to answer. I
have no problems in excusing the vast majority of
“offensive” heavy metal lyrics on the grounds that they
are principally fictional in nature, and in those cases,
no more offensive than horror films or fiction. Then
there are songs that take real life murder and other
grave crimes as their inspiration – which for a variety
of reasons (not least the satirical stance of Macabre
and Screamin’ Daemon) I can also understand. Yes, they
might be in poor taste to the average reader of the
Daily Fail, and unarguably the humour is of the sick
variety, but the option is always there not to listen. I
do struggle though with the real sounds of a murder
victim – at the point of his murder – being used within
a song. I wouldn’t seek to censor the song, nor to ban
it, but I would avoid it myself. I would, in essence, be
censoring it in a personal fashion, and it would be
extremely unlikely that I would then ever buy any more
material from the band concerned, or support them in any
financial way ever again. As a point of principle, I
won’t be visiting the website that sparked my thoughts
on the matter again, but the exposure to the comments of
a sizeable amount of heavy metal fans who excused the
posting of a murder for entertainment purposes does make
me wonder whether or not the constant exposure of fans
to brutality in lyrical and album art has made a
generation of metal heads somehow numb to the suffering
of others: on the other hand, it’s just as likely that
metal, as with all other genres of music, attracts a
certain proportion of morons. I’m still against
censorship, but even with the power to shock perhaps
becoming close to exhaustion, (seriously, is there a CD
cover factory where a guy just paints scene after scene
of the rape and murder of women for Gore bands?), can
there ever really be a justification for placing sounds
of a murder within a song?
