(Incomplete) A Heideggerian reading of Slayer's 'Reign in Blood'

“We may now summarize our characterization of authentic Being-towards-death as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death---a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the "they", and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.”

-Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Part 1, Division 2, I.53

“The waves of blood are rushing near, pounding at the walls of lies

Turning off my sanity, reaching back into my mind

Non-rising body from the grave showing new reality

What I am, what I want, I'm only after death”

-Slayer, “Postmortem” from Reign in Blood

Death is a universal and irrevocable entity; thus spoke a bunch of smart people from the past in some form or another. Indeed, in death we find a sense of finality that is difficult to grasp, come to terms with, or even philosophically codify. The above Heidegger quote, which I realize is imperceptible to those unfamiliar with the lexicon of Being and Time, comes at a crucial stage in his systematic treatment of the ontic situation of Dasein (mankind) where he's essentially tackled the “being” part of the treatise, and is now revisiting the “being” section and appropriately shoving in “time” where it belongs by elucidating the intricate relationship between the two. In my eyes, Heidegger's greatest success in Being and Time is in the same spirit of great death metal: revealing death as a fundamental component of being that shapes the way we look at the finite life we must spend (quite literally; there's a great quote along the lines of “time is the only real capital” I recall a philosophy professor mentioning one time, in a Heidegger course, naturally) in a world we're thrown into. Of these great works of death metal, Slayer's Reign in Blood, with its systematic yet visceral investigation of death's various incarnations and conceptions by mankind, rests comfortably in the throne above all.

Metal initiates will immediately find it strange that I prefer to call Reign in Blood a death metal album, but that's of very little importance. Splitting hairs with genres is an exercise in profound pointlessness, and there's far more to slapping a general descriptive label on a piece of music than analyzing its purely sonic qualities. Nevertheless, Reign in Blood isn't just a death metal album, it is the death metal album, par excellence. If we roughly define death metal as the sub-genre of metal that seeks to disseminate the role of death in being (if the two are even separable; Heidegger didn't think so, and neither do I), I challenge anyone to find a more poignant, concise, and utterly moving collection of songs that cover the spectrum of death in ways that “Angel of Death”, “Necrophobic”, “Postmortem”, and “Raining Blood” do. My thesis has been essentially laid bare; and this post will have a slightly more conversational tone than I'm used to. I'd simply like to investigate this colossal album under the framework that has been established above; that is, under the supposition that being itself is essentially being-towards-death, and that death itself is a complex, omnipresent thing (I previously used the term “entity”; the truth is that there is no ideal noun to identify with the strangeness of death) that manifests in innumerable manners as opposed to the oversimplified view of perishing that many harbor to this day.

A prevailing opinion in the general public regarding death seems to be a rigidly uniform and largely arbitrary standard in which life and death are mutually exclusive, with the former being comprised of activity and the latter a single moment in time that acts as the eternal cessation of living activity. Furthermore, I get the impression that many see death as a relatively homogenous experience that everyone must undergo in a relatively similar fashion; that is, the living activity that one engages in previous to final cessation is largely irrelevant in the actual act of dying. The twofold attitude described above is largely erroneous; and its shortcomings are fundamental in nature. Simply put, dying is not something that happens to an individual, but a process that, as stated above, is equivalent to being itself. Being a living organism consists of taking the finite amount of time one is given at birth in a world the said organism is thrown into and spending this time on various possibilities that, once life is “completed”, will comprise the picture of how the said organism used their life. In this sense, we are constantly dying, and in this being/dying we must keep our finitude at the forefront of our minds and allow it to drive the way is which we live/decay (this is the essence of the Heidegger quote I opened with).

As a result of this, dying cannot be seen as a purely biological event divorced of any experiential or ideological influence. On the contrary, attitudes regarding death and its manifestations will accordingly fluctuate with respect to one's ontological orientation. Reign in Blood astutely acknowledges this fact and investigates death from an informed, heterogeneous viewpoint with groups of songs thematically weaving together under the single consistent thematic convention: that death is the fundamental force that drives all aspects of life as opposed to the modern conception of death as a strictly futural event that, as opposed to driving being, negates it.

Analyzing Reign in Blood's labyrinthine structure proves to be fairly difficult, as there is no explicit thematic progression expressed throughout the album's playing time; but there are undoubtedly three “classes” of thematic notions that coalesce into one expression of the indispensability of death in any ontic examination of human life, which are as follows:

1. Historical/societal: Looking at death's role at a mass, often institutionalized level as a destructive event that shapes the way humans proliferate or die out (see: “Angel of Death”, “Epidemic”, and in some ways “Criminally Insane”)
2. Ritualistic: Looking at death as a ritualistic means to an end, often to fallacious supernatural results. (see: “Altar of Sacrifice”, “Reborn”, and in some ways “Jesus Saves”, Criminally Insane”, and “Piece by Piece”)
3. Phenomenological: Looking at death as a personal, essential, and primordial component of the human condition that engenders existential anxiety in every facet of life. (see: “Necrophobic”, “Postmortem”, “Raining Blood”)

I begin by examining the first class of songs that pertain to death as a societal phenomenon.

The Holocaust was at the epicenter of World War II, which itself is an icon for mass death and decay. In that sense, it seems fitting that Slayer begins its disquisition on death with one of the most famous intros in all of metal. A ripping open-Eb tremolo riff sets a frantic pace before Tom Araya delivers his trademark blood-curdling shriek previous found on other Slayer classics like “Kill Again”. This approach is a microcosmic view of the album's general aesthetic: Ripping intensity that relies more on subtle shifts in percussion and tonal variance than more obvious tempo alterations or key changes to set one song apart from another. A fascinating study in contrast, “Angel of Death” views events of The Holocaust through two distinct sets of lens. On one hand, we have the mechanistic view of Josef Mengele, whom the song is named after, and the visceral, tortured experience of a victim of ethnic genocide. However, this is not immediately discernible to the casual ear, as the two views are in many ways entangled in the song's aural violence and the lyrics' slightly impartial approach. For instance, the song begins with the following lines:

Auschwitz, the meaning of pain
The way that I want you to die
Slow death, immense decay
Showers that cleanse you of your life
Forced in like cattle you run
Stripped of your life's worth
Human mice for the Angel of Death
Four hundred thousand more to die!

From the outset, the song seems to be telling the story from the perspective of men like Mengele, who quite literally saw various “undesirables” as subhuman cargo. The lines concerning
“cattle”, “mice”, and the subsequent like about “four hundred thousand more to die” indicate a detached Aryan mindset that is simply fitting a quota to bring about a historical zeitgeist in accordance with their ideological disposition. However, there is a certain normative bent in some of the above lines that seems to underscore the inherent “wrongness” in committing such atrocities, with the “meaning of pain” and “slow death, immense decay” lines. The song's aural intensity certainly provides a backdrop for the grisly exposition of death that follows, first as a pummeling onslaught of the same verse riff that is played during a juxtaposition of the actual experience of torture all at the behest of Aryan “superiors”:

Sadistic, surgeon of demise
Sadist of the noblest blood
Destroying, without mercy
To benefit the Aryan race
Surgery, with no anesthesia
Feel the knife pierce you intensely
Inferior, no use to mankind
Strapped down screaming out to die!

Angel of Death!
Monarch to the kingdom of the dead
Infamous butcher, Angel of Death!

Following this line, however, the song takes a more interesting turn. A sprawling riff ushers in one of the album's few drastic changes in tempo. Here we are met with a brooding, relatively minimalistic section that invokes discomfort suitable for the prolonged litany of tortures that the lyrics recite:

Pumped with fluid, inside your brain
Pressure in your skull begins pushing through your eyes
Burning flesh, drips away
Test of heat burns your skin, your mind starts to boil
Frigid cold, cracks your limbs
How long can you last in this frozen water burial?
Sewn together, joining heads
Just a matter of time 'til you rip yourselves apart

Millions laid out in their
Crowded tombs
Sickening ways to achieve
The Holocaust

Seas of blood, bury life
Smell your death as it burns deep inside of you
Abacinate, eyes that bleed
Praying for the end of your wide awake nightmare
Wings of pain, reach out for you
His face of death staring down your blood running cold
Injecting cells, dying eyes
Feeding on the screams of the mutants he's creating

Pathetic harmless victims
Left to die
Rancid Angel of Death
Flying free

It is here that the song reaches its apex. The divide between sound and word is summarily cast aside as the unsettling dissonance of the lead guitars poke and jab the listener to the twisted picture of death that the lyrics paint. The twofold divide of the song comes through again as we're unsure of what perspective to assume. To the victims of The Holocaust, this is death incarnate in its most horrifying, real of ways. To men like Mengele, death was simply a systematic means to an ideological end. Slayer provides a middle ground by adamantly refusing to descend to moral pandering or straying from simply offering an account of death's essential role in shaping one of the most important and horrifying events of modern history.