In the days after 11 September 2001 an email went round the program directors of an American radio chain carrying 162 song titles that might, it suggested, be better left off the air for a while, and at the foot of the list one line that swept a whole catalogue off the dial at a stroke: every song by Rage Against the Machine. The company that owned more radio stations than anybody else in the United States was Clear Channel Communications, and it insisted afterwards that nothing had been banned at all.
The heavy metal on that list was the loudest part of it. Seven AC/DC songs went on it, "Highway to Hell" and "Shot Down in Flames" among them, together with Black Sabbath's "War Pigs", four Metallica songs including "Fade to Black" and "Enter Sandman", Megadeth's "Dread and the Fugitive Mind", Judas Priest's "Some Heads Are Gonna Roll", Dio's "Holy Diver" and Ozzy Osbourne's "Suicide Solution". So did "Imagine". The banned heavy metal songs were in strange company.
No ban has ever taken a song out of the world. It moves the song onto another surface. In the Soviet cities of the 1950s, bootleggers cut forbidden jazz and rock and roll into discarded hospital X-rays, scissoring a rough disc out of somebody's chest film, burning the spindle hole through it with a lit cigarette and scoring the grooves across the pale ghost of a cracked rib, so that the music played out through a stranger's skeleton to anyone who could get hold of a copy.
Every ban on a heavy metal song worked the same way, and each came from one of three hands: the company that pressed the record, the company that broadcast it or, far more rarely, the state. The committees, pulpits and courtrooms that tried the music as a whole belong to the longer account. The songs taken off the shelf one at a time are a shorter list, and the hand that took each one mattered more than anything the song said.
The banned heavy metal songs of September 2001
The Dallas four whose single "Bodies" had been climbing American rock radio all summer, a song its writers have always described as a celebration of the mosh pit, were Drowning Pool, and within a week a chorus that had filled every club floor in the country could no longer be played on a large share of the dial. The band had built the song for a room of colliding shoulders and the list read it as a casualty count, so the riff that had been kicking speaker grilles loose in rock clubs since the spring went dark overnight. Sinner, released by Wind-up in June 2001, had already gone platinum that August. The damage stopped at the transmitter.
The logic of the list was the logic of a word search. It struck titles that mentioned flames, falling, crashing, bodies or hell, whatever the song underneath was about, which is how a Sabbath song written against the generals of the Vietnam years sat beside a Louis Armstrong ballad, and how "Enter Sandman", a song about a child's nightmare, went into the same drawer as a Drowning Pool single. Clear Channel called the memo a suggestion, and some of its stations, including several in New York, never followed it.
When the label pulled the song
The Los Angeles band whose first single Capitol refused to put on its debut album, for fear that the big retail chains would throw the whole record off their shelves, was W.A.S.P., and "Animal (F**k Like a Beast)" came out instead in April 1984 on Music for Nations, a British independent, and reached American fans through the import racks the chains did not control. Capitol had first planned a European release sealed in a black plastic bag plastered with warnings. Then it backed away altogether.
The same fear decided the fate of a whole album two years later. Columbia, which distributed Def Jam, refused to handle Slayer's Reign in Blood over "Angel of Death" and its subject, the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, and Geffen put the record out in October 1986 with its own logo left off the sleeve. The song was never cut. The label simply changed.
The rapper who took "Cop Killer" off his own band's debut in July 1992, after police organisations had spent weeks pressing Warner Bros. to withdraw it, was Ice-T, and Body Count went on playing the song live. It is the one case on the list where the artist made the cut himself.
| Song | Band | Year | Taken off by | What happened next |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Animal (F**k Like a Beast) | W.A.S.P. | 1984 | Capitol, the band's label | Released as a single by Music for Nations |
| Angel of Death | Slayer | 1986 | Columbia, the distributor | Reign in Blood distributed by Geffen |
| Cop Killer | Body Count | 1992 | Ice-T, under pressure on Warner Bros. | Removed from later pressings of the album |
| Bodies | Drowning Pool | 2001 | Clear Channel's list | Kept off many stations for the autumn |
| Ich tu dir weh | Rammstein | 2009 | Germany's federal review board | Index lifted in June 2010 |
When the state stepped in
The Berlin six whose sixth album was placed on the German index of media harmful to young people on 6 November 2009, over the song "Ich tu dir weh" and a booklet photograph of Richard Kruspe with a naked woman across his knee, were Rammstein, and from that day Liebe ist für alle da could be sold only to adults and never displayed where a minor could see it. A second edition followed on 16 November with the song replaced by four seconds of silence.
That gap sits in the disc like the hole a conductor's clippers punch through a tram ticket, proof that the fare was paid and a window straight through to what is missing. Every buyer of the censored edition knew exactly which song had been cut out. An administrative court in Cologne suspended the order on 31 May 2010 and the album came off the index the next day.
The Buffalo five who spent years forbidden to play songs from their first three albums on German stages were Cannibal Corpse, a restriction that held until 2006, and the band answered it by playing the later records, which were no gentler. The record shows that no state ban on a heavy metal song has outlasted the band it was aimed at.
No state ban on a heavy metal song has outlasted the band it was aimed at.
What a ban actually did to a song
The accounts close in the same column every time. "Animal" became the song W.A.S.P. is known for, "Bodies" went on to be played at sports arenas across America for the next two decades, and Liebe ist für alle da went to number one in Germany in its first week. The ban was a salvo that landed on the wrong target. It lit the song up for everyone standing downrange. "Suicide Solution" had already outlasted two lawsuits by the autumn of 2001, and a radio chain's memo did no better against it than the courts had.
What the lists never touched was the one bastion that mattered, the fan with a copy. A song declared anathema by a label or a radio chain went straight from the shelf to the shelf behind it, to the import rack, to the tape passed hand to hand, and from each of those places it travelled further than the ban did.
Every ban on a heavy metal song came down to an office deciding what somebody else could buy, and every one of them was overruled by a teenager with a cassette deck.
Declan Rourke, KaosMetal
The office holders changed, from a label boardroom in 1984 to a radio chain's email in 2001 to a German ministry in 2009, but the pattern did not, and the dislike behind it, which runs far wider than any list, has its own anatomy in why people hate heavy metal. The songs are all still in print. Most of them are still in the set.
