The heavy metal songs about death that last are not the ones with the most skulls on the sleeve. They are the ones that decide which way the singer is facing and never once turn round. The Californian four who strapped a condemned man into the electric chair, handed him the microphone and let him count down his own last hours over a riff that tightens like the leather at his wrists, on a record cut in Copenhagen early in 1984, were Metallica. Nobody has done it colder since.
Drive a lane at night on full beam and the animals caught in the lamps show every posture there is toward what is coming. The rabbit freezes dead centre in the white light, the badger keeps trundling along the verge as if the engine were weather, and the fox stops, turns its head and stares straight into the glare while the tyres chew the gravel toward it. The songs sort the same three ways, and the good ones hold their pose from the first riff to the last chord.
War dead, despair and the courtroom fights of the eighties are separate quarrels, each with its own evidence. Death itself, met head on inside a song, is a smaller shelf than its reputation. Most of what the style sold as morbid was decoration.
Heavy metal songs about death, one band at a time
Released by Megaforce on 27 July 1984 as the title track of the band's second album, and credited to James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Cliff Burton and Dave Mustaine, whose riffs from his months in the band were still in use, "Ride the Lightning" is sung by the man in the chair. He is past the appeals and short of time. The verses march at a stubborn mid tempo, and then the instrumental middle breaks into a sprint that sounds exactly like a pulse that has understood what the straps are for.
The song offers him no chaplain with the last rites, no reprieve and no last speech worth recording. It gives him a barrage of downpicked guitar and a guitarist, Kirk Hammett, who tears through the break as if the current had already been switched on. That is the rabbit's posture, held for more than six minutes: eyes open, legs locked, the light getting bigger. It works because nothing in the arrangement pretends to look away.
Walking on: the pharaoh and the dreamer
The singer who wrote a god king into the last hours of his reign, and made him discover halfway through the song that divinity does not keep a heart beating, was Bruce Dickinson. "Powerslave", the title track of Iron Maiden's fifth album, released by EMI in September 1984, hands the dying pharaoh a riff built on an Eastern scale, a hushed middle section and a guitar duel that climbs out of it, and the sepulchre he has spent his reign preparing turns out to be the one room he cannot enter awake.
Monks building a sand mandala spend days tapping coloured grains out of thin metal funnels into a diagram of a palace, and when it is finished they sweep it into a heap with the side of a hand, pour it into a jar and carry it to a river. The pharaoh has spent his whole reign on the opposite project. The slow middle section of the song is the sweep: Dave Murray and Adrian Smith scatter the pattern grain by grain, and the returning riff carries what is left down to the water.
The songwriter who gave the badger its song four years later was Steve Harris. "Infinite Dreams", from Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, released by EMI in April 1988, belongs to a man whose nightmares have pushed him to wonder what waits on the far side, and who keeps walking toward the question rather than away from it. The song opens on a clean, patient guitar figure and gathers into a gallop. By common consent it is the most curious song about dying that the band ever wrote, curious in the plain sense, interested rather than afraid.
Staring back into the lamps
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.
John Donne, Holy Sonnets, X
The bassist who answered the whole subject with a joke, on a single cut in 1984 for the double compilation No Remorse, was Lemmy, and Motörhead's "Killed by Death" treats the grave as one more pursuer that will have to catch him first. The riff rolls in at a swagger rather than a gallop, flattening every solemn chord the style had ever laid across a coffin, and the chorus is a promise not to go quietly that is funnier every time it comes round. It is the fox, staring into the headlights and grinning.
Four years earlier, the singer who had just replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath, and who turned mortality into a reason to drive faster on "Die Young", from Heaven and Hell, released by Vertigo in April 1980, was Ronnie James Dio. The song opens on a drifting keyboard and guitar introduction and then Tony Iommi's riff kicks the ground out from under it, while Dio sings the shortness of life as an argument for spending it at full volume. It was a single. It still sounds like a dare.
The fox is the most common posture in the style and the hardest to do well, because a joke about the grave goes stale faster than a lament. Lemmy's works because the band plays it straight, with no wink in the rhythm section, and Dio's works because the song never once slows down to admire its own courage. A chorus built for the arena does the rest.
Not one of these songs explains death. Each of them picks a direction and holds it.
| Song | Band | Year | How it faces death |
|---|---|---|---|
| Die Young | Black Sabbath | 1980 | As a reason to live faster |
| Ride the Lightning | Metallica | 1984 | Head on, strapped in, no reprieve |
| Powerslave | Iron Maiden | 1984 | A god king finding out he is mortal |
| Killed by Death | Motörhead | 1984 | With a joke and a swagger |
| Infinite Dreams | Iron Maiden | 1988 | With curiosity about what comes after |
| To Live Is to Die | Metallica | 1988 | Grief for a band member |
| A Tout le Monde | Megadeth | 1994 | A farewell in the voice of the one leaving |
When the dead had names
Some of these songs are about real people, and they are written differently.
Cliff Burton, the bassist of Metallica, died on 27 September 1986, when the band's tour bus crashed in Sweden. He was 24. On ...And Justice for All, released by Elektra in 1988, the band included "To Live Is to Die", a largely instrumental piece built from riffs Burton had written before his death. Its one spoken passage is James Hetfield reading lines Burton had kept, some of them his own and one taken from the German hymn writer Paul Gerhardt. The band first played the whole song live on 7 December 2011, in San Francisco.
Dave Mustaine has said that "A Tout le Monde", from Megadeth's Youthanasia in 1994, came from a dream about his late mother, in which she was allowed to come back and say one thing to him. The chorus, sung in French, is a farewell from the person leaving. MTV at first declined to show the video, reading the song as one about suicide, and Mustaine said plainly that it was not. The music is slow and clean, a picked figure and a chorus that never raises its voice.
What the good songs refuse to do
The rule that runs through all of them is a rule about the music, not the subject. The condemned man gets a riff that never lets him breathe, the pharaoh gets a slow section that takes his monument apart, the joker gets a chorus built to be shouted back, and the songs about real people get the least ornament of all. Several of them sit on records that later counted among the best-selling heavy metal albums, which says something about how often buyers went back to them.
None of them offers an answer, and none of them wanted one. Where they sit as whole records, ranked against the albums that built the style rather than song by song, is argued in the related chapter. The songs themselves ask only one thing of the listener: to stay with the song's own choice, right through to the last chord.
