Ask somebody who has never listened to it what thrash metal songs are about and you will be told Satan, blood and death. Read the actual lyric sheets of the founding albums and you find something almost comically different: nuclear proliferation, heroin, the treatment of Native Americans, mental hospitals, arms dealing, chemical defoliants, Hemingway, Stephen King and the Second World War. Thrash is the most journalistic genre heavy music has ever produced, and it got that reputation for devil worship largely because one band was very good at frightening people.
The shift in subject matter is the clearest evidence that thrash was a generational argument rather than a musical one. The parent generation wrote about dragons and the road. The children wrote about the news, because the news in 1984 was worse than any dragon.
The bomb, first and above everything
Nuclear war is the founding subject and it saturates the entire first era. Metallica opened Ride The Lightning in 1984 with Fight Fire With Fire, four minutes of mutually assured destruction, and returned to it on Blackened. Megadeth built most of a career on it. Sodom wrote Bombenhagel from the other side of the same continent, and Kreator's early records read as a country that had spent forty years expecting to be the battlefield.
One band made it their whole address. Nuclear Assault, formed in New York in 1984 by Dan Lilker after he left Anthrax, put it in the name and then delivered on it album after album, and their subject was not the spectacle of the bomb but the ordinary institutional stupidity that might drop it.
This is easy to underrate forty years later. In 1984 the arms race was at its most frightening point since 1962, everybody under twenty had grown up with the assumption that they might not reach thirty, and no other form of popular music in America was saying so out loud. Thrash was.
Addiction, institutions and the things that eat a person
The second great theme is control, and specifically the loss of it. Master Of Puppets, the song, is about cocaine, and it is written from the drug's point of view, which is a considerably better idea than a warning would have been. Welcome Home (Sanitarium), on the same record, takes its situation from Ken Kesey's asylum and gives it to a narrator who may or may not be telling the truth about why he is there.
Suicidal Tendencies got the definitive version of this out of the crossover end of the scene: Institutionalized is a song about a teenager being pathologised by his own parents, delivered largely as speech, and it is funnier and more frightening than anything written on the subject by anybody with a therapy qualification.
Politics, and the specific complaint
Thrash's politics are rarely programmatic and almost always specific. Megadeth's Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? in 1986 is a cartoonist's position rather than a manifesto: the arms trade as a shop, sold by people who will not be doing the dying. Sacred Reich wrote Surf Nicaragua about American intervention in Central America. Sodom gave an entire 1989 album to Agent Orange, the defoliant sprayed over Vietnam and the illnesses it left behind, which is not a subject anybody was obliged to write about in West Germany.
Anthrax were the most consistently engaged of the Big Four and the least credited for it. Indians, on Among The Living in 1987, is about the treatment of Native Americans and was written by a band from Queens who could easily have written about something else. On the same album they turned The Stand into a title track, Apt Pupil into A Skeleton In The Closet, and Judge Dredd into I Am The Law, which tells you the other thing about thrash lyrics: this was a genre written by readers.
This was a genre written by readers.
Books, and the borrowing from them
The reading list is unusually visible. Metallica took For Whom The Bell Tolls from Hemingway and One from Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, a novel about a soldier who has lost his limbs, his face and his senses and remains conscious inside what is left. The Thing That Should Not Be is Lovecraft. Anthrax took two songs from Stephen King on one album.
This matters because it settles the question of ambition. A band that reaches for Trumbo is not trying to shock a parent; it is trying to find a container large enough for what it wants to say about war, and it has correctly worked out that a novel got there first.
The exception that made the reputation
Slayer are the reason the genre is remembered for atrocity, and the reputation is earned rather than invented. Their subject is death, damnation and war crime, delivered flat, without commentary and without a moral, and that refusal to editorialise is precisely what makes the records frightening in a way no amount of speed could have managed. Angel Of Death, which opens Reign In Blood in 1986, describes the experiments carried out by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz in the same uninflected register, and the band's position then and since has been that describing something is not endorsing it.
The record's American distributor declined to handle it and it came out through another company, which is a story of its own. What matters here is proportion: Slayer are one band. The reputation of the entire genre was built from their catalogue and then applied backwards to forty others who were writing about arms control.
| Theme | Where to hear it |
|---|---|
| Nuclear war | Metallica, Fight Fire With Fire; Nuclear Assault, all of it |
| Addiction | Metallica, Master Of Puppets |
| Mental institutions | Metallica, Welcome Home (Sanitarium); Suicidal Tendencies, Institutionalized |
| The arms trade | Megadeth, Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? |
| Foreign intervention | Sacred Reich, Surf Nicaragua; Sodom, Agent Orange |
| Historical injustice | Anthrax, Indians |
| Literature | Metallica, One; Anthrax, Among The Living |
| Atrocity, told flat | Slayer, Angel Of Death |
| The scene itself | S.O.D., D.R.I., most of crossover |
| Beer | Tankard, an entire career |
What thrash refused to sing about
The negative space is as informative as the content. There are almost no thrash songs about girls, sex, partying, cars or the pleasures of being in a band, and that absence is deliberate rather than accidental. Those were the subjects of the music thrash defined itself against, playing four hundred miles south on the Sunset Strip to audiences who had paid for the privilege, and writing about them would have been a surrender.
What replaced them, besides the news, was humour, and the genre is much funnier than its reputation allows. S.O.D. existed largely as a joke. Tankard in Frankfurt have now spent four decades writing about beer with total commitment. Municipal Waste inherited the whole tradition and ran with it. A genre this serious about the end of the world needed somewhere to put the other half of its personality.
Why it dated so well
Songs about dragons age gently because dragons do not change. Songs about the arms race ought to have dated the moment the Cold War ended, and mostly they have not, because the actual subject underneath was never the missiles. It was institutions making catastrophic decisions on behalf of people who had no say in them, and that has not gone anywhere.
That is the thing the genre put into words at two hundred beats per minute in 1984, and it is the half of the wider story that gets left out whenever somebody describes this music purely as fast guitars. How it managed to be fast guitars as well is What Makes Thrash Metal Sound Different.
