As good almost kill a man as kill a good book.John Milton, Areopagitica
Very few death metal sleeves were banned in the sense people mean when they say the word. A handful genuinely were, by state bodies, in named countries, on dated decisions. The rest were swapped, blanked, stickered or quietly replaced at the plate room stage, before a single copy existed, by somebody whose job was stock rather than morality. Both count. They just do not work the same way, and the difference is the whole subject.
What follows is the specific records. The boards, the customs desks and the register that stood behind them are a separate and much larger story, told in death Metal and Censorship.
Autopsy, swapped before anybody saw it
The first case is also the cleanest. Autopsy cut Severed Survival at Starlight Sound in Richmond, California in January 1989, with the band and John Marshall producing, and Peaceville released it on 24 April. Kent Mathieu had painted the intended front, a man being pulled apart, and it never went out. Peaceville put Kev Walker onto a replacement instead, and what he produced is the version everybody knows: the same surgery seen from the patient's side, four figures in scrubs leaning in over the viewer.
Nobody banned anything here. A label looked at a painting, decided shops would not carry it, and commissioned another one. The record was not delayed and the band did not fight it in public. Mathieu's original became a collector's object almost immediately, which is the pattern that repeats for the next twenty years: suppression makes the image more valuable, never less.
Carcass, deleted twice
Carcass are the only band in this story whose sleeves were not illustrations of anything. Reek of Putrefaction in 1988 and Symphonies of Sickness a year later were collages built out of photographs lifted from medical publishing, which is a different legal and moral proposition from a painting and was treated as one. An illustrator invents. A collage of clinical plates only reproduces, and what it reproduces are real people on real tables.
That is why those two records were dismantled rather than argued with. The artwork came off for the 1994 reissue in favour of a clean front. In 2002 a pressing went out with the face of the record printed blank and a line of text explaining that the original artwork was inside, which is what a deletion looks like when it is done politely. A 2008 reissue went one better and sealed the whole thing in a white medical bag. The music was untouched throughout. Only the outside was ever in dispute.
Cannibal Corpse and the alternate cover economy
Buffalo's most litigated export turned censorship into a production line, and it is the reason the phrase "censored version" means something specific to anybody who bought these records. From Butchered at Birth in 1991 onward, Metal Blade shipped two fronts for a great many titles, one for shops that would carry the painting and a second, tamer one for shops that would not. Vile in 1996, Bloodthirst in 1999, Gore Obsessed in 2002 and The Wretched Spawn in 2004 all went out in both forms.
Tomb of the Mutilated, recorded at Morrisound between 1 and 15 June 1992 with Scott Burns and released by Metal Blade on 22 September, is where the line finally sat. Vince Locke's painting went past what any chain would stock, a censored front was made, and Germany prohibited the record outright. The ban there eventually covered the band's first three albums and the songs on them, so that the material could not be sold or performed in the country at all. Australia followed in 1996. Both prohibitions ran roughly a decade and lifted in 2006.
The censor almost never arrives with a warrant. He arrives with a purchase order.
Set that against what else was happening to the same band in the same years. In 1994 their music turned up in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, in a scene with Jim Carrey in it, playing in cinemas in the very countries where the records were prohibited. Paul Mazurkiewicz has said that roughly one person a day still tells him the film is how they found the band. Banned at the border, distributed by a comedy.
Deicide, and the label that blinked
The most interesting censorship case in the genre involves no state at all. Deicide recorded Once upon the Cross at Morrisound in 1994 with Scott Burns, Roadrunner released it on 18 April 1995, and the band had commissioned the British artist Trevor Brown for the front: a flat, clinical, entirely unhysterical rendering of the body of Christ opened up on a slab. No demons, no flames, no gore in the horror sense. Just a medical drawing with a theological target.
Roadrunner would not carry it. What went out instead is the same scene with the body concealed under a shroud, identifiable only by the arms, which is a genuinely good piece of design and a considerable retreat. The original was printed inside the booklet, and some copies came with a poster of it signed by Glen Benton.
Read that sequence properly. The label did not object to the idea, because it published the idea, twice, in the same package. It objected to the idea being visible on a shelf. That is the entire logic of retail censorship in four moves, and it explains why so few of these fights ever became fights.
When it actually was the state
Three countries did the real thing, and their paperwork survives.
Germany prohibited Cannibal Corpse's early records and the performance of the songs on them, which is the heaviest instrument used against any band in this genre and the only case where the music itself, rather than the packaging, was reached. Australia shut the same material out from 1996. And on 20 February 1996 the Office of Film and Literature Classification in New Zealand, working from a referral out of the courts, classified the Tomb of the Mutilated compact disc and its lyric sheet as objectionable under publication number 9501955.
That last one is worth pausing on, because it is not a shop declining to stock something. An objectionable classification in New Zealand is a prohibition on supply with legal consequences attached, decided by a statutory body, recorded in a public register with a number on it. A distributor changing a sleeve is commerce. This is law, and there is a very short list of records in any style that have had it applied to them.
Notice also what the three prohibitions have in common. All of them landed on one band. Not on the collage records, not on the rejected paintings, not on the label that printed a dissection inside a booklet it would not show on a shelf. On the band whose sleeves were most widely distributed and whose name did the most work in a headline.
What a suppressed sleeve is worth now
Every one of these decisions has been reversed by time, and reversed in the same direction.
- Mathieu's rejected Severed Survival painting is better known today than most sleeves that were never questioned.
- The Carcass collages are back in print and the blank 2002 front is the curiosity.
- The German and Australian prohibitions expired in 2006, and Cannibal Corpse now headline festivals in both countries.
- Trevor Brown's original Christ is the version reproduced whenever anybody writes about Once upon the Cross, including here.
The current censor is not a distributor and not a review board. It is a content policy, applied automatically to a thumbnail, and it works exactly the way the plate room worked: the decision is made before anybody can object, by nobody in particular, on grounds nobody publishes. A cover that cannot be shown at forty pixels square is a cover that effectively does not exist for a generation of listeners, and bands supply clean alternates now for the same reason they supplied them to Metal Blade in 1996.
None of it ever touched the records. That is the joke buried in the whole subject: forty years of argument about pictures, and not one note of the music was ever removed by any of it. The paintings themselves, and the men who made them, are in the Death Metal Album Cover Artists, and the broader tradition they belong to is set out in death metal artwork.
