In the summer of 1986 a record company that had built its reputation on being unshockable listened to an album it had paid for and decided it wanted no part of it. The album was Reign In Blood. The objection was to the first three minutes. And the way the dispute was settled tells you more about how censorship actually works than any hearing in Washington ever did, because nothing was banned, nobody went to court, and the record still came out.
How Slayer ended up on a hip hop label
The arrangement was strange before anything went wrong with it. Slayer had made two albums for Metal Blade and were, by 1986, the most extreme band with any kind of distribution in America. Rick Rubin, who was producing Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys and running Def Jam out of New York, wanted to make a metal record and wanted to make it with them.
What he brought was not a metal producer's instincts. Rubin stripped the reverb out, pushed everything forward and dry, cut the running time to the bone, and produced something that sounds less like the metal records of 1986 than like a hip hop record made out of guitars: all attack, no room, nothing decorative anywhere. Ten songs, under twenty nine minutes, released on 7 October 1986.
The first three minutes
The album opens with Angel Of Death, written by Jeff Hanneman, and its subject is Josef Mengele and the experiments he carried out on prisoners at Auschwitz. It is written the way Slayer wrote everything: flat, specific, without commentary, and without any of the framing that would tell a listener what to feel about it.
That absence is the whole difficulty and it was deliberate. Hanneman's position, then and afterwards, was that he had read about the war, that what he read was what he put in the song, and that describing an atrocity is not endorsing it. The band have been consistent about this for forty years. The counter argument is equally simple: a song with no moral position on Mengele leaves the moral position to the listener, and some listeners will fill it in wrongly.
Both of those things can be true at once, which is why the argument has never resolved and why it is still worth having. What is not in dispute is that nothing in the lyric is sympathetic, and that the band have never been shown to hold the views they were accused of holding.
Columbia said no
Def Jam did not distribute its own records. Columbia did, and Columbia read Angel Of Death and refused to be involved with the album.
Consider what that decision actually was. Not a legal judgement, not a regulatory finding, not a response to any complaint from the public, because the public had not heard it yet. A corporation looked at a lyric sheet and concluded that the reputational cost of having its trucks carry the record exceeded whatever it stood to make. That is a commercial calculation and it was entirely within its rights, and it is also, in effect, a veto exercised by a company with no interest in the music, before anyone outside the building had a chance to form a view.
A corporation looked at a lyric sheet and concluded the reputational cost exceeded whatever it stood to make.
Geffen took it, and hid
Rubin found another route and Geffen agreed to handle the American release. Then Geffen did something that gives the whole episode its flavour: they put the record out without their logo on it, and kept it off their promotional schedules.
So the album reached the shops through a company that would not say it was theirs. It is difficult to think of a clearer illustration of how this works in practice. There was no ban. There was no law. There was a sequence of private refusals and partial refusals, each individually defensible, which added up to a record that was harder to buy, impossible to advertise and attached to nobody's name.
| Stage | Who | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| Signed and produced | Rick Rubin, Def Jam | Made the record |
| Distribution | Columbia | Refused, over Angel Of Death |
| Alternative distribution | Geffen | Agreed, without its logo on the sleeve |
| Promotion | Geffen | Kept it off the release schedule |
| Retail | Chains | Many declined to stock it |
| Outcome | The record | Charted, sold steadily, never stopped selling |
Twenty nine minutes, at full price
There was a second, duller objection running alongside the moral one, and it came from retail. Reign In Blood runs under twenty nine minutes. In 1986 that was awkward: it is too long to price as a mini album and short enough that a shop manager could reasonably expect complaints from anybody who had paid for a full one.
The band's answer was that the record was exactly as long as it needed to be, and four decades of listeners have agreed with them. But the brevity was a genuine commercial irritation at the time, and it compounded the distribution problem: a difficult record, unpromoted, from a company that would not name itself, and short measure into the bargain.
It worked, and then it did not
In the short term the refusal did what refusals do. The album was harder to find than it should have been and Slayer got no support from the machine that normally sells records.
In every other respect it was the most valuable thing that ever happened to them. Reign In Blood reached the American charts, which nothing of theirs had done before, and it has never gone out of print or out of the conversation since. Forty years later it is on every list of the most important metal albums ever made, and a meaningful part of the reason people first sought it out is that they had been told it was the record too dangerous to distribute.
Every act of suppression in popular music runs this risk and most of them lose. Telling a seventeen year old that an album is unavailable because adults find it unbearable is not a deterrent, it is the most persuasive recommendation available.
It happened again, twenty years later
The mechanism did not go away with the 1980s. In 2006 Slayer released Christ Illusion, with cover artwork by Larry Carroll that drew objections from Catholic groups in Mumbai, and EMI's Indian arm withdrew the album, recalled the stock from shops and destroyed it.
Same shape, different decade and different continent. No court, no legislation, no ban in any formal sense: a company weighing the cost of a controversy against the revenue of a metal album, and reaching the obvious conclusion. The album remained available everywhere else and was later reissued with different artwork, which is the other thing that always happens.
What it settled, and what it did not
It settled the question of who decides. Not legislators, who would have lost in court, and not the public, who had not heard it. Distributors and retailers, quietly, on commercial grounds, with no appeal and no obligation to explain. That is still the mechanism, and it is still the reason a modern equivalent would be a platform decision rather than a legal one.
What it did not settle is the argument about the song itself, and that argument is healthier for being unresolved. A band that writes about atrocity without a moral frame has made a choice, and a listener is entitled to find it insufficient. What nobody is entitled to do is pretend the choice was made carelessly. The rest of what this music was accused of is this part of the history, and the sleeves that had to be reprinted before shops would take them are Thrash Album Covers That Got Banned or Changed.
