Four men who were not a band went into a studio for three days while waiting for something else, and made the record that most of crossover and a substantial part of groove metal was built on. Then they spent forty years being asked about the lyrics.
How it happened
Anthrax had finished Spreading the Disease and were waiting. Scott Ian had been drawing a character in a notebook and writing lyrics around it. He, Charlie Benante and Dan Lilker, plus a roadie named Billy Milano on vocals, booked studio time and recorded the whole thing in about three days.
There was no plan, no expectation and no label pressure, which is a substantial part of why the record sounds the way it does. Nobody involved thought anybody would hear it.
What it invented
The crossover template, essentially complete. Metal riffs at hardcore tempo, songs of forty seconds, deliberate silliness alongside genuine aggression, and the mosh part written and named on the spot.
That last item is the important one. A section written at half tempo specifically so a room can act together is a device that has since shaped every heavy live show, and it comes from this record more than from any other single source.
It sold enormously by the standards of anything in this genre in 1985, and its rhythmic ideas are traceable through New York hardcore, through groove metal and into metalcore.
The lyrics
This is the part that has to be addressed rather than skirted, and it is genuinely unresolved.
The band's position has always been that the record was a deliberate offence machine aimed at everybody without exception, that the persona was satire, and that anybody taking it at face value had missed the point. They have pointed to the range of targets and to the obvious absurdity of much of it.
Plenty of listeners, then and since, have concluded that a joke told in that register does the same work as the thing it claims to mock, whatever the intent, and that the title track in particular is not defensible as satire because satire requires a target and this one reads as an endorsement.
Both positions have been argued in public for four decades by people acting in good faith. This history is not going to settle them, and any account that pretends the argument is closed in either direction is not being straight with you.
| Element | Where it went |
|---|---|
| The mosh part | Every heavy live show since |
| Forty second songs with metal riffs | Crossover, and later powerviolence |
| Deliberate silliness alongside aggression | Municipal Waste and the modern wave |
| The rhythmic ideas | New York hardcore, groove metal, metalcore |
| Dan Lilker | Nuclear Assault, formed straight afterwards |
| The lyrics | An argument that has never ended |
The Anthrax connection
Three quarters of S.O.D. were Anthrax members, and the two bands ran in parallel for a decade. Benante wrote a substantial amount of Anthrax's guitar material as well as drumming; Ian was the band's principal writer; Lilker had been Anthrax's original bass player before leaving.
What S.O.D. gave Anthrax was permission to be funny, which is the quality that got them dismissed at the time and has aged better than almost anything else in the genre. Among the Living is unimaginable without this record having happened first.
What to do with it now
Listen to it as a document, know what is on it, and decide for yourself. It is genuinely important, it is genuinely influential, and one song on it is genuinely indefensible to a substantial number of people whose objections are not unreasonable.
Pretending the record does not matter is dishonest. Pretending the argument about it is settled is also dishonest. Both things can be true of the same forty minutes.
The record that took the same trade in the opposite direction, from hardcore into southern heaviness, is Corrosion of Conformity's "Animosity", and the wider account is in Crossover: Where Thrash Met Hardcore.
What happened afterwards
The band was never intended to continue and continued anyway, sporadically, over two decades. There were reunion records, live albums and a follow up in 1999 that nobody defends, and each return reopened the same argument.
Dan Lilker left almost immediately to form Nuclear Assault, which is the band that took the same ingredients and did something serious with them. Billy Milano went on to M.O.D. and spent thirty years being the most confrontational figure in this corner of the genre.
Ian and Benante went back to Anthrax and made Among the Living, which is the record where the humour and the aggression finally sit together properly.
Why it still gets played
Because the music is genuinely excellent, which is the uncomfortable part. Twenty odd songs in half an hour, riffs that are better than they need to be, a rhythm section operating at a level the format did not require, and an energy that no amount of later imitation has matched.
That is precisely why the argument has never resolved. A bad record with objectionable lyrics is easy to set aside. A record that invented a device every heavy band now uses, made by musicians who went on to matter enormously, is not, and everybody arguing about it knows that.
The record in context
One more thing worth saying, because it explains rather than excuses. Nineteen eighty five in New York produced a small amount of music that was deliberately built to offend everybody in the room, and the participants regarded that as the point.
That was a live tradition as much as a recorded one, and it belonged to a scene where the audience and the bands were the same twenty people and everybody understood the terms. The problem with a record is that it leaves the room. Forty years later it is heard by people who have no access to the context, no relationship with the participants, and no reason to extend anybody the benefit of the doubt.
Whether that is the listener's problem or the record's is precisely the argument, and it is a real one rather than a manufactured one.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. The account of the sessions follows the band members' published statements. The characterisation of the lyrical controversy summarises positions taken in print by both the band and its critics and does not adjudicate between them.
