Thrash metal is a Cold War artefact. Not in the loose sense that it happened during the Cold War, but in the specific sense that its subject matter, its urgency and a good deal of its temperament come directly from a five year window in which a large number of young people in America and West Germany genuinely expected to be killed by a weapon they would never see.
Line the two chronologies up and the correspondence is uncomfortable. The genre forms in the most frightening period of the arms race, peaks in the year of Chernobyl, and comes apart within two years of the Soviet Union.
1983, which is the whole argument
Take one year. In March 1983 the American president described the Soviet Union as an evil empire in a public speech, and later the same month announced a missile defence programme the press immediately named after a film. In September a Soviet interceptor shot down a Korean airliner with 269 people aboard. Through the autumn, Pershing II missiles were deployed into West Germany over enormous public opposition. In November, a NATO command exercise called Able Archer was read on the other side as possible preparation for a first strike, and the world came closer to a nuclear exchange than the public knew at the time.
And on 20 November 1983, the American Broadcasting Company showed The Day After, a television film about a nuclear attack on Kansas, to an audience estimated at around a hundred million people. Britain's equivalent, Threads, followed in September 1984 and is considerably worse to watch.
Kill 'Em All was released in July of that year. Show No Mercy in December. Whatever else the founding records of this genre were reacting to, they were made by teenagers living through that.
A genre made by teenagers who had watched a hundred million people be shown what a warhead does to Kansas.
What the songs actually said
Nuclear war is the founding subject and it is everywhere. Metallica opened Ride The Lightning in 1984 with Fight Fire With Fire, four minutes of mutually assured destruction, and returned to it on Blackened in 1988. Megadeth built most of a career on the arms trade, and Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? in 1986 treats it as a shop staffed by people who will not be doing the dying.
One band made it the entire address. Nuclear Assault, formed in New York in 1984 by Dan Lilker after he left Anthrax, put it in the name and delivered on it record after record, and their subject was never the spectacle of the bomb. It was the ordinary institutional stupidity that might drop it, which is a considerably more frightening thing to write about and a much harder one to sell.
Sacred Reich wrote about American intervention in Central America. Sodom gave a whole 1989 album to the defoliant sprayed over Vietnam and the illnesses that followed. None of that is metaphor and none of it is fantasy.
Why the Germans meant it differently
An American teenager in 1984 was frightened of a war that would arrive as a light on the horizon. A West German teenager was living on the ground it would be fought over, and the difference is audible.
Kreator, Sodom and Destruction all came out of the Ruhr, the industrial belt that had been bombed flat within living memory of their parents and which would have been among the first targets in any European exchange. The Pershing IIs went into their country over the largest peace demonstrations in its post war history, and the argument about them was on the news every night of their adolescence.
Tom Angelripper of Sodom worked in a coal mine. That is not colour, it is the point: the German bands were writing about war from inside a working industrial landscape that had already been destroyed once and was scheduled to be a battlefield again, and their records are murkier, heavier and considerably less playful than the American ones for reasons that are not purely musical.
| Year | The world | The genre |
|---|---|---|
| 1979 | Soviet forces enter Afghanistan | Motorhead release Overkill |
| 1983 | Evil empire speech, KAL 007, Pershing II, Able Archer, The Day After | Kill 'Em All, Show No Mercy |
| 1984 | Threads is broadcast in Britain | Ride The Lightning, Fistful Of Metal |
| 1986 | Chernobyl | Master Of Puppets, Reign In Blood, Peace Sells, Pleasure To Kill |
| 1987 | The INF Treaty is signed | Among The Living, The Legacy |
| 1989 | The Berlin Wall opens | Agent Orange, Beneath The Remains |
| 1991 | The Soviet Union is dissolved | The commercial collapse, and Nevermind |
What the other side was listening to
The countries the missiles were pointed at had their own thrash bands, and their situation is the part of this story nobody in the West knew about at the time. Poland is the clearest case. The authorities there had worked out by 1980 that a large rock festival was a safety valve rather than a threat, and Jarocin ran annually with official tolerance, drawing tens of thousands of young people to watch music that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.
Out of that came a genuine Polish metal scene, and by the middle of the decade the country had bands playing the same music as the Ruhr, on worse equipment, under a government that could have stopped them and chose not to. Katowice had a metal festival of its own from 1986. Hungary and Czechoslovakia ran smaller versions of the same arrangement.
The point is not that the Eastern Bloc was tolerant, because it was not, and a list of forbidden Western groups was circulated in 1985 with a reason printed beside each name. The point is that the same music was being made on both sides of the line the songs were about, by teenagers who could not hear each other, and who would not meet until the line was gone.
Chernobyl, and the shift from war to failure
April 1986 changed the register slightly and it is worth noticing. Until then the fear in these records is of a decision: somebody presses something, deliberately or by mistake. After Chernobyl the fear widens to include the ordinary incompetence of large institutions, the reactor that fails because a procedure was wrong and a shift was tired.
That is a different anxiety and a more durable one, and the records of the later 1980s carry more of it. Environmental collapse, institutional rot, the machine failing rather than the enemy attacking, and by Rust In Peace in 1990 the subject is as much the apparatus itself as anything it might be pointed at.
Did the peace kill the genre
The dates invite the question and the honest answer is: partly, and not in the simple way. The Wall opened in November 1989, the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, and thrash's commercial collapse runs from 1991 to 1993. That is close enough to notice and too close to dismiss.
But the mechanism is not that listeners stopped being frightened and therefore stopped buying records. The bands had already been coming apart for individual reasons since 1987, the American industry's shopping list changed for reasons of its own, and the European audience, which had lived closer to the front line than anybody, kept turning up throughout the 1990s.
What did change is harder to measure and probably real. A genre whose central subject has been resolved has to find another one, and the thrash records of the middle 1990s are audibly searching. Personal subjects, internal subjects, anger with no external object. Some of that is bands getting older. Some of it is the disappearance of the thing they had been shouting at.
Which is why the songs have aged better than they should have. The missiles were never really the subject; institutions making catastrophic decisions on behalf of people with no say in them was the subject, and that has not gone anywhere, as the chapter this belongs to keeps demonstrating. How the people whose job it was to explain all this to the public actually handled it is How the Mainstream Press Covered Thrash.
