UPDATE: Slayer wants all of you “snowflakes” to respect the president, please
By now, it’s common knowledge that Slayer really isn’t the band to turn to when in need of a thoughtful, nuanced dialogue. Though it’d be easy to see the band as a left-leaning entity—what with all those songs about war being awful and, you know, the whole Satan thing—the band’s had a long history of being dogged for its conservative nature, and not unjustly. It began with one of the band’s best known songs, “Angel Of Death.” Serving as the opening track to the band’s iconic 1986 album Reign In Blood, “Angel Of Death” is a song about the atrocities committed by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz concentration camp. Though it’s easy to outright decry it, it’s far from the most reasoned way to approach the atrocities committed in concentration camps throughout the Holocaust.
The band would catch further heat in 1996 for its cover of Minor Threat’s most misguided song, “Guilty Of Being White.” Famously, the band changed the final line to “Guilty of being right,” which took an already dodgy song and spun it into a white nationalist anthem. Through it all, Slayer has time and again denied that the band is at all racist, citing that “Angel Of Death” is akin to a documentary, or using the fact that vocalist-bassist Tom Araya is of Chilean descent as proof of the band’s ideals. Anyway, here’s a photo of Slayer’s late guitarist Jeff Hanneman, who famously wrote “Angel Of Death” giving the white power salute.
So it should come as no surprise that Slayer would post this photo on Instagram on Inauguration Day: