Signifying Death

Death Metal and Baudrillard's "Hyperreality" (or why I like Carcass more than Cannibal Corpse)

Death kills the author

In the conclusion of his essay,  “Baudrillard, DeLillo's ‘White Noise," and the End of Heroic Narrative,” which explores the intersection between Don Delillo’s novel White Noise and the theoretical work of Jean Baudrillard, academic Leonard Wilcox defines the society that Delillo has created as being:

“where the fear of death, like other aspects of the deep structures of subjectivity, is being transformed into images, codes, simulations, and charismatic spectacle.”

In other words, this society, the America of the 1980’s, is one in which the finitude of life and its eclipse in death, are erased by a culture that has become thoroughly artificial and simulated. Death comes to signify nothing.

And while Delillo was writing White Noise, Baudrillard was writing about American society in the same terms. It was a country that he declares to be “neither dream nor reality” but “a hyperreality” where all connection to the real had been lost in a series of simulations, each eliding the other.

Against the background of this hyperreality—and partly in reaction to it—a musical genre emerged that would strike fear in the hearts of parents, teachers, and clergy: Death Metal. In both America and Europe, bands like Death, Necrophagist, Bolt Thrower, and Obituary formed who pushed the sonic possibilities of rock and roll to its limits, matching extreme music with graphic lyrics. Artists in this genre, along with the many rabid fans who bought their albums, discovered a release from the artificiality of western society in Death Metal’s embrace and glorification of death in all its forms. It was a genre that cut straight through the heart of the hyperreality that had stripped modern life of its meaning and took solace in vicious exploration of death and all its signifiers.

However, not all explorations of death are alike. While some artists in the genre intelligently deconstructed taboo themes, others merely revealed in the gore. Two bands exemplify these different styles – Carcass, of Liverpool, UK, and Cannibal Corpse, of Buffalo, New York. Examining them both can illustrate how the hyperreality of mainstream American society, as characterized by Baudrillard, manages to infect and subvert even the most subterranean and gruesome aspects of American culture.

By the mid 1980s, Heavy Metal was fast, loud, and technical. Bands like Metallica, Slayer, and Exodus had taken the heavy sound and occult lyrical content of British Heavy Metal and accelerated it to breakneck speeds. But it wasn’t along before a younger generation came along and pushed metal into deeper, darker places.

Formed in Liverpool in 1986, Carcass pioneered the use of extremely graphic lyrics in their compositions, bringing a new element to a genre that was already stretching the bounds of sonic possibility. Beginning with their album Reek of Putrefaction, they took the extremity one step further. With songs titled “Genital Grinder,” Vomited Anal Tract,” and “Festerday,” they introduced a new dimension of depravity to a genre that reveled in the macabre and disturbed. However, beneath the veneer of violence and death, there was a delicate examination of the politics surrounding the consumption of meat.

A perfect example of Carcasses’ ironic depictions of the violence inherent in meat-eating can be found on their second album Symphonies of Sickness. The lead track “Reek of Putrefaction” describes in nauseating detail the process of decomposition through which a corpse passes. The listener is put in the place of one who enjoys this process, who is “inhaling the dank smells / As [they] gouge out the dripping innards with glee / Succumbing to a translucid state / As [they] sniff the aroma of necropsy.” As one reads these lyrics, practically unintelligible in the songs themselves, they are forced to confront the natural process of decomposition which all flesh undergoes, articulated in the foulest possible language.

These lyrics, so extreme, do not exist merely to “gross out” the listener, but force them to confront what Baudrillard calls the “omnipresent cult of the body” and the obsession with a death that “has at all times to be prevented.” Once challenged by these lyrics, the listener is forced to reckon with not only their own mortality but mortality in general. They are compelled to look at rotting flesh, human or otherwise, as the sum of violence and the absence of life. Furthermore, they are subjected to depictions of the consumption of this rotting flesh. The average listener will, of course, react in disgust to the idea of eating rotting flesh. Implicit in such depraved lyrics, then, is the question: why eat meat at all, if it is so foul? The difference between a cooked steak and a “maturating corpse” is only a matter of degrees. The nausea that Carcass provokes with their lyrics cross the boundaries of horror and becomes political. The listener has a choice: to continue to eat meat, despite the violence and foulness contained within, or abstain and elect a lifestyle Carcass considered more sustainable.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, Death Metal was put through the wringer of American Hyperreality. Founded in Buffalo, New York in 1988, Cannibal Corpse took the extremity of Death Metal to a place somewhere beyond the pale. With songs like “I Cum Blood,” “Fucked with a Knife,” and “Meat Hook Sodomy,” they pushed the graphic of nature of Death Metal beyond the anatomical grotesqueries of Carcass and into a realm of unhinged violence and perversity.

The obvious consequence of writing such songs was controversial media coverage and accusations of glamorizing violence or desensitizing the youth. In a 2004 interview, when asked about the violent nature of their lyrics, the band’s key composer George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher replied:

We don't sing about politics. We don't sing about religion. We sing about stuff that - basically, all our songs are short stories that, if anyone would so choose, they could convert it into a horror movie. Really. That's all it is. We love horror movies. We like gruesome scary movies, and we want the lyrics to be like that. Yeah, it's about killing people, but it's not promoting it at all. Basically these are fictional stories and that's it.

In contrast to Carcass, whose songs provoke questions about the ethics of eating meat and consequences of violence, Cannibal Corpse is writing music that is little more than “horror movies,” and despite being “about killing people… it’s not promoting it at all.” Far from having any message, their music merely revels in the surface level spectacle of violence. It’s music perfect for Mass Consumer America, what Baudrillard calls “the land of the ‘just as it is.’” There is no message, there is no deeper meaning, merely songs about “killing people”.

In this brief post it’s not possible to navigate all the complexities that surround the genre of Death Metal and its relation to Baudrillard’s examination of a hyperreal America. However, it should be clear that there is something about mass consumerism, the sort at which we Americans excel, and its refusal to push beyond surface level meaning, that penetrates even the murkiest depths of our cultural output and renders it a simulation. Even the strongest of signifiers – death – is corrupted by the artificiality of mass American culture.

Carcass, carrying on a European tradition of Modernism and cultural critique, is able to transform the violence of death into a political interrogation of our relationship with meat. Like all good art, there is a message, even if it is buried beneath layers of putrid effluvia. Cannibal Corpse, on the other hand, has fallen victim to the hollow celebration of illusion which is unique to mass American culture. Their depictions of violence are not transformed by a search for meaning, rather they obscure the true meaningfulness of death beneath the splatter of spectacle and simulation