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Music

All Day Permanent Red: Halloween Edition

A brief discussion of Satan, followed by the most metal Halloween costumes ever of all time.

The scariest thing about Halloween is how many bags of candy corn I can consume on the night in question. I usually get very few trick-or-treaters buzzing my apartment, although one year I didn’t buy candy and had to keep shouting into my intercom, “¿Que? No entiendo Inglés.” But this is a column about metal, and metal loves Halloween, because: Satan.

Now, Satan, as Sonic Youth put it, is boring. But Old Scratch has been haunting the chapel of rock since the blues was “the devil’s music.” For the blues, as for metal, the devil was a metaphor. The legend that Robert Johnson sold his soul at the crossroads seems to have arisen among white music journalists in the 1960s, not among Johnson’s contemporaries. (I guess it was easier for white critics to believe that poor blacks in the south would have to attribute Johnson’s preternatural playing to the preternatural than it was difficult for poor blacks in the south to believe that Johnson was a genius. Yes, I know I just wrote that sentence, but I’m on a deadline here.) But the association of the blues with the devil is undeniable, even if we tend to read that association with rather less irony than it possessed for the music’s practitioners and fans. (Speaking of irony, at least of the Morissettian variety, you have to love that metal’s unfortunate Nazi fringe is playing a variation on music that was invented by African-Americans.)

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As the blues became rock and roll, the trope remained. I remember, as a child, being warned that KISS stood for “Knights in Satan’s Service,” AC/DC for “After Christ, Devil’s Children” (which doesn’t even make sense). The Beatles were said to have hidden Satanic messages on the White Album. Even Sammy Davis Jr. got in on the action (see this piece—did you know he’d owned part of the Factory? I didn’t). During my extensive research for this article, which involved googling “rock and roll” + “Satan,” I even unearthed a harrowing item entitled “The Dixie Chicks Are of the Devil.”

Black metal bands, of course, are the Sataniest majesties of all. Erik Danielsson, of honest-we-really-truly-worship-Satan-you-guys black-metal PETA members Watain, put it to me this way (in an interview for my forthcoming Harper’s essay “A Poet’s Guide to Metal,” plug):

Metal, and Black Metal especially, is the form of music through which Diabolical energies flow with the most swiftness and potency. The symbols and the imagery are things used to further ease this flow of currents. Watain, being a Black Metal band, is for me a tool to come to know these energies even deeper, to become one with them. We charge our music with what we get in return from them, until every note and tone becomes a rasp to the fetters that still bind us to the earthly prison.

This is interesting in part because it suggests that black metal is as hung up on authenticity as gangsta rap is, except instead of trying to convince people you sling dope, you try to convince them you channel the Evil One.

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Since many black-metal bands paint their faces and dress like idiots all year round, I originally wanted this Halloween edition of All Day Permanent Red to be a secret history of corpse-paint, Greil-Marcus-style, in which I traced its use to a proto-anarchist Protestant agrarian commune in seventeenth-century England or something. Alas, the trail seems to go cold with Arthur Brown.

Instead, I’ll conclude with my suggestions for some metal-themed costumes. If you actually use one of my stupid ideas for your Halloween costume this year—and post a link to photographic evidence in the comments—I will print your name in a very metal font in the next column, unless I forget.

GUY ON COVER OF PARANOID

The album cover features a man in red with a sword,” says Wikipedia. Yes, and Moby-Dick features a guy with one leg and a whale. Anyway, the man is wearing a yellow top. And a space helmet. And is carrying a shield.

INQUISITION VOCALIST DAGON'S VOICE

This one is a creative project. When I hear Dagon singing, for instance on the amazing new “Darkness Flows towards Unseen Horizons,” I imagine an old-man fetus who lives in a jar. In a tree. Or if some anthropomorphic viruses from cold-remedy commercials started a black metal band. There are no wrong answers.

CRYING COLON

A tribute to Cryptopsy’s Lord Worm, who sings the most poignant line in all of death metal: “Colon, cry for me.”

RAZOR BLADE IN AN ORANGE

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Dress up as a razor blade and hide in an orange, because a razor blade is a piece of metal and putting one in an orange is very evil. Alternative version: go as one of those assholes who hand out oranges and boxes of raisins to trick-or-treaters. Because that is truly evil.

BLACK METAL FONT

Just strap on a bunch of twigs and brambles and you’re good to go.

Amy Grant.

FLAMING PUMPKIN SCARECROW FROM THE COVER OF SONIC YOUTH'S BAD MOON RISING

This isn’t a metal album, but “Halloween” is pretty creepy. Anyway, isn’t Thurston in a black metal band now?

THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

Dressing up as a number is underrated. See William Blake’s watercolor The Number of the Beast Is 666, from the same series that inspired Tom Noonan and Ralph Fiennes to murder families during full moons.

Michael Robbins has tweeted exactly 666 times. See for yourself - @alienvsrobbins