Hell Just Got Louder; RIP Jeff Hanneman

The man who made thrash thrive and kept rock music’s Satanic side alive has passed. Jeff Hanneman, one of the founding guitar players of SLAYER, passed away May 2. He had been in bad health for the past few years after contracting a rare illness from a spider bite.

It is not only the state of heavy metal music that wouldn’t be what it is today without Jeff Hanneman. Anyone who listens to metal, punk, hardcore or any variation thereof owes a big debt of gratitude to Hanneman, who made thrash metal faster, harder and louder than it ever was before.

Slayer is the thrash metal band that never turned away from its roots, never wrote an embarrassing love song, never apologized for singing about evil, and never gave up. While the more popular heavy metal bands of the 1980s were wearing makeup and buying hair spray futures, Hanneman was writing amazing songs that were fast and furious from beginning to end. His songs’ subject matter included necrophilia, Nazi war criminals, Satanic blood sacrifices, and other things that were evil and a lot more interesting than weeping about girls.

You remember how every heavy metal band used to have at least one slow, sappy ballad on every record? Slayer has none of those. Remember in the 1990s how heavy metal bands cut their hair to try to fit into the alternative or grunge scenes? Not Slayer.  

In the 1980s, the punk rock and heavy metal scenes often did not mix. A punk rocker would never go to a heavy metal show and metalheads were likewise required to hate punk. Slayer changed that, and Jeff Hanneman was leading the charge.

Hanneman was a punk rock fan first and gravitated to metal because he wanted to play more blistering guitar solos than the punk genre allowed at the time.

For Hanneman, the divisions that fenced in the various genres of aggressive music were arbitrary and false, and he shredded through them with gusto. When Slayer put out an album of cover songs, they weren’t classic rock songs or tribute to popular groups of the day; they were mostly hardcore punk covers from bands that were little known at the time.

You’d rarely see a metal musician wearing a punk rock t-shirt until Jeff Hanneman did. And if Hanneman did it, you couldn’t argue it wasn’t heavy metal. He opened up aggressive music in that way and helped popularize the many great crossover bands that tread the line between punk rock and heavy metal.

[Author’s Note: For the past decade, I have regularly brought deviled eggs to parties and family gatherings and they have become quite popular among family and friends. My deviled eggs are called Double Satanic Deviled Eggs, and every time I make them, I must at some point listen to SLAYER.]