SLAYER Guitarist Says Band Were Censored On Jimmy Kimmel Live!
February 3, 2007, 17 years ago
SLAYER guitarist Kerry King spoke to Ashley Brown from the Kansascity.com recently about a number of topics including the band's recent appearance on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live! (January 19th).
The producers put in a last-minute gag order on 'Jihad', a song from their new album Christ Illusion. The song’s lyrics are typically grim: “I walk sifting through the blood, besieged to fear, await the coming of God!” singer Tom Araya roars.
“Anytime you do TV, you’re at the will of whoever owns the station,” King says. “We said, ‘Cool, we wanna play 'Jihad',’ and the day before, they came with 40 percent of the lyrics deleted from the song. We were probably 10 minutes from backing out but said, ‘Let’s just go do it.’?”'Jihad' isn’t the first Slayer song to be interpreted as an apologia for radicalism. With the song “Angel of Death,” about delusional and deific eugenics practitioner Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor who performed experiments on concentration camp inmates, the band unwittingly garnered acolytes among skin-headed Neo-Nazis.
“The only thing that stands out in my mind is that if it were a CNN story, it’d be totally OK. But since Slayer uses it in lyrics, we’re just the Antichrist,” says King, frustrated with all the projections by controversy-mongers.“(The song) doesn’t say, ‘We belong to Jihad now, we’re going to destroy society,’ but you’d think it did.”
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