Ninth International Day of Slayer
HOW SLAYER RE-INVENTED THE POSTMODERN WORLD
Jeff Hanneman left this world for demon realms on May 2, 2013 but the band he created along with Kerry King, Tom Araya and Dave Lombardo lives on. In fact, in the spirit of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, which posited that modern consumer society was the last stage of human history, the International Day of Slayer presents an understanding of how Slayer re-invented the postmodern world.
In 1983, people thought life was pretty much back to normal. Those 1960s, and the hedonistic 1970s, those were probably just hiccups. Science has conquered all the great fears. We have explored every ocean, climbed every mountain, even seen into space. Billions of pages of documents and books have been written. Surely we know everything. This is humanity at its peak; things can only go up from here. Right? But it seemed as if we were covering something up.
Like a demonic eye, Slayer saw past it all. A managed society created by hordes of MBAs. The positive propaganda on the television. Our assurance that we had fought moral wars and put ourselves on top through an almost religious devotion to freedom. Everything that could fixed, had been fixed, by the use of power from outside. Now in a society of love and trust we were finally together and would beat those nasty Russians and spread our Utopian vision. But the eye of Slayer stared into our soul.
Our souls exuded the faintest whiff of... decay. Fear. Moral cowardice. Emptiness. Slayer caught the trail and peered deep within. Underneath our glossy brochures, good intentions, and technology, the darkest demons of humanity roused themselves. The victims are asleep, thus now is the time to strike. Our oblivion -- out of sight, out of mind -- allowed us to hide the dark abyss within. When you peered in deeply enough into the hollows, you saw the lack of purpose and fundamental deception that we tried desperately to hide.
Fukuyama was wrong. Consumer society is not the last age of humanity. Rather, it is the last age of the old era. The darkness has won, and creeps forth to urge us to destroy. Instead of a world where every question is solved, we face a world of ambiguity. Despite having banished religion, it seems as if the old tales of things that go bump in the night might have truth to them. We are the evil that lurks in the night and our souls turn dark when exposed to the light. Slayer showed us our illusions and pierced them.
31 years after the first notes of Slayer burned themselves into a studio tape and immortal legend among Hessians everywhere, the dark vision of Slayer rises again like a phoenix. We live in times of great change and upheaval. While no one else was able to give us a guide, Slayer did, and continues to guide us into the next era.
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