Cattle Decapitation, courtesy of Bloody Disgusting
Content warning: Mentions of extreme violence in fictional contexts, transphobia, misogyny, and execution.
Death metal has always been brutal. Although I’d much rather avoid the often gratuitously violent lyrics, I can generally look past that and enjoy the musical elements. Take the infamous band Cannibal Corpse, for example, with songs such as “Hammer Smashed Face” and others I do not wish to name in a school newspaper. Their lyrics describe senseless violence in such brutal detail that I’m glad the vocals are impossible to understand.
I can look past all of this because the lyrics to these songs are about purely hypothetical situations; they are designed for shock value rather than to be a call to arms. Sadly enough, not all bands know how to separate fiction from reality. An example: the band aptly named “Cattle Decapitation.”
Cattle Decapitation uses death metal to spread a message of “social justice.” While this sounds virtuous in theory, it isn’t in practice. Cattle Decapitation’s lyrics are equally as brutal as those of Cannibal Corpse, but what was simply edginess when done by other bands is now bordering on death threats.
Probably the most disgusting example of this is the track “Forced Gender Reassignment.” The band attempts to advocate for trans rights by graphically describing mutilating and torturing a hypothetical transphobe to make them “understand” what gender dysphoria—as they, cisgender men, understand it—feels like.
The reason Cannibal Corpse can get away with this level of brutality is because their violent lyrics are not directed at anyone in particular. However, in Cattle Decapitation’s case, suddenly “I want to kill someone” turns into “I specifically want to kill transphobes so you better not be transphobic.” Not only is this deeply disgusting and immoral but it only makes the issue of trans rights worse. If someone already hates trans people, threatening them with violence is not going to change their mind.
I hate transphobia just as much as any other Ithacan; however, these violent, almost-death-threat lyrics are crossing a line and a half. Social justice should be done by humanizing the oppressed, not by dehumanizing the oppressors.
Cattle Decapitation has made many other similarly despicable songs in the name of social justice. For example, they used real-world execution audio in a track about misogyny and named an album Human Jerky.
What is almost as bad as Cattle Decapitation itself is the fact that many people look up to them as some great beacon of morality when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Glorifying violence is bad enough when the violence is against some hypothetical person, such as in the case of Cannibal Corpse, but once you threaten actual people with violence, even for a good cause, it crosses the line from edgy to full-on evil.