Even in a nation where 12 schoolchildren a day are killed by guns, the death of Elyse Pahler stood out from the welter of cold statistics. The adventurous 15-year-old Californian thought she was sneaking into a eucalyptus grove to share a marijuana joint with three boys — but they had other intentions.
First they choked her with a belt; then they took turns with a hunting knife to slash and stab her more than a dozen times; and as she fell to the ground, praying and crying out for her mother, the three friends stamped their feet on the back of her neck.
Not long afterwards, according to a lawsuit, Joseph Fiorella, then 14, and Jacob Delashmutt and Royce Casey, both 16 at the time, returned to where Elyse had bled to death and had sex with her corpse. That was five years ago in San Luis Obispo and now her killers are serving sentences of 25 years to life. They were problem kids who devoted most of their leisure time to marijuana, methamphetamines and LSD, but they had something else swirling around in their heads. This was death-metal music, and specifically the records made by Slayer, the veteran pioneers of thrash from Huntington Beach, California.
The band’s lyrics might be taken to have a risible, cartoonish, flavour about them. Try these from Kill Again: “Homicidal maniac / Trapped in mortal solitude / Lift the gleaming blade / Slice her flesh to shreds / Watch the blood flow free.” While there are those who regard these words as a vehicle for no more genuine menace than a Robbie Williams video, David Pahler (53) and his wife, Lisanne (43), are not among them. They believe that Slayer’s paeans to serial killers and necrophilia contributed to their daughter’s death and are suing the band and the companies that have distributed their music.
“This case isn’t about art,” says David Pahler. “It’s about marketing. Slayer and others in the industry have developed sophisticated strategies to sell death-metal music to adolescent boys. They don’t care whether the violent, mysogynistic message in these lyrics causes children to do harmful things. They couldn’t care less what their fans did to our daughter. All they care about is money.”
For their part, Slayer are not talking about the case. But two years ago Paul Bostaph, the drummer, said: “They’re trying to blame the whole thing on us. That’s such nonsense. If you’re gonna do something stupid like that, you should get in trouble for it.” He supported Slayer’s case by observing that the killers had not done their homework properly: they had failed to follow the rituals of necrophilia sacrifice set out in the songs.
The Pahlers are simply the latest bereaved parents to try to hold accountable purveyors of popular, and not so popular, culture for the deaths of their children. Their predecessors include the parents of a 19-year-old who commited suicide after listening to Ozzy Osbourne and the families of children shot in a Kentucky schoolyard who tried to sue the makers of video games. Both cases foundered in the path of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression.
But the California lawsuit is different. Here the lawyers for the Pahlers hope to body-swerve the First Amendment by relying on the argument that the companies sold material harmful to minors in the knowledge that the music’s violent creed was simply a tool to sell records. “The distribution and marketing of this obscene and harmful material to adolescent males constituted aiding and abetting of the criminal acts described in this complaint,” says the lawsuit. “None of the vicious crimes committed against Elyse Marie Pahler would have occurred without the intentional marketing strategy of the death-metal band Slayer.”
Attorneys for the band and the music companies — including Def Jam Music, Columbia Records, Sony Music Entertainment and American Recordings — say that Slayer’s work is ring-fenced by the right to free speech enshrined in the Constitution. No one can be sure that this guarantee is worth what it was. Next month at the Grammy Awards it will become known whether the music industry has found a way to avoid giving one of four awards to the confrontational rapper Eminem, variously hailed as a bigot and the most vital young artist in the US or anywhere else. No sooner had he been nominated than there was a foretaste of the ructions to follow, whether he wins or not.
“We’re not really endorsing him,” said Michael Greene of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. “There are very few people in this organisation who wouldn’t agree that Eminem’s record is probably the most repugnant album of the year. However, the craft around it … it’s a remarkable recording.”
Eminem says his lyrics are not meant to be taken literally, any more than Slayer wish to be certified as necrophilia salesmen. “We’re part evil,” says Slayer singer Tom Araya. “If we were really evil, we would be doing everything we’re writing about.” This distinction does not impress David Pahler. “What are we talking about here? We have children ending their lives because the lyrics say they’re worthless. It’s about money. That’s the driving force. I can’t imagine the adults in the band, in the distribution end, really think this so-called music or the lyrics are good.”
Advocates of the First Amendment believe the Slayer case could be a turning point and are not over-confident about the outcome. “We’re kidding ourselves if we don’t think the cultural climate affects judges and their decisions,” says Peter Eliasberg of the American Civil Liberties Union. “We’re getting to the point, if we let these cases go forward, that someone can say [the blaxploitation movie] Shaft glorifies vigilantism.
There is a really serious danger to decide to not make a movie or not write a book.” That danger, as he perceives it, was not diminished by a report from the US surgeon general’s office that identified a ”scientific link between graphically violent TV programming and increased aggression in children”. The paper, commissioned after the Columbine shootings, says: ”Research to date justifies sustained efforts to curb the adverse effects of media violence on youths. Although our knowledge is incomplete, it is sufficient to develop a coherent public health approach to violence prevention that builds upon what is known, even as more research is under way.”
Perhaps the starkest if not the best evidence, though, comes not via reports, but rather from Elyse’s killers. Delashmutt, now a 21-year-old, says: “It was harmless at first. We used to smoke weed, play guitar, kick it. I was just into heavy-metal music.” But Fiorello had taken his hobby further. “It gets inside your head,” he told a police counsellor a year after the girl’s death. “It’s almost embarrassing that I was so influenced by the music. The music started to influence the way I looked at things.”
Delashmutt says that one day Fiorella asked “if I’d be down for sacrificing a, whatever, a virgin. I didn’t take it seriously. I said, ‘whatever.'” Slayer are in Canada this week, working on the record they hope will become the sixth gold disc by the outfit who have awarded themselves the title of “the world’s most grisly band”. “They’re the nicest people,” says Chris Ferrara, their long-serving publicist. “It’s a matter of opinion how you take in the music, but I think it’s fiction, period. They’re nice, conservative people, believe it or not.”