Death Metal Is Not Satanic

One of the more bizarre charges against metal or rock music, especially "death metal," known for its use of a vocal style called the death growl, is that its affiliation with darker, more aggressive or horror-like imagery marks it as satanic.  These accusations are made by those who either do not understand metal music or by those who are content to slander it as long as this gives their preferences a greater social influence.  Just as first-person shooter video games and erotic literature can be targets of slander due to controversial elements, death metal receives all sorts of unfavorable attention in some circles.  This subgenre's broad lyrical and visual styles lend themselves very well to distinctively more intense themes than more mainstream kinds of music, to be sure.  It just also gets misrepresented by some outsiders.

There are certainly death metal bands that consistently use atheistic, anarchistic lyrics along with macabre imagery to convey an ideological stance (like the songs of Arch Enemy, featured below), but does imagery associated with satanic concepts make a band "satanic" by default?  No, for the same reason that lyrics that might reference Christian themes or terms does not make a song, band, or genre Christian.  The metal group Disturbed included a cross on the cover of its album Believe.  Does this imagery (which appears in an amalgam of symbols associated with other religions) make Disturbed a Christian band?  Not at all!  Just one example should make it entirely clear that borrowing imagery does not equate to the genuine personal embrace of a worldview.

Photo credit: acase1968 on VisualHunt.com

There is also the conflation of satanic imagery--images explicitly intended to connect with the figure of Satan or ideas associated with him for shock value or as personal expression--with dark, somber, or eerie visuals.  An image can be "dark" in that it shows some kind of entity or environment related to something like death, yet intentionally macabre images have no automatic overlap with the portrayal of demonic figures, whether the figures are shown out of sincere appreciation of Satan as a figure or not.  Satanic is not the same as macabre; demonic is not the same as dark!  Even an album cover or band set that shows images intended to be of demonic entities does not necessarily mean that the band believes in demons, and believing that they exist would not necessarily mean that they are being regarded fondly.

Any Christian who fears finding death metal artistically appealing--or even thematically appealing in some cases--is not in any danger of approving of demonic ideas by any means by listening to or enjoying the music!  "Satanic" and "demonic" are strong words that call for much more careful applications than some people are willing to wait for.  The charge of having a genuine worldview link to the celebration of demons is even out of place when it comes to the kind of anarchist atheism of a metal group like Arch Enemy, for an atheist would not be calling upon or unironically celebrating any demons tied to religious theism.  As outright metaphysically and epistemologically asinine as atheism is under rationalistic analysis, it is not honest to think of even this as inherently demonic in origin, much less something that is simply dark in nature.