Litany of Miseries

When you watch or read a lot of interviews with heavy metal artists of the eighties, you will often find that they often proclaimed themselves as not being one of those bands who write about Satan, dungeons & dragons or babes & cars; but usually the artist’s band does something that other bands did with their song-writing. This is either because they had either read the same news stories (thus parallel thinking), the same books or the same lyrics of other bands. No matter what the song titles are on the back, you will find (especially in the case of thrash metal bands) that the range in subject matters are the same regardless of the order in track sequencing. Some bands deviated from the norm, but the below list of subjects constituted the average tracklist of an `80s metal album…

1) Mythology.

2) The fragility of our ecosystem.

3) Warfare, especially of the nuclear kind.

4) Murder in general.

5) Disease.

6) Playing a gig.

7) Drugs.

8) Religion.

9) Insanity.

10) Freedom of speech.

11) Corrupt politicians.