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The Tomb Within: Metal and Jeffrey Dahmer

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On July 22, 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer had a bad day. After failing to fully subdue his attempted eighteenth victim, Dahmer forced Tracy Edwards into his bedroom with a butcher knife. Terrified at the sight of photographs of Dahmer’s recent nocturnal activities, Edwards punched Dahmer in the face, escaped his apartment, and managed to wave down a police car. When the two officers returned with Edwards to apartment 213 of 924 N. 25th Street, Milwaukee, Dahmer greeted them amiably. But when Edwards urged the officers to check the bedroom for the knife, they also discovered Dahmer’s photos. Upon opening the refrigerator, one of the policeman discovered a human head. A human heart was in the freezer, and more severed heads, skulls, and photographs of dismembered victims were found around the house. Speaking to his father shortly after his arrest, Dahmer is quoted as saying, “I really screwed up this time”. No frothing at the mouth, no Devil worship, no hatred of women–just a boneheaded mistake.

Extreme metal’s obsession with serial murderers is long-standing and understandable. Serial killers seem to represent our basest negative reactions—God, I just want to beat that dude’s skull in for saying/doing that—and the crossing of a line that we cannot possibly understand—the fulfillment of a tormenting urge through the death of another human being. In metal culture, some serial killers receive more coverage and cred than others—Ed Gein, for his quiet but elaborate morbidity; John Wayne Gacy, for his diabolical alter-ego Pogo The Clown; Richard Ramirez, for his allegiance to Satan and pentagram tattoo. Then there’s Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee cannibal. Dahmer has become the subject of, or is at the very least mentioned in, a number of metal songs, even having a bizarre concept album written about him by death metal jokers Macabre. But anyone looking into his life will realize that for all his hideous doings, Jeffrey Dahmer wasn’t terribly metal.

A little background: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born in 1960 to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. As a child, Jeffrey was withdrawn and antisocial, spending his time biking around his neighborhood and looking for dead animals to play with. Around this time, Jeffrey also began drinking heavily, and by his late teens was a full-blown alcoholic. After dropping out of college and being thrown out of the Army, both due to his excessive drinking, Dahmer moved in with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin, the city where he was born. During this time, he was arrested twice for indecent exposure to young boys, and was known for drugging and raping men in the city’s gay community. Jeffrey’s grandmother eventually threw him out due to his strange behavior and the odd smells coming from her basement. Dahmer then moved into apartment 213 on Milwaukee’s west side, and it was there that his famous killing spree truly took off.

What attracts metalheads to Dahmer as a public figure is the extremity and horror of his crimes, which cannot be disputed. After drugging young men—some as young as 14—Dahmer would bring them home and murder them, often bludgeoning them to death, before dismembering their bodies, usually either saving them in his refrigerator or dissolving them in tubs of acid he kept for such a purpose. He would also commit acts of cannibalism and necrophilia on his victims. Obviously, the vivid repugnancy both of Jeffrey Dahmer’s acts and the type of mind that would cross such lines presents an unwavering ugliness that metal music often finds itself drawn to; there is no gray area surrounding Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes, no sensible justification or clever twist to be brought to the table. They were unspeakably awful acts committed by an unquestionably sick man. But the motive behind Dahmer’s crimes just doesn’t have the fire or cruelty metal music often ascribes to serial murderers.

Men like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy committed their acts of carnage in extremely hateful ways, often involving extended torture and sadistic behavior for the sake of sexual empowerment. But Jeffrey Dahmer’s murders stemmed from his weakness—perpetual loneliness, a sad inability to relate to others, and what now appears to be poorly stunted homosexuality. When later discussing his first murder, in which an 18-year-old Jeffrey had bludgeoned a hitchhiker to death while his parents were out of town, Dahmer described how “the guy wanted to leave and I didn’t want him to.” One of Dahmer’s more bizarre experiments was to inject hydrochloric acid into the brains of his victims in order to zombify them, in the hopes that he would finally have someone who wouldn’t leave him. Even his consumption and continued possession of his victim’s body parts were acts born of sadness and isolation—murdering these young men was the only way he thought he could ever be popular.

His presence in heavy metal music is pretty face-forward, with focus put on his gore more than his core. Blasphemous Oakland industrial outfit Global Genocide Forget Heaven’s song “Room 213” has lyrics like “Come and take a bite” while Cradle of Filth’s “Lord Abortion” includes the line “I know I’m sick as Dahmer did but this is what I do”; the latter, in typical Cradle form, is a romanticized version of the serial murder game, while the former seems to heavily crib from Slayer’s classic “Dead Skin Mask,” a song about Plainfield, Wisconsin “ghoul” Ed Gein. Slayer, however, also wrote a song about Dahmer called “213,” the lyrics of which seem to accurately portray the pathetic nature of Dahmer’s violence: “I don’t want to be left alone with my insanity” and “Shades are drawn, no one out can see / What I’ve become, what’s become of me.” The song’s slow, haunting atmosphere also drives home the strange and upsetting malaise of Dahmer’s crimes. After all, it isn’t Dahmer’s bludgeoning of his victims that attracts metalheads to his story, it’s the grotesque follow-up.

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Slayer – “213”

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And then, there’s Macabre. On their concept album Dahmer, the Downers, Illinois “murder metal” band paint a hilarious 26-song portrait of Jeffrey Dahmer that sounds like a Friar’s Club Roast of the killer. Multiple cuts from the record use classic children’s song tunes—”March of the Ants,” “Over the River and Through the Woods,” “She’ll Be Coming Around The Mountain”—to describe Dahmer’s sexual perversions and murder methods. Rather than glorify or sympathize with Dahmer, Macabre’s entire album seems to cackle maniacally at the sheer lack of traditional metal tropes behind the serial killer’s upbringing and practices. The thesis of Dahmer appears to be, Hey, look at this crazy fucking asshole right here. On the one hand, it’s easy to blow off the album as a dickhead examination of gross violence and bizarre sexual behavior. On the other, Macabre’s regard for Jeffrey Dahmer might be just as important as Slayer’s. By laughing at Dahmer, Macabre laugh at human weakness as a whole, showcasing this one man’s complete inability to make the human machine run properly, and, in the end, his entirely unbelievable way of coping with that.

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Macabre – “Do the Dahmer”

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Metalheads worship power, be it physical strength, social rebellion, spiritual grandiosity, or even just the overwhelming and inevitable power of death. But part of that reverence is an admittance of our own weakness. Death metal focuses on the thin membrane that is the physical body, black metal on the flimsy lies surrounding our souls. We love the massive dominance that comes with the blazing riffs, the pounding drums, and the guttural vocals, because they use our ears and hearts to claw at something huge and far out and, truthfully, very frightening. In that way, perhaps heavy metal’s fondness for Jeffrey Dahmer points to our own weakness and frailty. We, like him, are not creatures empowered by our compulsion, but hopelessly completed by it. Unlike his peers in the art of abomination, Jeffrey Dahmer is looked to not because he showed maliciousness and strength, but because he showed despair and inhumanity, pulling his objects of desire apart in the hopes of finding something inside that would make him feel less alone.

— Scab Casserole

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