In this bimonthly column, staff writer Doug Moore takes a very close look at extreme metal lyrics. Some will be serious, some will be silly, but they’ll all go under the microscope.
Pig Destroyer is one of my favorite bands. I bought Prowler in the Yard when I was fifteen or sixteen years old. It blew my mind—partially because I’d never heard such riff-oriented grindcore, and partially because the lyrics defied my expectations so thoroughly.
Prowler in the Yard is a concept album about a man driven insane by a failed romance. Even outside of this album, vocalist J.R. Hayes’s lyrics often deal with toxic relationships, and some people like to tar Pig Destroyer with epithets like “emo grind.”
I’ve spent a lot of time poring over Hayes’s work. Though his focus often falls on women, the breakup-album format often serves as a prism for his bleak worldview.
Take , for example, “Strangled with a Halo,” a throwaway track from Prowler:
“Religion in the corner of the eye
A peeping Tom, a hole in the sky
The last stall on the left
As our makeshift confession booth
Your parents will never know
Stalked by a child’s nightmare
The promise of the serpent in the tall grass
Mother, I’ve been raped in the shadow of a watchtower”
It’s a 90-second song, and Hayes limits his lyrics to two four-line verses. But there’s a lot going on here. He packs a complex meditation on betrayal at the hands of authority figures into this tiny space.
The title itself is both suggestive and deeply ambiguous. Halos belong to angels, but who is being strangled with whose halo? I read it as “Strangled, with a Halo”—an innocent destroyed by its own symbol of purity. Hayes loves these aesthetic splices: he presents decay as beauty, affection as abuse, and violence as tenderness.
Let’s look at the first line: “Religion in the corner of the eye.” Hayes’s lyrics are full of allusions to God, but not as an object of praise or even as an adversary (though he appears to deny God outright on Phantom Limb). God is something that exists in his mind’s peripheral vision—a background condition that he notices but can’t quite focus on.
The following three lines enumerate the first betrayal in these lyrics. Traditionally, God is a benefactor; he protects you from foes, calls forth the harvest, and so on. But here, God is a callous voyeur who views the world’s grimy underbelly as a source of pleasure. What goes on in “the last stall on the left”? Sexual assault? Drug abuse? At the very least, someone’s shitting—hardly a pleasant or dignified act, but our the way of communicating with a God who has abdicated his responsibility to us.
At this juncture, the key of the music and the focus of the lyrics both shift. We’re faced with another ambiguity. It’s unclear who’s saying “Your parents will never know”—it could be a threat from an aggressor, or an interior certainty for the narrator. Either way, the lyric places the listener in the mind of someone who relies vainly on protection from his family.
The next line is my favorite in the song: “Stalked by a child’s nightmare.” So evocative! The nightmares kids have are often ridiculous, but they leave scars. Everyone remembers some childhood bad dreams; they speak to our deepest vulnerabilities.
The last two lines drive home a terrestrial betrayal that matches the divine one from the first stanza: “The promise of the serpent in the tall grass / Mother, I’ve been raped in the shadow of the watchtower.” Watchtowers are designed for protection. They’re symbols of institutional vigilance. Violation under the gaze of an authority is a double violation: the rape could’ve been stopped, but those charged with stopping it didn’t care to. The system is complicit as well.
Hayes directs his final confession to “Mother,” but we know he’ll receive no help from family, government, or God. Only his audience hears his cry.
