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God Hates Us All at 25: Slayer's nailed Bible cover, the September 11, 2001 street date, and the same date on Repentless in 2015

Foto: JJxFile — CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

God Hates Us All at 25: Slayer's nailed Bible cover, the September 11, 2001 street date, and the same date on Repentless in 2015

Twenty-five years ago this week, Slayer put out the record with the nails through the Bible, on the one Tuesday in 2001 nobody remembers for a record. Fourteen years later they put out another one on the same date.

The street date was a Tuesday. That is all it was supposed to be.

Slayer released God Hates Us All on September 11, 2001. In the US that was a normal Tuesday street date, the day new records went on the shelf. The album had already been pushed back once because of the cover, as Loudwire’s anniversary piece notes, so the date was not chosen for anything. It was where the schedule landed after the delay.

Then the morning happened, and a thrash record called God Hates Us All was in the racks while the news was on every screen. Nobody planned that. It is still the first thing anyone says about the album, and it will still be the first thing in another 25 years.

The story of this record, though, is mostly a story about a sleeve. The date frames it; the cover is where the fight was.

The cover the stores wouldn’t touch

The original artwork is a Bible with nails driven through it in the shape of a pentagram, covered in blood, with “Slayer” burned across the page. That is the whole image, a book and nails, with no band photo and no logo doing the heavy lifting.

American Recordings had a problem with that long before the release. Kerry King later said the label had “absolutely no idea what the fuck they were going to do” with it, and added that it “looked like a seventh grader defaced the Bible” (Wikipedia). That is a man describing a cover that did its job, which is to make a store clerk uncomfortable.

The delay came out of that standoff. So the record that landed on September 11 was already late because of a picture.

The white sleeve with four crosses

The fix was a second cover: a white slipcase with four dark-gold crosses on it, made, in Wikipedia’s words, “so retailers would stock the album.” Slide the slipcase off and the nailed Bible was underneath. The store got the clean version to put face-out. The buyer got the real one at home.

That white sleeve is the version many stores stocked, which means the plain crosses are what a lot of people saw on the rack in 2001. Discogs lists the pressings and variants if you want to check which one is on your shelf, and the official product page still shows the original.

There is a habit in metal of treating the censored version as the lesser one. On this record I’d argue the opposite, because the white sleeve only exists because the original worked.

What the record did anyway

For an album that shipped into that morning with a decoy cover, the numbers are not small. God Hates Us All debuted at number 28 on the Billboard 200 with 51,000 copies sold in its first week. Matt Hyde produced it (Wikipedia).

“Disciple,” the song that carries the album’s title line, was nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 44th Grammy Awards in February 2002. Tool’s “Schism” took it. Readers of Exclaim! voted God Hates Us All the best metal album of 2001, ahead of Lateralus and Toxicity (Loudwire), which tells you who was buying Slayer records that year and how loudly they felt about it.

“Disciple” is the reason this album is still argued about: Tom Araya screaming the title over a riff that sounds like it is being dragged across concrete. If you play one track from this record to someone who has never heard it, you play that one.

The tour story I’m leaving out

Most anniversary pieces about this record tell a version of what happened on the road that autumn: who went home after 9/11 and who stayed out and played. I have read it too. I went looking for a primary source this week and came up empty, so it is not in here as fact. When I can pin it down it gets its own piece. If you were at a European show that October, I want to hear from you, and the place for that is @realrocklab on Threads.

September 11, 2015: the same date, a different band

Fourteen years after God Hates Us All, Slayer released Repentless on September 11, 2015, on Nuclear Blast (Wikipedia). Wikipedia records it as a plain release date. There is no band statement on record that I could find saying the date was chosen, so read what you like into it. I will only say that a label with a calendar in front of it had every chance to pick a different Friday.

What is on record is how much had changed between the two albums, and how they are tied to each other anyway.

Jeff Hanneman died in 2013. Repentless is the only Slayer album without him. Rick Rubin, attached to Slayer records for 29 years, was out of the producer’s chair; Terry Date produced it. And on drums was Paul Bostaph, back for his first Slayer studio album since God Hates Us All.

That last one is the connection I care about. The 2001 record and the 2015 record are the two ends of a Bostaph gap. He played on the album with the nailed Bible, left, and the next time he played on a Slayer studio record it came out on the same date. Whatever the label meant by the date, the drummer is the through-line.

Repentless debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200, Slayer’s highest, and went to number 1 in Germany. The album with the decoy sleeve did 51,000 and number 28. The album with no Hanneman and no Rubin did their best chart week. I think it says the audience had been growing for fourteen years and nobody had counted them.

Where this thread goes next

The anniversary pulled in the usual retrospectives on the 11th: Metal Injection, Men’s Journal, The Rock Revival and Nu Metal Agenda. The day before, Ov Sulfur released a cover of “Disciple” for the 25th (Theprp.com). Twenty-five years on, the song has outlasted the fight over its packaging.

Next time I want to follow Rick Rubin. His 29 years with Slayer ended with Repentless. That is one producer on one band from the 1980s to 2015, and Slayer is a small part of what he was doing in those years. Which of the other records he made in that stretch sound like they were made by someone who kept going back into a room with Slayer? That is the map I want to draw.

And a smaller question, for the people who were there in 2001. Which sleeve is on your shelf, the nailed Bible or the four crosses? Tell me at @realrocklab on Threads or X.

Sources

In this web: Slayer · Kerry King · Jeff Hanneman · Rick Rubin · Paul Bostaph