Remember a few weeks ago when Slayer's Tom Araya posted a doctored photo of the band's classic lineup hanging out with Trump? At the time, it came with a caption that said "like him or not he is the president" and that he "never would have guessed that there where so many snowflakes commenting their distaste for the new president." At the time, the rest of Slayer, and Kerry King specifically, distanced themselves from the comments.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe addresses those comments. Blythe's band is, of course, touring with Slayer and Behemoth this summer (we're giving away free tickets to each stop of the tour) and while RS asked Blythe if it's still funny to joke about Trump, he brought up the Araya incident:
[Laughs] Oh, everybody wants to talk about Trump. You know, I think we're living in Planet of the Apes. My brother sent me some footage the other day from these Trump rallies in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and of course there were protestors. And there's this one anti-Trump protestor who decides to start disrupting the Trump-rally people by just screeching incoherently. And then the Trump people surround her and start making animal noises, and soon all of them are just screaming incoherently at each other [laughs]. This is the state of modern political discourse in a nutshell. We are fucking living in Planet of the Apes.
The whole thing is mind-blowing. Trump has only been in office for, like, a month and a half. There's so much shit that's happened in the media. … I'm checking Fox News; I'm checking CNN; I'm checking the BBC to see what other people are saying. I'll go on these horrible binges of going down the rabbit hole and reading all the different viewpoints of what's going on. And, really, man, the reality of the situation, there's no clarity to it yet, because nobody really knows what exactly this administration will do, can do. What will get through Congress, what won't. Reality itself seems to become subjective at this point. So for me, you know, there's some horrifying things, but there's some shit that's also absolutely fucking hilarious to me.
"Slayer has never endorsed any political party or any candidate, and the band intends to keep it that way," band tells Rolling Stone
I have to look at it that way. People got really mad at Slayer when I think [Tom] Araya posted some picture of Slayer with Trump that said: "Make America Great Again." People went apeshit. They're, like, burning their Slayer records and stuff, and it's like, don't you people think just for a second maybe he was just being an asshole, like trying to get your goat? This is the singer of Slayer, you know? Come on, you know? So, it's like, the whole situation … there's really vocal minorities all around that are refusing to talk to each other. I guess that's just like the last eight years of Congress refusing to talk to each other. The country has become completely bipartisan, and there's not a lot of discourse. And I think that the intensity of all this can only last so long before people are gonna have to be like, "Look, we've got to chill the fuck out and be human beings and talk to each other somehow."
I can absolutely see the Araya thing being a troll, but he also made an uncomfortable joke to a gay fan in the comments of the post.
Elsewhere, Blythe also revealed he's working on a new book:
Well, in the next year, I'm going to be working on a new book once this tour cycle is over, and it is going to involve a lot of travel. I don't know how much politics will be involved with it because it's probably going to be more ecologically centered – not strictly political, if you know what I mean. It's going to involve a lot of surfing, I know that.
It's kind of tied together to me because the ocean is basically the source of life for us on the planet, and if we screw it all up, then everything is going to die. I think there is a lot of shortsightedness about that. And before I went to Standing Rock, my concerns for water quality, that's evident to me constantly as someone who surfs. I've seen varying water quality in different places around the world. It's something that's really concerning to me. So there will definitely be an ecological aspect to the book, but sometimes that also involves politics, too. Depending on the policies of wherever you are, whatever country it may be.
Read the entire interview here
