Trivia / Slayer

• Banned in China: Christ Illusion is unofficially banned in India, after the Indian branch of EMI recalled and destroyed all physical copies of the album after the Catholic Secular Forum sent a complaint to the Mumbai Police Commissioner that the songs "Skeleton Christ" and "Jihad" were offensive to Christians and Muslims respectively.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: When Jeff Hanneman passed away, several newspapers wrote an obituary that featured the image of Gary Holt, the band's backup guitarist during Hanneman's recovery.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Diabolus in Musica, especially, is this to Kerry King.
  • King also doesn't much like the song "Cleanse The Soul," finding it to be too happy-sounding for a Slayer song.
• Died During Production: Jeff Hanneman's death forced Kerry King to do all the guitar work for Repentless aside from some leads from Holt. The album also featured one last song that Hanneman wrote, "Piano Wire".
• Fan Community Nickname: The Slaytanic Wehrmacht.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: King has claimed that he prefers God Hates Us All, an album that tends to be detested by fans, over Reign in Blood, the band's most well-known work and one of their best-received.
• No-Hit Wonder: They've sold millions of albums worldwide, but have never even bubbled under or had a Top 40 hit on rock radio. In spite of their lack of actual singles chart success, however, most people will be able to recognize at least "Raining Blood" (due to its popularity at sporting events and as a song for people learning how to play guitar), and likely also "Angel of Death".
• Reclusive Artist: Jeff Hanneman, to some degree. The other members were quite happy to hang out with fans after shows and regularly gave interviews, while Jeff would almost always retire to the bus to read and rarely gave interviews. Outside of touring and recording, his bandmates seldom heard from him; most of his free time was spent with his wife. While people criticized King for calling him a dear friend despite having not seen him for several months prior to his death, the truth was that even if you were one of Jeff's buddies, seeing him on a very infrequent basis was perfectly normal and expected.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In 1984, Jeff Hanneman and Dave Lombardo started a Hardcore Punk side project called Pap Smear, joined by Suicidal Tendencies guitarist Rocky George. They had written many songs together and were planning on recording an album, but their frequent Record Producer Rick Rubin advised against taking the project any further, thinking it would lead to Slayer breaking up. Two of Hanneman's Pap Smear songs, "DDAMM" and "Can't Stand You", were recorded by Slayer on Undisputed Attitude, since he considered those the two best songs the side project produced and thought they'd fit in with all the Hardcore Punk and Punk Rock Cover Versions on the album. Hanneman had also said that from time to time he would reuse riffs that originated with Pap Smear for Slayer songs.
  • According to Tom Araya, Undisputed Attitude itself could have turned out very differently: It was always meant to be a Cover Album, but originally they set out to cover Hard Rock and early Heavy Metal artists such as Judas Priest, Deep Purple, and UFO, as well as The Doors. The songs they were working on "didn't sound right", so they shifted direction towards punk and hardcore instead.
• Working Title: God Hates Us All could have been called Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, but they decided that it sounded more like a title for a retrospective box set, not an album; a couple years later they did in fact use the latter title for a box set.
• Write What You Know: Jeff Hanneman wrote multiple songs about war and Horrible History Metal because he came from a military family (his father was a World War II veteran, while his older brothers were Vietnam veterans), and discussions about military history were a common topic in his family.

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