Lost Angeles: Slayer's Hell Urbanism

Sometimes I write about music and how it influences architecture and the city – and vice versa. Here is a text about interrelations between music and cities from an urbanistic viewpoint, with Los Angeles and Slayer as examples. 

Lost Angeles: Slayer's Hell Urbanism
Author: Mark Kammerbauer
Publication details: unpublished manuscript, 2024

1. Introduction: The city as mirage of counter-culture
The music, lyrics and visuals created by bands can be indicative of the urban life their members experience. Their work can be seen as a form of dialogue between the music cultures they participate in and the urban spaces they inhabit. This dialogue establishes an interrelation between the musician's city of reality and the music's city of imagination. Perceived this way, music becomes a medium of alternative visions of the city or audible utopias and dystopias. The question this perception raises is: What kind of imaginary city do musicians envision and what does it tell us about the city of reality? And, eventually, how can such complex band-place-interrelations contribute to current urban planning debates?
The city of Los Angeles, California is home to music cultures of global renown. By writing their songs, musicians and bands of these cultures also build their own imaginary cities. One example is Slayer, a pioneering band of the Thrash Metal genre, formed in 1981 in Huntington Park, a city in Los Angeles County. Originally a streetcar suburb located eight miles from downtown Los Angeles, Huntington Park underwent dramatic demographic changes from the 1960s to the 1990s, when a transition from a white working class population to a low-wage immigrant population of Latino and Hispanic origin took place. These changes occurred during the shift to a post-industrial economy, resulting in white flight and the formation of an ethnic enclave impacted by abandoned housing and blight. Scholars question to which extent redevelopment programs were truly inclusive of all ethnic groups (Rodino 1999). It can be assumed that this social, spatial and cultural context impacted Slayer's music.
Different music genres refer to the built environment in different ways, through the character of sound, the content of lyrics and the aesthetics of imagery (Nevarez 2013). The definitive work of Slayer's four founding band members, Jeff Hanneman, Kerry King, Tom Araya and Dave Lombardo – Los Angeles heteropolitans (Dear and Flusty 2002 with reference to Jencks) who come from diverse ethnic backgrounds, including Anglo Californians and Chilean and Cuban immigrants – is the 1986 album “Reign in Blood”. Slayer's music, lyrics and imagery are inspired by conceptions of Hell in Christian religion. World War II also plays a prominent role, based on wartime experiences of Hanneman family members. The results have led to controversy, especially surrounding the song “Angel of Death”.
Nevertheless, Reign in Blood, the band's third album, also delineates a transition from the “suburban” Slayer of the preceding, second album, “Hell Awaits” to the “urban” Slayer. This transition was most notably facilitated by the involvement of producer Rick Rubin and his work with the Def Jam label in New York City. However, the transition is not the exclusive responsibility of Rubin. In fact, it coincides with developments in the band's songwriting between the two aforementioned and seminal albums, Hell Awaits and Reign in Blood (cf. Ferris 2008). While the former suggests a cavernous space of recording emphasized by reverb and echo effects, the latter boasts an in-your-face recording technique as if the listener were positioned directly next to the amp. Is this indicative of a particular spatial sensibility (or attitude) on the part of the band, and what is its relevance with regards to both the imaginary and real cities their work refers to?
The structure of the contribution follows this line of thought by briefly discussing urbanization in the USA, Los Angeles, and Huntington Park. The interrelations between urbanism and music are explored and the band Slayer is introduced as an example of this interrelation. In order to delineate the imaginary Hell City that Slayer's work implies, music, lyrics and visuals will be analyzed and their urbanistic relevance will be discussed. From an urbanist viewpoint, imaginary, fictional utopian or dystopian cities display how and why particular aspects of everyday life are narratively refracted and amplified. Their proposed scenarios allow urban planners and designers to discuss related future development pathways. Even Slayer's hell city dystopia has the potential for constructive critique of reality based on its antithetical focus on aspects that utopias fail to address, including conflict, marginalization and environmental degradation. This deliberation offers insight beneficial to urban cultural studies and research on broader scales.

2. The North American city
When studying urban cultures, the notion that cities present particular opportunities for relating characteristics of both spatial and social origin comprises potential that is only limited by the understanding that both are not identical mirror images (Lévi-Strauss 1977, 315). The exchange processes that take place in urban space can be applied to other forms of exchange, summed up under the term culture (Lévi-Strauss 1977, 322). This calls for an interdisciplinary perspective, contingent on “an approach which transcends divisions” (Lefebvre 2007, 95). One such approach comprises socio-spatial perspectives of urban development (cf. Gottdiener 1994, Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006), which allow discussing cities in North America vis-a-vis their European predecessors with an emphasis on property development in the context of a “relatively autonomous” state (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, 77).
Organized settlement structures at large scales existed prior to the arrival of European colonizing expeditions in North America, who founded cities based on the historic European urban experience. The results were similar, yet different (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006; Hardinghaus 2003; Hassenpflug 2006; Kammerbauer 2013; Lefebvre 1997). In European urban history, centrality and the distinction between urban and rural space are of principle importance to an understanding of urban development (Hassenpflug 2006). This refers to a form of centrality that is characterized by sacred and profane spaces with corresponding institutions of the church, the market place and city hall (Hassenpflug 2006, 24). Cities in North America and what became the United States differ, since they lacked fortifications comparable to their European counterparts (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, 85-86), eventually resulting in the development of regionally dispersed metropolises.
Due to the absence of the European urban-rural dualism and related fortifications, and in their stead, a contrast between what was termed civilization on the one hand and wilderness on the other, delineated by the frontier (Hassenpflug 2006, 48), urban growth was unhindered in expanding into the “surrounding fringe that could always grow by accretion and land speculation” (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, 90). Urbanization in the US accelerated in the course of industrialization and the maturing of the railroad infrastructure in the mid-1800s (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, 93). Modernization and infrastructure played indispensable roles also for post WWII suburbanization processes in the US. The application of principles of Fordism informed spatial production practices aimed at increasing efficiency and speed, with deurbanization as the result (Hassenpflug 2006). This coincided with the application of zoning principles to planning, leading to the functional differentiation of space and, in follow, “separation, segregation, isolation” (Lefebvre 2007, 144) of population groups based on class and race.
From the 1970s onward, suburban development exceeded urban development, producing “single-family home construction for the middle class on an unprecedented scale” (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, 105). Dreams of homeownership had been fueled by the GI Bill and government funding initiatives (Lassiter 2006, 10), but find their roots in paradigms formulated by the founding fathers of the US. For Thomas Jefferson, property ownership was the principle of creating “a paradise of small farms, a rural arcadia with every freeholder secure under his own vine and fig tree” (Schlesinger 1999, 221). However, this exclusionary utopia fails to address the urban reality constituted by the field of tension between different forms of housing tenure based on ownership or rent. Related spatial patterns reflect “racial, ethnic, and class exclusion” (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, 108), due to the fact that “beneficiaries of suburbanization were overwhelmingly white” (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, 111).
Facilitated by zoning and automobile infrastructure, polycentric metropolitan development patterns emerged that encompass “suburbs, industrial parks, shopping malls, recreational sites, and small towns” (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, xv). One type of this development is seen to encircle existing US cities, while another type has liberated itself from the need for conventional urban centrality, such as urbanized regions (with Orange County in California as an example). Both perform similar functions, while the latter is considered “the first really new way people have organized their living and working arrangements in 10,000 years” (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, 5). The transition of the urban economy from “manufacturing to one that now specializes in services and retailing” (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, 115) further contributed to urban deindustrialization and deconcentration (Williams 1985). Inner city vacancies made residential space available to ethnic minorities who didn't benefit from surburbanization. At the same time, inner city areas experienced neglect and decay that prompted urban renewal efforts, in the course of which housing was destroyed through slum clearance. The resulting settlement patterns were indicative of “racial, ethnic, and class exclusion” (Gottdiener and Hutchison 2006, 108).

3. Los Angeles, Huntington Park
Los Angeles is considered exemplary for an understanding of metropolitan development in the US. As an edge city, it is characterized by a political vacuum and a lacking sense of community (Dear and Flusty 2002 with reference to Garreau). According to Soja (1989), state and military investment contributed significantly to the economic development of the region surrounding Los Angeles. This is considered key to a process of “turning the industrial city inside-out” (Soja 1989, 170) and consequentially, decentralizing the city by shifting manufacturing from the urban core to its periphery. The remaining centrality is reduced to functions of surveillance and control, an urban version of Bentham's panopticon (Soja 1989, 172). Following post-WWII industrialization in the Los Angeles region, global changes in the 1970s resulted in a shift from Fordist to post-Fordist, flexible modes of production. This led to a “loss of thousands of high-paid manufacturing jobs” (Rodino 1999, 94), increasing processes of white flight from “communities in the inner city” (ibid.).
The City of Huntington Park is a case in point regarding these development processes and patterns. Located eight miles south of the panopticon of downtown Los Angeles in the Gateway Cities region of the LA metropolitan area, it spans from Vernon in the North to Long Beach in the South. It borders the City and the County of Los Angeles to the West and South, flanked by Alameda Street. Currently, it is home to a population of more than 58,000. Pacific Boulevard constitutes its major economic axis (Huntington Park n.d.). Originally a streetcar suburb serviced by the Los Angeles Railway and named after the industrialist Henry E. Huntington, it covers nearly 8 square kilometers of area. Per year, it boasts 286 sunny days and zero inches of snow. Industrial development expanded in the region in the early 20th century and the city offered workers corresponding residential space. Alameda Street and Slauson Avenue are also considered dividing lines of racial segregation, since Huntington Park was originally home to a predominantly white population (ibid.). Research states that the 1965 Watts riots “had a chilling effect on the whites then living in Huntington Park” (Rodino 1999, 93) while lining up “railroad cars along Alameda Avenue was used to keep the rioters out” (Rodino 1999, 94). Changes to the economic structure of US cities and of Los Angeles in the 1970s contributed to declining industrial production and growth in other regions, such as Orange County. A further contributive factor were changes to the military industrial complex following the end of the Cold War. By 1995, almost the entire white population had left the city (Huntington Park n.d.).
Huntington Park is also considered an example of an ethnic enclave that experienced top-down urban regeneration. Planners intended to reduce the deterioration of the built environment. Municipal actors responsible for planning were of non-Latino origin, while the overwhelming majority of the population were of Latino heritage (Rodino, 1999). This produced top-down approaches to planning that neglected cultural aspects of engaging with the local residents. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the population changed dramatically from white middle class members with blue collar jobs to non-US born low wage workers, coinciding with vacancies and blight. The planning response was to raze blighted housing and develop new residential space. For this purpose, the Huntington Park Redevelopment Agency was created by the City Council. Thousands of units of mostly 1940s housing stock were demolished in order to create townhouses and apartments for senior citizens. While the urban regeneration efforts were notably successful, they were based on standard real estate practices at the time and cliché assumptions on characteristics of the population (ibid.). This relates specifically to the culturally rooted (and lacking) capacities for social and political interaction. The result is the formation of an ethnic enclave (Dear and Flusty 2002, 5 with reference to Jencks), characterized by “a declining industrial/business base; low skill levels in the work force; crime; overcrowded public schools; limited information available on medical services; scarcity of affordable housing; and an inadequate transportation system” (Rodino 1999, 99).

4. Music cultures and urban mythologies
When considering both music and urban life as forms of culture, it seems almost self-evident that both can coincide. The question raised here is inasmuch both forms of culture influence or even shape each other in a socio-spatial sense. Postmodern perspectives of urbanism (Dear and Flusty 2002) refer to conceptualizations of different elements of the city, such as the built environment on the one hand and interpretations and perceptions of the city on the other. Both can display complex and indeterminate relationships (Dear and Flusty 2002 with reference to Raban). The examination of such relationships can lead to insight on how musicians can act as representatives of a particular city, how music reflects qualities of the built environment, or how music can become the “soundtrack” of a city (Nevarez 2013, 56ff.). In this manner, music can also be interpreted as a utopian (or dystopian) extrapolation of an urban experience or even have a quality resembling Science Fiction (ibid.) As literary forms, utopias and dystopias display limitations that Science Fiction is capable of mitigating by incorporating both within its narratives and scenarios. The latter are of value to planners, as they can emphasize and focus on one particular aspect of future development and illustrate it, either as text or image. This can support formulating future planning endeavors. The caveat is that Science Fiction doesn't display a particular future, but instead, an amplified “different present” (Kammerbauer 2019).
Acknowledging that music has the capacity to document the urban condition, whereas recordings and associated media provide artifacts that enable others to engage in these documentations, certain further caveats arise (Nevarez 2013, 57). It is necessary to question preconceptions on the interrelations between music and urban space. It is not as clear as it may seem that musicians are authors of meaning. Also, the listeners may perceive music in very individual ways. Further, narratives of music carry a retrospective character oriented on the past. Given these caveats, music can enrich perspectives on cities within current debates by refracting certain aspects through a complex lens of cultural interaction and interpretation. The media that musicians produce, including music, lyrics and imagery, provide an opportunity to correlate their content and the urban environment they were created in (Nevarez 2013, 62).
These perceptions capture specific moments in time that are oblivious to change. Planning initiatives, on the other hand, may lead to changes, such as in the case of urban regeneration initiatives. Related dynamic processes encapsulate a musician's work as a snapshot of a particular, idealized moment frozen in time. This isn't merely related to the appearance of space, but also social and demographic questions – for instance, who is supposed to benefit from urban regeneration initiatives, and do they correspond to the band's audience (cf. Nevarez 2013, 68)? In this manner, the city a band sings about may be a “lost city, disappeared by the forces of urban capitalism” (Nevarez 2013, 70). Here, the city functions as a landscape connecting individual, psychological perceptions and social, civic structures (ibid.). Experienced in this manner, post-industrial cities are at the root of a certain form of “chill urbanism” (Nevarez 2013, 71 with reference to Wozencroft) that exerts a specific quality reinforced by the music of a band. This experience offers room to create a certain urban mythology that displays a certain degree of difference from reality (similar to Science Fiction). And, additionally, by questioning the insistence on the uniqueness of such a city, the opportunity arises to transfer and apply notions of “myth-making” (Nevarez 2013, 72 with reference to Savage) to other urban examples.
It should not be understated that, depending on the point in time bands played their music, the relevance of the experience of listening to their recordings is also related to socio-economic capacities for mobility among listeners, or in other words, the inability to leave the place the band possibly writes songs about, contributing to “urban alienation” (Nevarez 2013, 73). Yet, the opportunity exists that music assumes the function of facilitating a process of coping with the hardships and crises that affect listeners, by “using their minds to find a way out of a hard situation” (Nevarez 2013, 63 with reference to Reynolds). Perhaps for this reason, Punk was attested an “intense and integral” (Nevarez 2013, 64 with reference to Savage) relationship to the modern urban way of life. The city perceived through the filter of music can, thus, either obscure or enrich its generic, modernist quality. Viewed from a car when driving by or witnessed as a pedestrian on a rainy day, a specific post-industrial city affected by fragmentation, blight, neglect and disregard for the quality of urban space may seem like any post-industrial city – “it could be anywhere” (ibid.). For this purpose, it is prudent to not neglect “social and interpretive ruptures of history and human geography” (Nevarez 2013, 74) upon which interpretations of complex band-place-interrelations are contingent, both as experience and discourse. As a result, place, at best, becomes a malleable concept.

5. Slayer
For the purposes of this contribution, the band Slayer is interrelated with a place in reality and a place in mythology. This offers the potential to discuss the work of the band regarding their spatial origins, their possible perception of the cultural space surrounding them, as well as the mythology of hell they illustrate in their work. To be clear: Slayer did not write songs about Huntington Park in reality, but they did write songs about hell in mythology (Ferris 2008). Hell appears in religious texts and imagery as a place where souls of deceased humans experience forms of punishment. It can be an eternal destination, either outside of our physical universe or beneath the surface of the Earth. The term hell appeared in Old English (hel, helle) with parallels in Germanic languages, such as Old Norse (hel) or Old High German (hella), all of which originate in Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European, referring to actions of covering, concealing or saving. The Proto-Indo-European origin can also be related to Latin (celare, meaning to hide, also connected to the term cellar) (Hell n.d.). Hell can also include urban settings, such as the eternally burning city of Dis (Alighieri 1988). Fire and burning are its typical “environmental” characteristics, complementing human suffering and punishment. All of these images and descriptions are the result of complex cultural interactions spanning thousands of years and the production of traditional religious text that was eventually subject to popularization in various forms of modern media, including music and – in particular – Heavy Metal. Slayer's second and third albums deal with and illustrate hell in very immediate ways, yet different in terms of presentation and production. But first, to the uninitiated, who the hell are Slayer?
Slayer were an American Thrash Metal band. They are commonly associated with Huntington Park, although band members lived in different parts of Los Angeles. The band was founded in 1981 by Tom Araya, Jeff Hanneman, Kerry King and Dave Lombardo, all of which have different cultural origins. Dave Lombardo repeatedly left and rejoined the band in its history. After the death of Jeff Hanneman, Slayer continued to record and perform, but disbanded in 2019. Thrash Metal as a music genre or “style” is typically associated with the so-called “Big Four” bands, Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax. In its original form, Thrash Metal was characterized by a combination of influences from Heavy Metal and Hardcore Punk and hence, the capacity to incorporate different extreme musical influences. Velocity and intensity are decisive characteristics of this music genre, typically described as “speed” (cf. Speed Metal) and “heaviness”– or even “brutality”. Slayer's album concepts, song titles, lyrics and imagery deal with violence in various forms, related to politics and crime on the one hand, and religion and myth on the other. All of these have led to controversies, antagonism, release delays and bans, and legal action (Ferris 2008).
Kerry King, full name Kerry Ray King, was born on 3 June 1964 in Los Angeles. His father worked in the aerospace industry. King went to Warren High School in Downey. He first experienced guitar playing as a child and received lessons in South Gate. He was the co-lead guitar player throughout Slayer's existence after co-founding the band with Jeff Hanneman in 1981. King approached Hanneman at an audition and suggested they join forces playing guitar, which led to the decision to form their own band. King's influences include Venom, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. He is highly critical of organized religion, which plays an important role in his lyrics (Ferris 2008; Kerry King n.d.). 
Jeff Hanneman, full name Jeffrey John Hanneman, was born 31 January 1964 in Oakland. He grew up in Long Beach. His father was a veteran of World War II, having fought in the European theater. His brothers were Vietnam War veterans. Their experiences were a common topic in family conversations. His paternal family is of German origin and his grandfather spoke German fluently. Thus, he displayed an interest in military memorabilia, also of the German WWII Wehrmacht. Hanneman's sister introduced him to Heavy Metal. In high school, Hardcore Punk became an important musical and stylistic influence. Prior to meeting King in 1981, he had been playing guitar for a year. He was responsible for writing music and lyrics for every album Slayer recorded prior to his death. When working on new material, he would use a drum machine to record early versions of songs and discuss these with the other band members. Hanneman wrote the lyrics for “Angel of Death” (Ferris 2008; Slayer n.d.).
Dave (David) Lombardo was born 16 February 1965 in Havana, Cuba. His family is Cuban of Italian descent. When he was two years old, his family moved to South Gate. He began playing percussive instruments at age eight and, in follow, befriended other musicians in his area. In 1979, he entered South Gate High School and graduated in 1983. At age 16, he heard about Kerry King, who lived close by. Lombardo visited King at his house and they began rehearsing. Eventually King introduced Lombardo to Hanneman. After more rounds of rehearsing, they realized they needed a bass player and a vocalist. King, who knew Tom Araya, introduced him to Lombardo and Hanneman. Lombardo is recognized as a highly influential drummer of Heavy Metal and other genres. He is known for various innovations, for instance playing with two bass drums. His performance is considered essential to Slayer's style. Lombardo was the band member who contacted Rick Rubin to work with the band. After he left Slayer, Rubin convinced him to return. Hence, he played drums on nine of Slayer's albums. Different than the other band members, he played and released albums with other renowned musicians, such as Mike Patton, John Zorn and many more (Ferris 2008; wikipedia).
Tom Araya, full name Tomás Enrique Araya Díaz, was born in Chile on 6 June 1961. When he was five years old, his family moved to Los Angeles. Araya and bandmate Kerry King had already played together in a band called Quits. In 1981, Araya accepted King's offer to join Slayer as their bass player and vocalist, completing their original line-up. Working as a respiratory therapist at the time, he used his income to finance the band. Araya withdrew from his employment in 1984, when Slayer embarked on their first European tour. He remained a member of the band until 2019. In the lyrics he contributed, physical and psychological Trauma play important roles. Araya is a member of the Roman Catholic faith, and he sees no conflict between his religious views and the band's work. Instead, he considers the lyrical and graphic themes as a means to “scare people” (Tom Araya n.d.), in particular related to the jocular culture of Hollywood, Sunset Strip and Glam Rock.

6. Hell Awaits Raining Blood
Initially, Slayer played cover versions of songs by Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Venom. Early imagery relied on symbolism adopted from Satanism. Dave Lombardo designed the band's iconic logo of angular letters superimposed upon a pentagram consisting of swords. In 1983 they were offered a contract with Metal Blade Records and released their debut album of original material, Show No Mercy, a following EP, Haunting the Chapel (1984) and their second album, Hell Awaits (1985) with the label. The band toured internationally and garnered recognition from fans, while the themes and their presentation increased in intensity from one release to the next. Hell Awaits and its long and complex tracks complemented by demonic vocals recorded backwards and featuring cavernous reverb effects suggestive of hellish environs was highly successful. The next album, Reign in Blood (1986), featured shorter, faster and yet, even heavier “songs” that merged Metal and Punk, played by the band with a combination of ferociousness and precision that was unheard of either in the genres of Heavy Metal or Punk at the time. A connection was established with New York producer Rick Rubin and the Def Jam label, known for Hip Hop and Rap music, most notably by LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. This connection afforded the band access not only to a professional recording engineer, a budget and a distribution deal. It also afforded Rick Rubin access to what was the heaviest band in the world at the time.
The production of the album resulted in an immediate, in-your-face sound almost completely lacking any spatial effects such as reverb. Listeners had the impression as if they were positioned directly next to the amplifiers. This distance-less immediacy of sound is in stark contrast to the cavernous ambience of the previous album. The cover image depicts a hellish scene with a demonic figure enthroned on a litter carried by figures wearing what resembles vestments, surrounded by pools of blood and human body parts. The technique of the illustration relies on collages and hence aesthetically transcends previously and typically painted or drawn covers, such as the band's cover for their own Hell Awaits album. Lyrically, the band remains on course and the vocal delivery features no melody whatsoever while disintegrating into one of the most terrifying shrieks of music history – right at the beginning of the recording. The sound, images and lyrics characterize an album-as-provocation directed against all that the band opposed, presented with intense levels of coherence and vision. One song in particular was and still is considered so over-the-top that, unsurprisingly, controversy erupted. The song “Angel of Death” features lyrical passages such as “Auschwitz, the meaning of pain” (Slayer 1986) and descriptions attributed to Nazi concentration camp physician Josef Mengele. The controversy complicated the release schedule and resulted in prolonged discussions on how to deal with references to Nazi atrocities in music culture. In Germany in particular, heated arguments over the political naivete on the part of the band's members nearly led to physical altercations (Kühnemund 2013). Interviewed on the controversy that erupted due to the song's lyrics, Hanneman stated: “there’s nothing I put in the lyrics that says necessarily [Mengele] was a bad man, because to me – well, isn’t that obvious?” (Davis 2004). It is noteworthy that the album release coincides with the outbreak of the Historikerstreit, where the singularity of the Holocaust became a matter of dispute among intellectuals in West Germany.

7. Discussion
Slayer's music displays a particular type of complex band-space-interrelationship. It is clear that Slayer did not write songs about Huntington Park. And it is clear that they did write songs about some kind of hell. The point is made here that the relationship between Huntington Park as a place in reality and Slayer's hell as a place in mythology offers room for discussion with regards to aspects of urban development and planning. In certain ways, Los Angeles and Huntington park have often been associated with everything that could possibly go wrong with urban development in the US. Yet, characterizing the city as a sprawling failure paints an incomplete picture. Urban growth in Los Angeles produced population densities of “over 7,000 people per square mile – by a fair margin the densest in the United States” (Bruegmann 2005). Further, a “surprising number of the densest municipalities in the country are suburbs of Los Angeles, including, among others, Huntington Park” (ibid.). Viewed from an environmental perspective, however, it is also obvious that urbanization in the region brings with it an exacerbated risk for environmental disaster, including wildfires (Kammerbauer 2020).
The place Slayer's founding members lived in indicates complex processes of urbanization, deurbanization and suburbanization in the US, while their characteristics are refracted and amplified in a dystopian manner that leads to the construction of a specific hell. In Los Angeles, structure follows economy (Gutzmer 2013), reflective of an absolute form of modernism undeterred by social questions (ibid.). The related phenomena include deurbanization and industrial decline, white flight and the influx of new populations from the South, blighted housing and spatial fragmentation and segregation. Momentous shifts in global economic patterns led to the transformation of a white, working class city to an ethnic enclave with a near-complete Latino and Hispanic population. The dream of “a paradise of small farms”, transformed into post-WWII single family home development, also resulted in a fragmented, post-urban nightmare of  “separation, segregation, isolation” (Lefebvre 2007:144). Planning for urban regeneration disregarded urban diversity, under the all-seeing eye of remote top-down planning authorities. In this manner, Huntington Park was never really given the chance to be completely urban in the sense of urbanity's key tenets of diversity, density and centrality (cf. Wirth 1938).
Slayer's members come from diverse ethnic backgrounds and joined together to oppose commercial Los Angeles music trends represented by Glam Rock. They confronted this trend by incorporating satanic imagery and themes in their music, where narratives of hellish suffering replace Glam Rock's joyful party attitude – “smoking in the boy's room” (Mötley Crüe 1985) can hardly compete with “death machine, infest my corpse to be” (Slayer 1986). Slayer's hell is an environmental nightmare, if one chooses to define it as such. The denizens of Slayer's hell are subject to all kinds of suffering, drowned by blood raining “from a lacerated sky, bleeding its horror” (ibid.)  – yet, without distinction or exclusion. Slayer's hell also knows the all-seeing eye of a top-down planning authority, if one chooses to define Slayer's “Monarch to the kingdom of the dead” (ibid.) that way. This king of hell does not remain distant from hell's denizens, he resides among them. So, in a certain, urban way, Slayer's hell features a design that did not betray its initial intentions: It is perversely diverse and, perhaps, even hellishly urban. Perhaps it is even a 15-minute-hell, or can it be a coincidence that each side of Reign in Blood's original vinyl edition plays for 15 minutes?
However, there are differences in the presentation of Slayer's hell dystopia. The second album, Hell Awaits, displays the opposite of density, as the visuals show a cavernous space with individual demons and denizens hovering about. This is emphasized by the reverb-heavy sound of the album, which reinforces this cavernous, extensive – sprawling – impression. It is a suburban hell where the supreme authority remains remote and invisible. Everything is obscured by distance. The dystopia is refined, modernized and urbanized on the third album, Reign in Blood. The album cover presents a claustrophobic degree of density of demons, denizens and their body parts and among them, in their center, the supreme authority. The sound is presented in an immediate and direct manner, as if listeners were positioned directly next to the amplifiers. This is not exclusively the result of the “urban” producer Rick Rubin's intervention – the structure and presentation of songs as indicators of the band's progress underscores this effect. Everything becomes clear, proximity is absolute, there is no escape. The “hidden” urban quality of Huntington Park is revealed, from one album to the next, through the song structures and the production aesthetic. The degree of dystopian refinement of the band's mythological realm increases from one album to the next, while all the more intensely refracting key aspects of a “Lost Angeles”. By doing so, they pierce the structural veil of urban development in the US, oscillating between urban and suburban under the gaze of planners who “show no mercy”. Perhaps they even tear down the wall between reality and myth, creating a mythical reality and a quasi-realistic mythology: a physical-psychological “Zwischenstadt” (cf. Sieverts).

8. Conclusion
At the time of Slayer's formation, Los Angeles was musically defined by the carnival air of Glam Rock, clouding reality behind wafty hairdos, glittery bandanas and colorful tights. Slayer invaded these clouds and forced them to rain blood on everybody and all beneath them. Their mythology of a “hell urbanism” refracts characteristics of an antithetical, counter-culture image of the city, producing an amplified and exaggerated critique of its reality. Aspects of Slayer's mythological hell urbanism can, thus, be integrated in a discourse on the urban condition and how planning relates to it. From this viewpoint, Slayer's complex band-place-interrelation offers the following insight:
What did the band do? Counter-culture music produced a counter-culture narrative of the urban reality in the form of a construction of a specific hell as the band's central mythological “place”. However, to evaluate its contribution to the urban discourse, the aesthetic progress in the band's work needs to be considered, from one album to the next. The progress from Hell Awaits to Reign in Blood exemplifies this progress.
What does the mythology say vis-a-vis the real city? Despite the primacy of the market in US urban development, other aspects of an originally European historic urbanism continue to play important roles. This is expressed in the critical urban discourse on purely commercially oriented real estate development based on assumptions that disregard local cultures and lead to marginalization and segregation. In Slayer's case, religion and its “central”, perhaps even “sacred” function in the band's work is to assume a hellishly integrative effect: everybody suffers in the same place.
What can urban scholars gain from such explorations? The construction of dystopian mythology in the work of a band can be related to the real city. However, it does not produce a mirror image and requires interdisciplinary deliberation on which aspects hold potential for a discussion on the urbanist impact of a band's work. The band's mythology, contributive as it may be to identifying planning challenges, is also a timeless one, solidified within their recordings and imagery. Urban development on the ground is not static and contingent on dynamically changing situations. We should remind ourselves of this when the album needle runs out. In the case of Reign in Blood, the final track “Raining Blood” ends in a locked groove, echoing the sound of rainfall, forever.
What can planners learn from this example? If something like Slayer comes out of your neighborhood, area, district or suburb, you possibly have a problem that planning should address. And planning culture itself may be part of that problem. The urban case described here can clearly be interrelated to the failures of modernist spatial production. The band's work, interpreted in the manner presented here, also sheds light on the hidden urban qualities of the real city of Huntington Park. Planning in the past failed to address this circumstance, with the creation of a suburban ethnic enclave as a result. While this may not be “hellish” per se, it underperforms with regards to sustainable development goals oriented on diversity and inclusion, in correspondence to the capacities of the local population to engage in planning endeavors. If these goals are achieved, real – and mythological – spaces and places can retain their pliant characteristics for the benefit of their inhabitants.

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