Sh*t I Could Watch Over and Over and Do # 13

The Beastie Boys once said about Venom: “When we first heard them, we thought it was the funniest, dopest shit. Then when we found out they really were into Satan, it kinda bummed us out.” Not an exact quote, but close enough to the truth to stick.

Well, that might’ve been their reaction, kimosabe, but me? I love me some black metal. Not the screechy stuff—wall of noise, tremolo riffs, corpse paint, and fourteen-inch spikes poking off Scandinavian wrists like Satan’s acupuncture clinic. Some of that’s fine, I guess, but it ain’t really my thing.

No, I mean VENOM, baby. Pure and simple. Like Motörhead had a demonic three-way with Mephistopheles and a stack of burned Judas Priest records. Venom supercharges your damned soul, drops Metal Ten into a black hole, and sends the devil’s horns punching straight through the speaker cones.

Right now, as I type these blood-besotted words, opening the gates of Hell one keystroke at a time, I’m wondering—can AI be used to talk to Lord Lucifer? There's a storm outside, whipping itself into a mid-May tantrum, turning the early evening into this bluish, dishwater-grey apocalypse. Trees are thrashing, the wind howling like the torment of souls being twisted in the dark, and I’m sitting here with Venom blaring.

Venom.

Venom.

Venom.

(Look, they got minimum word counts, okay?)

Black metal. God’s rock n’ roll. And Cronos—Kronos, whatever—ugliest moflicker to ever strap on a studded collar, but still a total badass. Like Lemmy fused with a manatee. Dude was a weightlifter, too, which is kind of a no-brainer if you're gonna growl about Hell all day. Gotta have the traps to back it up.

A lot of metalheads, though? Fat. Or you had the “skinny dirtbag in a leather jacket” variety. Back when I was a kid, metal dudes wore denim vests plastered with patches and buttons. Skintight jeans with holes in the knees. High-top sneakers. Always had a brush in their back pocket. Because—duh—the hair.

T-shirts were Ozzy, Iron Maiden, maybe Anthrax if they were edgy. And, let’s be honest, who are the true, undisputed metal gods? Do I hear Judas Priest? Mercyful Fate? Bathory? Hellhammer? Nah, who am I kidding?

Everyone knows it’s Metallica.

Then there were the crazy ones. Trench coats. Combat boots. Shaved heads. Slayer shirts. They always had dads like Judd Nelson’s old man in The Breakfast Club—a fat, cigar-chomping greaseball who never bathed and cursed in a Brooklyn accent, even though they were from Des Moines. Those kids were destined for dishonorable discharges, psych evaluations, or maybe some Travis Bickle shit if the wiring went just a little more wrong.

But back to Venom.

They were too fast for metal, too heavy for punk. Like the Sex Pistols and Black Sabbath had a deformed baby in a bar fight. Cronos didn’t sing—he projectile vomited lyrics like Satan gargling Drano. Mantas’s guitar tone sounded like a lawnmower chewing on barbed wire. And Abaddon—God bless that sloppy bastard—hit drums like a drunk falling down a spiral staircase with a snare tied to his chest.

And it worked.

Their album Black Metal didn’t just name a genre—it birthed a whole damn religion. Or at least a cult. A cult of fire, leather, bad decisions, and teenage heresy. It was everything you dreamed about at fourteen, drawing pentagrams in your Trapper Keeper while your mom screamed about algebra.

The Beastie Boys got bummed when they found out Venom were serious about Satan. But that’s the beauty of it. Even if they weren’t serious, they had to pretend they were. That’s what makes it magic. That razor-thin line between total joke and total conviction. Like pro wrestling for the damned. One part Elvira, one part Anton LaVey, all soaked in beer and stage fog.

You don’t just listen to Venom. You invoke them.

And if you do it just right—late at night, storm raging, candles flickering—you might hear Lucifer chuckle from the shadows and growl:

“Play it again, boys.”

Venom - Black Metal (Official Video)

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