11. Raining Blood
(Hanneman/King, 1986)
Slayer - Reign In Blood

“I don’t have the feeling I’m looking at myself. Those are the main characters from the twelve songs I covered. But I know all those kinds of women. It doesn’t take a lot to let this one come up in myself, or this one (the French looking woman). She was in the resistance in 1942. She wanted ten orgasms a day, because chances were high she would be arrested and executed by the Nazis, and it could be her last ten orgasms. She’s as intense as they come. She comes ejaculating up in me, when I feel threatened.” [Samsonic - Sept/Oct 2001]

“The text is really beautiful indeed, the words touched me deep. The Raining Blood girl revealed herself to me from the moment that I heard the song. She said from the first line, ‘Come with me Tori, I’ll show you everything.’ She took me to a warfield, pure horror. Still I felt safe with her, because of her braveness. But not only the girl came to me. There was another image. Of a big, beautiful vagina in the air. From which blood is raining. It’s falling out of the air on certain countries which are so terribly violent against women. Like Afghanistan, where women can’t even go on the street without a man, are not allowed to study and often get raped. And these horrors can not be lead in any way to religion. It’s straight from the spirit of men.” [Oor - September 8, 2001]

“Beck’s bass player (Justin Meldal-Johnsen) suggested I do a cover of Slayer’s Raining Blood.  I was reading about what was going on in Afghanistan - the way women were being oppressed, the destruction of religious statues.  And when I heard that song, I just imagined a huge juicy vagina coming out of the sky, raining blood over all those racist, misogynist fuckers.” [Spin - October 2001]

“She’s a French Resistance woman whose sister was killed. She went to the underground after the death of everyone she knew. She’s calling on certain powers, no different than the ones Himmler and the Nazis were calling on, only they used the dark forces. Our French Resistance woman knows myths and is calling on power and working with alchemy.” [AP - October 2001]