Die Eier von Satan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Die Eier von Satan" is a song by American rock band Tool and appears on their second LP, Ænima.

"Die Eier von Satan" has a heavy industrial guitar played over a reversed drum beat with an unusual, irregular time signature. The lyrical component of the song is performed by Marko Fox, a member of ZAUM. The lyrics are in German. This effect is compounded by the overlaying of various crowd noises - cheering and applause - which increase in volume as the lyrics approach their climax, being read with greater and greater ferocity. Although this might suggest to listeners unaware of the meaning of the lyrics that the song features aggressive or even violent content, the speaker is merely reciting a recipe for hashish cookies: literally, "The Eggs (or 'Balls') of Satan". The song was originally translated by Gudrun Fox.

According to Blair McKenzie Blake, the maintainer of the Tool website, "Die Eier von Satan" originally were cookies that:

"Marko Fox's grandmother used to bake for him as a child (miraculously, without using eggs as an ingredient). Of course you have to substitute the eggs with a magical incantation from the worm-eaten pages of some moldering grimoire."^[1]

This magical incantation ("sim salabim bam ba saladu saladim") is taken from the German children's song "Auf einem Baum ein Kuckuck saß" [1]. According to the lyrics, the special ingredient besides this "incantation" is actually "a knife-tip of Turkish hashish". The song's title (as indicated above) incorporates a German double-entendre of "Eier", which literally means "eggs", but which also serves as a slang word for "testicles".

Original German lyrics can be found here.