Raining Blood

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"Raining Blood"
Song by Slayer
Released	1986
Genre	Thrash metal
Length	3:32
Label	Def Jam Records
Writer(s)	Jeff Hanneman Kerry King lyrics
Producer(s)	Rick Rubin

Raining Blood is the final track from thrash metal band Slayer's 1986 album, Reign in Blood.

[edit] Sound and history

The song is regarded as a masterpiece by metal fans. The title itself plays on being a near homophone with the album title. Slayer's guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King wrote the lyrics with Hanneman writing the music. No live Slayer CD or DVD has been released without it and it remains a popular concert staple. It was also issued as a single by Def Jam Recordings.

On the original 1986 pressing, Raining Blood (track 10) starts at the breakdown of the previous track (Postmortem). This error was corrected on the 1998 re-release.

In 1991 a double live video was made for the song with "Black Magic" (from the Show No Mercy album). The video omits the solos at the end (as is often done in concert) and goes into "Black Magic" after the line "Now I shall reign in blood".

In 2003 Slayer toured playing Reign in Blood in its entirety throughout the fall, something they never did on the original album tour, under the tour banner Still Reigning. Their playing of the final song "Raining Blood" culminated with the band being drenched in a rain of fake blood.

The song ranked #8 on VH1's 40 Greatest Metal Songs ^[1].

[edit] Other appearances

• The song was covered by Tori Amos on the cover album Strange Little Girls in 2001. The cover featured Tori's single vocals accompanied by only a piano, with little resemblance to the original song except the lyrics. Slayer was reportedly confused about the cover [1], but liked it enough to send Tori and her crew some Slayer T-shirts, to much appreciation. [2]

• The song was featured in the Die Hippie, Die episode of South Park in which Cartman used it as a means to defeat hippies, although it is incorrectly identified as death metal.

• The song was featured on the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in-game radio station V-Rock.

• The song (along with Slayer's "Mandatory Suicide") was also sampled by rapper Lil Jon in his 2004 song "Don't Fuck Wit' Me" (from the album Crunk Juice)New Zealand based Drum 'n' Bass duo Concord Dawn also sampled the riff for a song also entitled "Raining Blood," on their 2003 album Uprising. The track proved to be a modest club hit in New Zealand and Australia, and to a lesser degree in the United Kingdom.

• Reggie and the Full Effect had covered the song for an import EP, using a synthesizer to replace the lead guitar for an odd effect.

• Blood Has Been Shed also used parts of the famous riff for their song "Signs & Omens".

• Vader has put out a cover on their Live in Japan CD. They also recorded it the studio and released it as a bonus track for the Japanese version of Impressions In Blood.

• Powernoise band Terrorfakt has also done a hard industrial remix/cover of it.

• Goregrind band Cuntgrinder released a song called "Dildo Megawatt (Slaytanic Version)" which is based off of Raining Blood. Cuntgrinder combined the famous riff at the beginning of Raining Blood along with the entire intro, but the lyrics are not the same.

[edit] References

Slayer
Tom Araya | Jeff Hanneman | Kerry King | Dave Lombardo Tony Scaglione | Paul Bostaph | Jon Dette
Discography
Albums and extended plays: Show No Mercy | Haunting the Chapel | Hell Awaits | Reign in Blood | South of Heaven | Seasons in the Abyss | Divine Intervention | Undisputed Attitude | Diabolus in Musica | God Hates Us All | Eternal Pyre | Christ Illusion
Live albums: Live Undead | Decade of Aggression
Compilations: Soundtrack to the Apocalypse
Videos and DVDs
Live Intrusion | War at the Warfield | Still Reigning
Songs
"Angel of Death" | "Raining Blood" | "Eyes of the Insane" | "Jihad"