Cannibal Corpse

"The things we sing about in this band are incredibly brutal and negative -- we want everything in this band to be brutal and negative. Really. And that might sound strange to the average person, but it's what we want. You know, that's the way to make it effective death metal and to effectively capture the emotion we're going for. If you're gonna make music that sounds aggressive and hateful, then [obviously] the lyrics should also be aggressive and hateful. It makes complete sense to me. And if it's something that is about something negative, but it makes you feel good when you're done listening to it, and no one's been harmed by doing that, then there's nothing wrong with it at all. [...] I mean, we're not too surprised that people want to censor us, because most of the people who are in political offices [...] they were teenagers when Elvis was being censored for moving his hips around on Sullivan's Show. So people who grew up with that -- what are they going to think of a band that sings about eating people?"

"We’ve really tried hard to make our songs serious horror songs. But the ones that have the more extreme gore in them, those lyrics sometimes make the audience realize there’s a bit of black humour to it, much in the way Evil Dead or Evil Dead II did. Those movies were meant to be frightening, for sure. But it takes some of the scare out of it because they were so over the top. None of our songs are written to be intentionally humourous or anything like that, but I think when you’re describing something that bloody considering the context: it’s coming from a band. It’s coming from a band and you’re enjoying the music and you’re reading the lyrics that’s describing something completely atrocious, you know, and people aren’t going to take it particularly seriously. [...] It’s strange, but if you edge off the gore a little, the song becomes more frightening. I would say Cannibal Corpse has a little bit of Evil Dead to it, but we have more serious horror songs too. Not that any of them were intentionally not serious. But when you edge the gore back a little bit and leave something to the listener’s imagination you can wind up with something scarier. That’s the same way with horror movies, I think. The movies that I found to be the most frightening weren’t particularly graphic, as far as violence goes. [...] There’s a number of dark, frightening movies that I really like and they aren’t that gory at all. Some of our songs are Evil Dead-like, but we have songs that are more like The Shining."

""Hammer Smashed Face," ' (1992) as quoted by"

""I Cum Blood," ' (1992) as quoted by"

""Fucked With a Knife," ' (1994) as quoted by"

""Severed Head Stoning," ' as quoted by"

""Intestinal Crank," ' (2012) as quoted by"

""Hacksaw Decapitation," ' (1999) as quoted by Jon Wiederhorn of"

""Starring Through the Eyes of the Dead," ' (1994)"

"These guys are hands down, the undisputed kings of death metal."

"The idea of a completely melody free, utterly brutal death metal band that specialize in the most stomach-churning lyrics and imagery ever seen in music -- going on to become million sellers and Hollywood movie stars -- is like something from an alternate universe."

"Cannibal Corpse is by and large the face of the death metal sub-genre, and they have been ever since they broke out into scene in the early ‘90s. [...] the band’s ferocious songwriting and often comically vile lyrics have lended them to becoming one of metal’s most notorious and celebrated bands."

"Cannibal Corpse have so much gore in their songs that it's hard to think of any other band so hyper-focused on tales of people getting killed in gruesome ways."

"Almost as depressing as the song themes is the regularity with which the members of Cannibal Corpse have been forced to explain that a) no, they don’t take their violent lyrics seriously, b) no, they don’t advise that anyone tries these things at home and c) no, they themselves are not violent or in any way generally extreme as human beings."

"It worked out for me because I wasn't happy in that band ever since Bob Rusay left."

"In junior high school I had discovered "music" and the power and exhiliration of a live performance. Shortly after reaching high school, I was playing in a band and by graduation time I had signed with a major recording label and were were on our way. In the course of eight years, we had put together three full-length albums and toured the United States, Europe, Mexico, and Canada several times and were featured in the movie "Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.""

"More power to Bob [Rusay]. Once leaving the band, he pursued his other passion and made a career out of it. The rest of us could be so lucky."

"The band have evolved away from the blunt shock/splatter approach that they took in their earlier years. Nowadays the horrors that they write about are more streamlined and precise, the equivalent of graduating from whacking a person on the head with a stick to dissecting someone with a scalpel."

"I have been dealing with the potential for brutalization in society for decades. In this context, I came across the band around 25 years ago because, as a teacher, I saw pupils wearing T-shirts depicting babies on grappling hooks. They were freely available on the market at the time. I've been educating people ever since. Cannibal Corpse is not the only band, but I see it as symptomatic of how far things can go when state institutions turn a blind eye."