999,909: Mercyful Fate - A Dangerous Meeting

For a time in the early ‘80s, it seemed that heavy metal had hired Satan as its chief marketing executive. Amid all the pentagram logos and the B-movie horror songs that dramatized (but didn’t advocate) evil, it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to one-up the pack by selling themselves as a genuine practicing Satanist, for whom occult-themed lyrics weren’t just a posture. That somebody turned out to be Mercyful Fate singer King Diamond, who claimed an affiliation with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan and wrote obsessively about black magic and the sorts of demonic rituals that suburban parents suspected their teenagers were performing in the garage and/or basement. Oh, sure, Diamond has since clarified a number of times that he doesn’t actually worship the devil and is really more of a marketing-savvy atheist. But the “is he or isn’t he” ambiguity still fuels Mercyful Fate’s mystique -- even more than Diamond’s “evil Kiss” stage makeup, which inspired many a black metal band in decades to come.

“A Dangerous Meeting” leads off the band’s classic Don’t Break the Oath album, and may be the most memorable song in their catalog. The sound is post-Judas Priest/Iron Maiden metal, with a healthy dollop of minor-key neo-classical flavor learned via Ritchie Blackmore. Then there’s the one-of-a-kind King Diamond Voice, which takes the falsetto registers of Rob Halford and Bruce Dickinson to the next logical extreme, and mixes in some lower-register growling and bellowing. The whole sound is pitch black. Jet black. Black as night. Black as coal. But cutting sharply. Black and sharp, like obsidian. Or a really, really sharp knife that happens to be black. It basically doesn’t matter that the lyrics – which tell the tale of a coven destroyed by the demon spirit they conjured up – are difficult to understand. The music makes clear that this is real-deal evil.

Well…sort of. Read the lyrics, with their slightly awkward grammar, and you’re struck by the exact same B-movie quality of the less committedly “Satanic” metal bands. One wonders if this isn’t partly reflective of the fact that these guys are Danish, and hence not native English speakers. If it’s hard to spell “merciful,” it’s definitely hard to sound evil in your second language. (See also: Germany’s Scorpions trying to sound really sexual in the verses of “Rock You Like a Hurricane.”) Read along, and you’ll hear more of the spots where the King has to rush or stretch syllables to make the words fit the melody line. It’s like watching a horror movie and noticing the camera crew’s reflection in the villain’s mask – the spell can be broken when the artifice is visible. So it’s a testament to the skill of the band’s music that you can mentally plug in just about any misheard lyric without substantively altering the mood and effect (e.g., “Toniiiiiiiight the eeevil mean liiiibraaariaaaaaaaaaaan”). And in the end, if English is your second language too, you won’t be parsing this for meaning below the surface anyway. Hence Mercyful Fate’s vast influence on the even more self-consciously evil genre of black metal. And hence the easy cross-cultural translation and worldwide appeal of heavy metal, in all its glorious lack of subtlety.

Postscript: King Diamond is obsessed with the number 9 as a signifier of Satan. (Example: add 6+6+6, get 18, add 1+8, get 9.) Look what number this song ended up at. EEEEEEEEEEERIE. Makes you wonder where our exclusive algorithm really came from...

A Dangerous Meeting - Mercyful...