Layers of Inferno: Slut by Velvet Acid Christ
Paradise Lost was wrong, the devil does not rule hell
Slut by Velvet Acid Christ is honestly a very beautiful musical piece. The instrumental portion alone is very captivating and follows the lyrics well. The song very much gives the feeling of being within the psychological world of someone completely in the grips of this pathology. The subject of the song finds a type of false beauty in the way she lives her life while being on aware of the utter corrosive nature of it all.
Slut isn’t a song about promiscuity slut is a song about utter self debasement which drags down even the spectator. The narrator claims she wants to utterly subject herself to a completely dishonorable state, yet she seems to think that she can destroy her partners via doing this. She wants to embody a type of psychological vagina dentata, devouring a soul via engulfment. A subversion of the vulnerability of vaginal penetration.
Several comments on song lyric websites see this as her gaining an upper hand in the relationship, as opposed to a mutually destructive death spiral where both ships sink. Some comments do understand that the narrator is obsessive in a manner that is self destructive. I do sincerely suspect that Velvet Acid Christ wrote with mindset that this was a mutually destructive situation. The line of “I will be your never ending, unbefriending, self-expending, moral-bending thorn” stands out in particular.
Unbefriending suggesting an erosion of existing social bonds or else the evolution of seeing a former friend as a complete bane.
Moral bending thorn strikes me as particularly potent. This is likely completely outside of what Velvet Acid Christ had envisioned but I keep thinking back to the old rune poems. The rune Thurisaz often means thorn or giant. The poems of this rune deal largely with pain and have some connection to women. (The various poems vary in terms of what they imply and are best read together)
Moral bending perfectly ties into the cultural pathology of seeing subversion as salvation. The idea that this is a power struggle where one party can ever truly “win” as opposed to being tied into a downward spiral. There is a line suggesting that the narrator will move onto a new partner once this current dance has burnt out. It is very possible that the narrator believes that she can utterly self debase and then turn the tables to destroy the other ad infinitum. This is what we call an unreliable narrator.
The song is very suggestive of trauma. This woman doesn’t want thriving, she wants revenge. She wants to utterly corrode the likely source of trauma. The desire to turn the position of being utterly helpless in a sexualized state into a power reversal burns throughout this track. This desire to drag down an oppressor, even if the oppressor may be a complete projection. We do not hear the partner’s voices throughout the song. We have no idea how they feel about the narrator directing these desires at them or even what sex they are. The narrator wants to destroy SOMEONE, but who remains a mystery.
The song is undeniably psychosexual nature with the narrator as a character who has bought strongly into certain ideas about power. It is extremely reminiscent of the type of alleged sexual power ascribed to women. This is the extreme version of putting on lipstick and saying it is “war paint to kill a man.”