After all, what better to sate
the sinful than the authentic strains of a woman pretending to orgasm in a
recording studio? Cradle of Filth have
form on this count, too, deploying the O-bomb as early as 1996 on their
Dusk…and Her Embrace album. The same
taste for erotica has encouraged some of the band’s most vivid imagery, more
often than not involving gratuitous descriptions of “cunts” (the word appears
in all but three of their full-length albums and EPs since their 1994 The
Principle of Evil Made Flesh).
Perhaps Filth’s finest hour – and
certainly their most controversial – was heralded by their infamous “Jesus is a
Cunt” t-shirt. But, when it comes to
music, their sexual bent serves more than just the shock factor. The band’s lyrical and musical themes since
1994 form a pattern which feeds into a much broader discourse on sexuality and
the female body. Sex has been
consistently summoned to invoke the spirit of sinful deviance, revelling in its
glorification of explicit imagery which inverts the supposed “purity” of
religious morality (who could forget the majestic wordplay of Cruelty Brought
Thee Orchids, from the album Cruelty and the Beast: “Her cold cunt meat on holy
bone”).
Dani Filth is certainly a talented
lyricist, imaginatively weaving a number of themes through Cradle of Filth’s
songs to produce some of the most sordid imagery around. In playing off sex and religion, he’s chosen
a very good target. As a tendency which
primarily seeks the moral self-discipline of the devoted, religion has always
gotten the larger part of its authority from the ability to regulate its
followers’ sexual activities. And, by
focusing on the feminine, Filth has taken particularly good aim. A consistent focus for the self-appointed
messengers of God, who have long used their religion to promote the ideal of
the “pure” and “innocent”, women have inherited a pale and de-legitimised husk
of sexuality from Christianity.
One of the most important
elements underpinning the lyrical themes of Cradle of Filth, therefore, is the
idea of a female sexual awakening. This
provides much of the substance for the band’s famous “cunts”, as in Red Roses
for the Devil’s Whore (Dusk…and Her Embrace): “Dost thou not want to worship
me/With crimson sacrifice/So my cunt may twitch against your kiss/And weep with
new found life”. Just so in For Your
Vulgar Delectation: “Virgin cunts aquiver at this foreplay for the spiteful”.
Unleashed, the woman’s sexual
passion is an irrepressible force which sweeps all before it. This is an interpretation well portrayed in
the song, Under Huntress Moon (from their 2006 album, Thornography), as the
celestial beauty shines relentlessly upon helpless men. Nonetheless, the same song reveals a dark,
sinful core to female lust, which is inspired in “thighs/That Lucifer snuck
inside”. And the basis for this idea
had been laid out in numerous Cradle of Filth songs well before Thornography’s
release in 2006. In Cruelty and the
Beast, released a full decade previous, the sensual passion of the bloodthirsty
Countess Bathory (“Elizabeth, paragon of vice”, as she is described) is invoked
exclusively to emphasise her hedonistic evil.
Subsequent albums offer a somewhat different take on the matter: in
2004’s Nymphetamine, the band enlisted the sugar-sweet vocal chords of Liv
Kristine to voice the part of a mistress whose passion ensnared her feverish
and delirious lover. Promising
submission to his cravings (“I could always find the right slot for your sacred
key”), Kristine’s lilting vocals nonetheless belie her own sensual
gratification, as she teases her smitten victim, luring him with her soft tones
like a siren (“Fold to my arms/Hold their mesmeric sway/And dance out to the
moon/As we did in those golden days”).
What remains consistent
throughout, however, is the sense of duality between femininity, on the one
hand, and sexuality, on the other. The
woman is drawn by the impulses of the flesh, but, empowered by the depth of her
passion, is then corrupted by its sinful influence, unleashing it for her own
gratification to the detriment of others.
This thematic imagery has frequently found its way into the physical
artwork of albums, which have portrayed both its cruel and frightening
sides. The covers of Nymphetamine and
the earlier EP, Bitter Suites to Succubi, feature the fiery image of a demonic
mistress, conjuring the prospect of cruel sexual domination (to avert any
doubt, the succubus on the latter album cover was considerately dressed in
leather for the occasion).
With greater deviousness, the
fallen Eve on the back-cover of their 2004 album, Damnation and a Day is
pictured sinking talon-like nails into the flesh of the Adam she embraces.
A strikingly
different image is offered on the back-cover of Midian, upon which a shark
bursts forth like a tongue from a mouth which gapes from a woman’s naked
body. Seemingly incapable of holding
the beast within, the woman is rendered helpless and distraught by the power of
her inner being.
All this gives a wicked and
incisive edge to Cradle of Filth’s lyrics, which are often little short of
brilliant in their glorification of darkness and sin. There’s praise to be had, especially, for the poetic license of
albums such as Damnation and a Day. And
yet, in seeking to embody spirit of sexual deviancy, the band have locked
themselves into that very moral universe which they seek to degrade. The notion of female sexuality as a force of
evil feeds directly from the same moral authority which first established the
woman as a “pure”, “innocent”, and, therefore, ideally asexual being. Her transformation from this into a
liberated and predatory sexual goddess, too, follows a pattern long established
in the Christian canon, which contended that the sexually active woman sought
to lead her men-folk astray by the temptation of the flesh. The phallic symbolism of the snake which
corrupted Eve, enlisting her sinful complicity by spurring her to tempt Adam,
after all, shows how similar Filth’s and the bible’s interpretation of that
story were. The theme of temptation
was, thereafter, much of the basis for medieval witch-hunts, and there’s more
than just a hint of the same attitude in present-day arguments about women
“inviting” men to rape them by wearing revealing clothing.
On the one hand, this calls into
question the nature of the band’s self-appointed mission. Cradle of Filth, since their first years of
recorded existence, have been heretics, firstly of religion and morality, then of
their own musical genre, as they deviated from black metal orthodoxy in search
of graveyards new. But, in tackling the
issue of female sexuality, their decision to resurrect the oldest clichés going
– the temptress, the whore, and the daemon – forces their themes into
submissive observance of the most conservative of sexual values.
On the other hand, it’s worth
asking what exactly Cradle of Filth have been saying all this time. There’s very good reason to challenge the
authority of religion over the human body and its expressions of pleasure. As was once said, sex is, perhaps, the most
democratic of all pleasure, being available to almost everyone who seeks
it. On the surface it might seem, then,
that revelling in the “sin” of sexual temptation, flying, as it does, in the
face of the Church and the God it created, it a worthy mission. In this case, however, the end result – from
the reproduction of the manipulative and callous temptress to the outright (and
literal) demonisation of the female body – no more legitimises a woman’s right
to sexual pleasure than do the most dogmatic and misogynistic of religious
dogmas.
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