Black Metal

Even Transilvanian Hunger is Subject to Criticism

“Trve is a noose, for dogma strangles art. Gatekeeping is the manifest fear of irrelevance. Let the unworthy flood the temple—if the art cannot survive them, maybe it deserves oblivion.”
— Ramon Alanis

“Varg Vikernes, once the most feared musician in the world, has been reduced to a survivalist e-girl cultivating an autistic fake-Viking brood with the miraculous blessing of Freya. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the post-Deafheaven face of ‘reclaimed’ ‘queer’ ‘experimental’ black metal, is the granddaughter of oil tycoon billionaire and segregationist benefactor H.L. Hunt and, through such devices as ‘universal orthodoxy’ and ‘transcendental Kabbalah’, has succeeded in creating a Neon Genesis Evangelion-grade theology which will bear no acolyte outside of YouTube lecture comment sections and Discord initiation rites. Such is the end result, on either ideological pole, of the greatest musical export Norway will ever know.”
— Colby Smith

“We wish here to indict not just the Black Metal genre—which was always vastly more interesting for extra-musical reasons than it was on the turntable; Filosofem and a few other records of merit do not match Varg’s atavistic revolt against Christcore imperialism in Scandinavia through the salutary practice of removing architectural follies, however much of a LARP it always was—but its increasingly tedious influence on other forms of art, writing, and film. The Neo-Passéist strategy of seeing a specific artform through the prism of other artforms has led to much stagnation. We, the Neo-Decadents, do not wish to read writers who wish they were musicians: and in the case of musicians, we wish them to explore the history of their art seriously, rather than defaulting to tired scene theatrics. We demand true musical obsessives, poetry obsessives and painting obsessives: the ‘reluctant creator’ pose has grown stale.

But back to Black Metal. There is no future to this genre, which barely existed beyond its ‘second wave’ (the first wave barely existed either, given that Venom never intended a larger movement or genre). Its appropriation by younger American Neo-Passéists is only evidence of their own creative bankruptcy. We are thoroughly sick of having Black Metal and Black Metal-derivative ‘music’ forced on us by faux-Transgressive types, and the more abstract the music grows—the more distanced from its original sound—the more soporific it becomes: as interesting as a numbing medicated bandage.

This is all another way of saying that the genre has sunk below parody.”
— Justin Isis

“The first thing you must understand about Black Metal is that, aside from perhaps a few diehard (by which I mean brain-damaged) metalhead fanatics, the audience for this ‘musical’ subgenre is not what you would expect: forget whatever stereotypes you might have about stave church-burning, hobo-murdering, devil-worshipping zombie boy types. No, in all actuality Black Metal is mainly listened to (or, to be more accurate, namedropped) by desiccated stick insect culture vultures, chardonnay-swilling and pâté-consuming fops with names like Nigel or Pomeroy who gravitate towards the genre for its supposed ‘hip’ cachet, and to give themselves a false veneer of indie cred . . . in this regard, it’s the modern equivalent of white prep school boys gushing over N.W.A back in the 1980s. The second thing you must understand is that people do not actually listen to Black Metal albums for enjoyment, because you can’t really have it playing in your car while driving, and you certainly can’t fuck to it. No, the people who profess an affinity for Black Metal do so because they are in thrall to its aesthetic (if ugly black-and-white Xeroxed album covers, poorly produced and unlistenable ‘music,’ unreadable band name logos that look more like bramble piles, and witless lyrics about Vikings and Satan can be said to constitute an aesthetic; while on the subject, someone really needs to inform these goat-loving Norwegians that the Devil is in appearance more akin to a beautiful angel, like Sharon Stone, as elucidated by that noted theologian, the late Herbert Butros Khaury).

A number of years ago, I owned a book that was a compendium of articles and interviews from some zine dedicated to so-called ‘extreme culture.’ I recall there was in it an interview with some Black Metal band whose name I forget, and the members of this band were talking about their interests: Satanism, church burnings, National Socialism, Norse mythology, witchcraft, runes, and (most of all) the importance of radical individuality, or being apart from the common mindless herd. The problem with this is that there were also a bunch of other interviews in this same book with a number of other Black Metal bands, and they were all saying the same thing, espousing the same identical views, and they even all looked the same: shaved-headed Europeans dressed in black, scowling dourly. If you want an accurate mental picture of the Black Metal movement, imagine shaved-headed Europeans dressed in black and scowling dourly, forever.”
— James Champagne

“Except for Sunn O))) and the more schizophrenic journeys of Varg (pretty much just Filosofem), this genre is doomed (fittingly) to an eternal recurrence of bland repeated darkness, with no further developments in the Sonic Void it once created, with only drugged-up sycophants such as Harmony Korine as their praise-singers.

With its National Socialist flirting, both serious and for glamour, it's achieved nothing but making even more of an archetypical joke of both movements, and indeed, any sort of dissidence that can be associated with them. As men, as humans, we should, or must, at this point, stand for something: all the better if it is against the status quo, to call ourselves righteous or even worthy to be alive in a wicked society: this, Black Metal does not provide. It lies that it does, like a 16 year old vixen saying she's 22 to buy smokes. It has no maturity, because it hasn't been allowed to mature, due to the past-idolizing, controversy-worshipping, contrarian movementarians lionizing the early Inner Circle's burning churches—an act that, losing the chance to break real taboos, remains so oblivious to its own meaninglessness in Secular Christian modernity that its instigators continued to accept this narrative after said fires died down—even if your Black Metalheads burned every Christian Church, they'd achieve nothing but furthering their ignorance for the sake of a dead-end musical genre.

It is redundant to mention that the very act of church-burning which made Black Metal interesting in the first place turns out to be, as one grows up, extremely Abrahamic and Nazarene, almost as if ignoring the whole of the Nietzschean oeuvre. To go beyond Christ and Antichrist(s), one must remember here that Krishna was the original ‘Black One,’ etymologically and spiritually speaking, and that the historical Krishna would, by all accounts, be no more amused by ‘Black Metal’ equating itself to a form of music adequate for his worship (as it, bizarrely, has sometimes) than by a monkey performing fellatio on another, finding these ‘musicians’ as thoroughly pathetic as the lifeless guitars playing each other during Lou Reed's equally onanistic (yet brilliant), bizarrely unpopular (for a known onanist) Metal Machine Music, which, at least subconsciously, inspired every work of Black Metal.”
— Salvattore Beteta-Reyes

art by Dan Heyer