This piece originally appeared on Splice Today.
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If you know one thing about black metal, it’s probably that some performers are racist shitheads who burn churches. Jessica Hopper recently published yet another article retailing the various unpleasantnesses committed by Varg Vikernes of Burzum. She did vary the formula a little, though, by acknowledging that not all black metal performers are Nazis. Instead, she argued that all black metal performers have to deal with the fact that the music is originally, inevitably, associated with unpleasant ideologies.
“The genre’s reluctant fans can be divided into a few apologias. There are those who go for the sheepish “but it’s so good I can’t help it” (the artist is creepy, his work divine). And others subscribe to the fantasy that if you don’t cosign the artist’s belief, their platform, their perversion, if you don’t understand what they are singing about, if the song isn’t explicitly promoting an agenda, though the artist may be, that you are less of a participant. Another common excuse is that the lyrics are unintelligible (or not in English, so they don’t “count”), and they are listening to black metal just for the heavy atmospherics.”
As a casual fan of black metal myself, I don’t think I necessarily make any of these apologies. And that’s for the simple reason that there are just tons of black metal acts that aren’t any more ideologically noxious than any other music on my hard drive, and less ideologically noxious than some. Porter Wagoner singing murder ballad after murder ballad about how cool he is for shooting his cheating woman or Janis Joplin signing off on blackface iconography for her album cover seem significantly more dicey to me than listening to Katharsis theatrically shrieking about witches and satan.
It’s true that black metal is focused on evil and death and genocide. But being interested in those things doesn’t have to mean you’re a Nazi. It could mean that you’re Gorecki — whose droning ambience isn’t all that far removed from black metal’s aesthetics, as it happens. And if it sounds crazy to think that Gorecki’s explicitly anti-Holocaust message could find purchase in black metal, I would direct your attention to Pyha, an explicitly pacifist artist whose music sounds like tortured metal emitting a long, sustained groan of lament.
Pyha, a Korean who made his sole album when he was 14 years old, is obviously an oddball. But there are lots of oddballs in black metal. Another of my favorite performers, Botanist, plays hammered dulcimer and preaches plant supremacy and fealty to the forest. The band Frost Like Ashes is part of a small but non-negligible group of Christian unblack metal artists, who tend to sound exactly like black metal except that instead of talking about blood and the pit, they talk about blood and the cross, or about blood and the evils of abortion. And then there are folks like Enslaved who just like to pretend they’re Vikings. Or performers like the black/doom outfit Gallhammer who are dedicated to the proposition that Japanese women can make a noise as terrifying and evil as any Scandinavian dude.
There are also bands like Drudkh who (as the album title Blood in Our Wells indicates) are in fact anti-Semitic assholes. But the reason black metal is defined by anti-Semitic assholery isn’t because all black metal musicians are anti-Semitic, or even that there’s a preponderance of anti-Semitic facists in black metal. It’s because black metal isn’t all that popular, but anti-Semitic assholery makes a good story. Hopper argues that black metal fans have to face especially difficult questions about their music and aesthetic preferences. But it’s not black metal that’s obsessed with fascism; it’s Hopper and buzzfeed and mainstream venues in general. I tried to pitch a piece about how black metal isn’t fascist to a number of largish mainstream outlets. One editor said what I presume the rest of the editors were thinking: this is too niche. Or, translated, an article about how black metal isn’t fascist isn’t something anybody cares about. It’s the fascism our readers want to hear about; without that, you’ve got nothing.
Which isn’t to say that Hopper’s article is terrible, or that the issues she raises are completely irrelevant. How do listeners’ ethics interact with their aesthetics? Why do people like to pretend to be evil? Why are they fascinated by genocide? Those are all interesting questions. But they aren’t all the same question. Using black metal to treat them as such is more about demographics and hit counts than it is about looking for answers.
Your point is of course right, Noah: all members of the genre don’t share the same politics. But can a style of music be so associated with a political attitude that musicians who don’t share the attitude are still working in relation to it by sharing the style? I’m thinking of southern rock and the fact that as a teenager I wore a federate flag on the back of my concert t-shirt with no awareness that it promoted anything but a subgenre of apolitical rock music. I was of course an idiot. But my unthinking association with the style made me an accidental supporter of southern racism. Not all rock bands from the south are racist, but if you are a rock band from the south it’s better you deal with the issue overtly. REM, for instance, named an album Fables from the Reconstruction, marking themselves as separate from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” default position.
I guess…. I don’t know that anyone felt that REM was southern rock, or associated with Skynard though? REM had way more to do with the Byrds than with southern rock bands.And does anyone really think the Allman Brothers are supporters of the Confederacy? I feel like black metal is way more tarred with fascism than rock bands of the south are with anything in particular…not least because southern rock was really popular, so there could be stories about southern rock that didn’t need a controversy hook.
The number of black metal bands who have anything to do with facist ideology just isn’t all that big. And there are a fair number of bands (Pyha, Botanist) who have explicit ideologies that are opposes to right-wing fascism. Others (like Gallhammer) are geographically distant enough that it would be weird to assume that they’re in the same scene.
Just to be clear: I’m totally fine with Hopper’s article talking about the moral implications of fascism in black metal. It’s just frustrating that that is the only mainstream coverage black metal gets, even though it’s not actually all that prevalent. It’s like if Lynyrd Skynyrd’s flirtations with the confederacy were the only thing anyone ever said about Southern rock, and REM never got any coverage at all.
Though maybe that would be best, I suppose.
As a non-metal-head with some friends who are into metal (including black metal), I didn’t know it was associated with racism or Nazis. I just knew it was out there. But, really, aren’t there negative connotations for metal in general for most people unfamiliar with the overarching-genre? I remember having to explain to an uncle that Metallica weren’t Satanists back in the late ’90s.
Isn’t that general misunderstanding and outsider-status part of the everyday appeal/struggle for metalheads, no matter their preferred sub-genre?
I’m sure there are levels of knowledgeability…but there was a scandianvian black metal scene that was actually satanist and racist and burned a couple churches and was involved in a couple of deaths.
Right, I figured. My point wasn’t so much about my former ignorance or present lack of a certain common mental association, but about metal’s typical position as an often misunderstood and feared outsider culture. Metal performers have beenn hauled in to court to testify about their music in murder trials, they have been sued for driving teens to suicide, and they have been raked over the coals by pundits for having been listened to by killers–even when the bands themselves were not involved in anything remotely illegal.
Out of curiosity, does Drudkh actually make songs about their anti-Semitic viewpoints? From my understanding their songs are largely about the natural world and the Ukraine’s history of subjugation. Guy was part of a band called Hate Forest though so it wouldn’t surprise me if he managed to sneak a few “also fuck the Jews” in there also.
Well, they titled an album Blood in the Wells (referring to anti-semitic myths about Jews poisoning wells.) They’re songs are in Ukrainian so I don’t know exactly what they’re saying, but I don’t think they’re sympathies are necessarily in doubt.