Non-Canonical

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Black Metal Fandom

In the framing of the documentary “Until the Light Takes Us,” the pheonomenon of Black Metal was born and died in the same instant as the publication of sensational reports in the Norwegian media of the activities of Varg Vikerness and the supposed “inner circle” of musicians and agitators retroactively called the second wave of black metal. The aesthetic and thematic trappings of the world-wide scene to come, including, paradoxically, the adherent reverence to the supposed ideals of the original inner circle who despise and disavow all those who follow them, are cribbed almost entirely from these (mostly false) accounts of Satanism, Anarchism, and (unfortunately true) pointless grisly murder.

Punk Rock died in Los Angeles in 1986, according to some sources. It emerges, Elvis-like, on the underside of skateboards coasting across uneven gravel mall parking lots, or in communal houses in the suburbs of Rangoon, and in endlessly concurrent music documentaries about the life and death of Punk Rock, year after year.

Disco died when white people started making it and other white people got real mad. The whole scenario is pretty embarrassing in general. I’m glad I hadn’t been born at the time.

&The children’s television program My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic something something bronies blah blah siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Superheroes never die. They just get new writers who sometimes kill them. But later, new writers – and who knows?!

My favorite manga should have ended like, ten volumes agooooo. It just doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.

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What bugs me about semi-autobiographical works is that an author can always ascribe the lousy parts of their stories to the fixed continuity of the supposed “autobio” part. Jonathan Lethem’s toad of a novel “Fortress of Solitude” sets its story against the backdrop of Brooklyn in the waning of the 20th century. So it makes perfect narrative sense that after the dissolution of the possibility and wonder of the childhood friendship of the book’s two heroes, Mingus gets chewed up and his talent suppressed by the intertwined terrors of drug addiction and the criminal justice system as his neighborhood is gentrified in real time. Dylan, the more privileged of the two, more or less becomes a dried-up old turd from the moment he begins to monetize his passions, to value things over people and to vaporize his yen for music and culture into the loveless prison of obsessive collection and curation. The fact that the former character is black and the latter white is no accident, it’s just fate. Too bad the semi-autobiographical author was only semi-interested in designing a universe with less banal systematic cruelty along with the addition of magical rings of power.

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Being a fan draws a lot of people into happiness and/or success as creators in comics. But as fandom becomes more visible and defined in our consumer culture, a vocal following can blur the line between fan/participant and master and enforce rules that no one can remember writing in the first place. Just like the lions eat the antelope and the lions turn to a grass lot which gets built up into a boutique for silk-screened baby onesies and the antelope get pushed out of their neighborhoods by rent hikes, whole artforms can be scuttled by the arbitrary curation of its fans when the joy of discovery becomes the rote drudgery of collection.

I didn’t mention furries in this essay-ette, so it’s not canon.

“Don’t call me a fucking BRONY, ok?”

25 thoughts on “Non-Canonical”

  1. I am still a big black metal fan. By which I mean that I am skinny and white and love Katharsis. And you’d think there’d be other comics types who would agree with me (Thor fans maybe?) but they never appear on the HU Friday music roundup.

    But black metal’s popularity and longevity actually may be a testament to how half-assed it is as a phenomenon (ideology? musical subgenre? fashion statement?). There is actually a black metal record called “Waiting For Black Metal Records To Come In The Mail” or something similar.

  2. “Until The Light Takes Us” is impressive, incidentally, for being almost as uncritical of hate speech/crime as the Lords of Chaos book.

  3. I think it’s a lot funnier for letting its participants speak for themselves. The blu-ray, at least, contains an extra hour or more interview with Varg. He’s the smartest of the bunch and the worst. And is it Immortal sitting around a table with perfect posture drinking big mugs of ale? Those guys are a riot. I didn’t really need the movie or book to tell me racism and homophobia are wrong. They can be funny, though. No one in the movie or book comes off as particularly admirable, just ridiculous. Except that fellow from Dark Throne seems really nice. He even has a Hanoi Rocks tattoo, God bless him.

  4. While it’s not exactly my cup of tea, my wife (who is from Taiwan) is a huge fan of Black Metal and I’ve attended a number of shows with her in the last few years. One thing I’ve noticed is that while yes, there are a lot of pale and skinny guys (and lots of not-so-skinny guys) at shows, the audiences tend to actually be quite diverse and there are also often a good number of women in attendance. I don’t know if it’s just a NYC thing, but I hear a lot of Spanish spoken and there are a lot more people of color (again, including women) than I see at the “indie”, psychedelic and folky shows that we also attend. The main guy in one metal band we’ve seen several times, Inquisition, is from Colombia and whenever he shouts out a Spanish sentence of two a good segment of the audience roars in delight.

  5. “I didn’t really need the movie or book to tell me racism and homophobia are wrong.”

    The racism and homophobia in black metal has resulted in actual violence. Pointing out that the filmmakers don’t seem to be able to engage with that fact seems like a reasonable thing to do.

    I mean…the nativism in Scandinavian black metal is really central, and a big part of why anyone’s interested in it as a thing to make movies about. If you can’t talk intelligently about that, the exercise starts to seem pointless, except as a kind of making fun of the freaks and geeks kind of thing. Which isn’t necessarily horrible or anything; it just doesn’t seem wrong to ask for a little more from the filmmakers if they’re going to bother with the material in the first place.

  6. Daniel’s point is undeniable, well-taken, and one I would have mentioned if I’d had more time. Of course all metal has a world presence, but black metal seems pretty remarkable in the diversity of its appeal.

    One thing I have thought and wrote about black metal (I’m writing about black metal again, an article for Helvete: The Journal of Black Metal Theory- tres kvlt!) is that it manages to be strangely universal in its isolationist appeal.

    But yeah, that documentary could have talked to metal fans of color– was Gaahl (the gay former frontman of Gorgoroth) in that? If he was I don’t think he was outed.

    Hip-hop is the music of capitalist diaspora, and metal has managed to define itself in (unacknowledged) opposition. It deserves some better documentaries (I think I’ve seen three at this point),

  7. But as I said, many of the fans don’t seem to hold those attitudes at all (or ignore them) and plenty of bands specifically disassociate themselves from them. Obviously the nationalist/racist stuff gets all the attention, but there’s a lot more going on than just that.

  8. Bert: I use “Until the Light…” as an example because of how petulant and awful the “inner circle” reveal themselves to be in their own words, but I agree with you that it is severely limited in scope, and too taken with Varg’s natural charisma. I got the impression that “Unitl the Light…” is a documentary made by curious black metal fans for curious black metal fans, not the gawking general public, and it does seriously pass along the burden of any attemptat contextualizing or examining the behavior of these people. I was left very hungry after I saw it…

  9. I’m one of those black metal fans who hates black metal, like as a concept, though. I’m into Ulver, etc.

  10. :waits for someone to de-real this discussion into talking about my little pony:

  11. Right, sorry about ignoring the Brony thing. I am as beyond comprehending furry pathologies as Ulver are beyond black metal — their Myspace page says they sound like “wolves evolving,” which I love.

  12. it’s probably the exception that proves the rule, but there are a few Black Metal bands out there that are very much on the opposite end of the spectrum as far as being not racist (or even actively anti-racist), and espousing something akin to Progressive ideas. i’m not gonna speak for them, as i’m not a member of any of those bands, but two that come to mind are Panopticon (which i’m pretty sure is just one dude), and Wolves In The Throne Room. some may scoff, but this doesn’t interest me. i like what i like. i think i got into it too late to be “KVLT”.
    as far as comics and liking Metal, i knew a dude who looked like a barbarian that i was sure would love metal, but when i spoke to him about it, he balked saying not only did he not like metal, but he was into techno (not electronic music: techno). we remain friends, but almost never discuss music.

  13. Noah, the film is pretty explicit about the bigotry and the resulting violence. The only thing the movie didn’t do is say, “this is really a bad thing that happened because of these really bad views to which we the filmmakers are opposed.” The causative link is pointed out there and, from what I remember, in the book, too. It’s pretty clear that they’re not promoting the bigotry.

  14. Yeah– that was not my impression. It was more like, “this is pretty awesome,” in the book. In the movie, it was less of a distraction– they had some interesting commentators on Satanism and stuff, but it wasn’t terribly reflective.

    I have been told that leftists use “critical” like conservatives use “moral,” so I’ll drop my gripe and go listen to Panzer Division Marduk.

  16. I remember quite a number of people said the writers of Lords Of Chaos were bigots.

    I think most of them in UTLTU came off fine, even though a couple really did look totally bigoted.

    A lot of people wanting to get into Black Metal are scared they wont be able to find any non-racist bands, but non-racist bands are really the majority and many bands who did have racist or other extremist views end up renouncing them (although without verifiably official statements, it can be hard to say for sure, because its fandom is full of myths and lies, sometimes fans pose as if they were the real band members; sometimes bands even spread myths themselves. I’ve heard some bands even pretend to be racist just to get an extremist image).
    Here is a handy list of racist bands…

    http://rateyourmusic.com/lists/list_view?list_id=258716&show=50&start=0

    …even big fans wont have heard of many of these guys. I’ve only been interested in 3 of these bands.

    A guy from Summoning wrote a very good piece on racism/fascism in music….

    http://www.summoning.info/Stuff/PoliticalStatements.html

  18. I have complicated feelings around the racism in black metal issue– Wolves in the Throne Room are the poster children for enlightened black metal, and I haven’t really gotten super excited about them– definitely less than Katharsis, for example, who have an album called “Fourth Reich” (although they’re just being stupid, much like Marduk).

    It’s the one edge white people have in terms of straight-up evil– we don’t have rhythm or colorful rituals, but we have genocide. That’s one reason (I think) why white prison gangs are usually white-supremacist.

    The right way to use evil and genocide and ethnic kitsch is in terms of morbid erotica, like Gnaw Their Tongues, or tragic ghost-drama, like Khanate or Pyha (who is Korean, I think), or weirdo “brown metal” like Lugubrum, Bostulistum, Dead Reptile Shrine, Urfaust, etc. It never enhances lyrics in any way, it’s just that the smug “sophisticated” bands aren’t always the greatest.

  20. Moynihan says: “When you get into these buzzwords like fascism and Nazism, those are difficult areas. The media forums where these terms are bandied about don’t allow for any discussion of the intricacies of such subjects, or what the words even mean. These people who are anti-this and anti-that activist types, they don’t want such intricacies discussed.”

    Hardly reassuring. And his band Blood Axis sort of sounds like Leonard Cohen meets L. Ron Hubbard doing the Battlefield Earth soundtrack.

  21. Actually, “Leonard Cohen meets L. Ron Hubbard doing the Battlefield Earth soundtrack” sounds pretty awesome!

    —————————-
    Bert Stabler says:

    …It’s the one edge white people have in terms of straight-up evil– we don’t have rhythm or colorful rituals, but we have genocide.
    —————————-

    (Sarcasm Alert) Yah, ’cause only white people commit genocide…

    —————————-
    That’s one reason (I think) why white prison gangs are usually white-supremacist.
    —————————-

    On the subject of “ethnic” prison gangs, consider the following:

    —————————-
    There are probably more men than women raped in the United States every year—most of them in prison. Best estimates put the annual number of prison rapes at about 140,000, which is 50,000 more than the 90,000 or so rapes of women reported to police. Gang rape of the most brutal kind is common, and weaker prisoners often seek protection from a “daddy” who fights off other predators in exchange for total submission and sex on demand. There is an ugly racial dimension to prison rape: Blacks and Mexicans deliberately seek out white victims, and black-on-white rape is probably more common than any other kind. Prison rape is an appalling secret in a country that prides itself on human rights…

    …As No Escape reports, Hispanics sometimes rape Hispanics, and blacks sometimes rape blacks, but neither group permits anyone of another race to rape its own people. If a black tried to “turn out” a Mexican, the Mexicans would riot and try to kill him. Blacks also defend each other from white or Hispanic rapists. It is only whites—unless they are known members of white racialist gangs who do stick together—who are on their own and can be raped with impunity.
    —————————–
    Emphases added; from http://www.limbicnutrition.com/blog/mating-calls-the-horrific-reality-of-male-on-male-rape-in-us-prisons/

    Thrown in prison and faced with the very real threat of being considered “fair game,” would it be so outrageous for a white guy to joining a white supremacist prison gang; not because they believed their pernicious venom, but for protection?

    (Well, certainly the More-P.C.-than-thou crowd would have no trouble condemning…)

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