True Norwegian Black Metal

"I didn’t know whether this was legitimate for Five Books or not…. I slipped it in anyway. In the same way that fiction can get to the heart of what music is, I think photography can do it just as well. We respond to music using a whole toolkit of aesthetic tools, and also I love photography books. This book is massive fat hardback, very lavishly produced, and is very satisfying to own. Norwegian Black Metal is infamous for a series of church burnings and even a couple of murders in the early nineties. But now the scene is very productive, innovative, and still influential in the wider world. Black metal is of interest because of its commitment to a transgressive view of metal. It is often, although not always, openly satanic, occultist and pagan. It is also often espouses a very extremist, individualist misanthropy. Some people at the fringes have dabbled with forms of fascism, and aesthetically it is very challenging. There are a lot of screams, it is very fast and difficult to listen to if you’re not into it. “Norwegian Black Metal is infamous for a series of church burnings and murders in the early nineties” This book captures the scene very well, in particular that clash between the transgressive and the mundane. There are a lot of pictures of people wearing what is known as corpse paint, which is make-up a bit like Kiss, but darker. That kind of thing. There are some great pictures of corpse-painted black metallers out on the streets, one with an old lady around the corner trying to ignore them. There’s a wonderful photo of one covered in his own shit, literally, but he is in his bathtub which seems a bit bathetic. In another, a guy has been cutting himself and his blood is in the sink, along wish his tooth brush and toothpaste. It is that mixture of the very transgressive and the very normal that this book captures so well. “There’s a kind of heroism, a self-conscious myth-making, in black metal” There’s a kind of heroism, a self-conscious myth-making, in black metal, particularly Norwegian black metal. This collection both upholds that and subtly questions it as well. Black metal is ambivalent because it likes to be left alone in its own solipsistic world to do its own thing, but it’s also a critique of the modern world. There’s a paper that was published a few years ago about Norwegian black metal called ‘Social Democratic Satanism’. Some of the critique that black metal offers is that the modern world is too soft, or that it stamps down on the individual. There’s a kind of merging of extreme anarchism and misanthropic nihilism, which I don’t hold to ideologically at all, but it produces some incredible music. It’s a bit like climbing Mount Everest; I’m not going to do it myself, but I’m glad that somebody has done it for me. The paper looks at why satanic black metal emerged in a country with among the highest qualities of life on earth and a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Many people, including myself, have pointed out that a lot of these bands in Scandinavian countries are able to get assistance with paying for rehearsal rooms and other kinds of support. And Norwegian diplomats have used Norwegian black metal as softpower publicity for their country. So there are all sorts of irony that are fun to write about or photograph. More or less everywhere. One of the most interesting things about metal is the integration of so-called ‘folk styles’ into the music. So it’s not just that people around the world are making the same metal that everyone else does, but they’re also doing it in distinctive ways. For example, one of my favourite bands is an Israeli band called Orphaned Land who mix in Middle Eastern and Jewish music into their work. “There are black black metal bands. There aren’t a great deal of them, but they exist” It used to be that metal was confined to Europe and the English speaking world, but now there are places in the world that had very small scenes in the last decade or two which have rapidly grown, such as China, South East Asia, India, Japan. Africa is starting to develop metal scenes as well, which is interesting giving that metal is often been associated with whiteness. There’s a scene in Botswana that challenges that. So it’s becoming a highly globalised music, and you shouldn’t just see it as cultural imperialism. There are people who are using this music to express what it means to live within a particular context. No, absolutely not. There are black black metal bands. There aren’t a great deal of them, but they do exist. I do. I have studied the connection between metalness, Israeliness and Jewishness, and I wrote a blog called Metal Jew for a few years. As to the connection between metal and Jews, there have been plenty of prominent Jewish metallists, people like Gene Simmons of Kiss, just like there have been Jews in most popular music genres. But what I’m particularly interested in is those instances where Jewish metal is used to express Jewish concerns in distinctively Jewish ways. The Israeli band I talked about, Orphaned Land , do that in a very interesting way. Another examples is John Zorn, a Jewish radical musician based in New York who is hugely influential in some more avant-garde versions of Jewish music. Listen widely! And don’t stop with the music that you’re most comfortable listening to."