Lords of Chaos

I recently read a book called "Lords of Chaos", about the bloody rise of Satanic black metal music. Much of the book is pretty interesting, charting as it does the evolution of black metal from thrash, and the subsequent evolution of Norwegian black metal and its violent subculture (usually referred to as a "scene"). It's incomplete, especially its rather cursory treatment of thrash and death metal and its complete lack of any explanation of what black metal really sounds like, but it's still interesting enough.

The book gets much less interesting when its authors start the usual mass media accusations that all black metal fans are criminals waiting for a crime scene, that all black metal is Nazi, and that there's a great occult satanic black metal conspiracy out there. Black metal has to be "taken seriously", they intone gravely, lest something bad happen. I'm no Pollyanna and I know that bad things have happened in the black metal scene, especially in Norway and Germany, and that bad things are probably going to happen in Poland and Russia in the near future. But come on, do they seriously think that the fact that I listen to Enslaved, Darkthrone and Emperor means that I'm going to commit some beastly act of antisocial protest? Do I have to go on some watch list because I own - gasp - a Burzum album??* And - double gasp - I actually like it???**

The authors strongly imply that black metal makes people do bad things. I think they miss the point, which is that some people do bad things, and some of them happen to listen to black metal. Are some lackwits chivvied into doing bad things because they they think Varg wants them to? Probably. But they'd probably do bad things anyway, even without Varg; they'd just listen to a different Peid Piper. (Varg Vikernes is such a convenient figure for the mass media to focus on that, as they say, if he didn't exist, they'd have to invent him.) They seem to argue that there's no way to just listen to black metal without actually sinking into the black metal lifestyle as it existed in the early 1990s, in much the same way that critics of rap argue that you can't listen to rap without turning into a grill-sporting misogynist with a Hummer and an AK-47. Are there misogynist gun-toting thugs in rap? Sure, but there would have been misogynistic gun-toting thugs even without rap; we'd just be blaming someone else (Perry Como, maybe).

Still, I liked the book, even though I found its later sociological chapters somewhat unconvincing, and its heavy focus on Varg Vikernes, NSBM, and Satanism somewhat limiting, and its alarmist tone kind of heavy-handed. Parts of it reminded me of Civics classes in the early 1970s, when we had to be taught alarmist nonsense about the Communist world takeover timetable. Now it's the black metal Satanist world takeover timetable. At least the Communists had a whole country to work with. Most black metal groups seem to have trouble scraping up a rehearsal space. It's hard to take a conspiracy seriously when it has to crash in its friend's basement because it can't scrape up rent money.

(NSBM stands for National Socialist Black Metal, which is kind of a contradiction in terms. Most black metal seems to stress the power and primacy of the individual, while National Socialism teaches the subjugation of the individual to the state. NSBM does exist, but it's not as common as they would have us believe. Most of the true racist material I've heard over the years sounds more like hardcore or Oi! than black metal to me anyway.)

*The album I refer to is Filosofem, Burzum's last pre-incarceration album. It's something of a classic in the black metal field, up there with In the Nightside Eclipse and Transilvanian Hunger, but let's be honest about something - it's sung in German, which I am not fluent in, and even if I was fluent in German, I couldn't understand the vocals anyway. And I have no intention of ever looking up the lyrics, because I just don't care about the lyrics. But as a musical effort, it is quite singular; the first two tracks are almost hypnotic, and even though it's black metal it's curiously soporific and calming.

**Let there be no misunderstanding here. I do not and never did approve of the church burnings that Burzum advocated, Varg Kikernes was convicted of, and some black metal mouthpieces approve of. Nor do I personally admire Varg Vikernes, or agree with his political, racial and philosophical positions. The snippets of Vargsmal that I've read come off sounding like warmed-over Nietzsche filtered through Josef Goebbels, and that's a tough act to hang with. But as an album, musically, it's amazing.