Let's talk about Black Metal

So I just read the book Lords of Chaos, and being a fan of black metal, found it quite enlightening. Now don't get me wrong I always knew about the rumors of how crazy the Norwegian BM community was, and therefore was weary from time to time of certain bands. However reading this book has put a lot of puzzle pieces together making me pretty fucking cautious about what bands I entertain.

In the back of the book the authors do a brief summary of the movements through out the globe circa about 2000. They mention america, but say that so far the second BM wave had not largely caught on. Let's fast forward to today.

As of now, at least in the musical underground, there has been a huge revival of black metal. Like I've already stated, even I find myself in the eye of this storm. However, I don't think many US kids get what being into some of this scene has meant, and done in other countries. Or if they do, they are not taking it as seriously as their Scandinavian counterparts (which is a travesty).

Black Metal was founded on the idea of turning away from christ and following lucifer in a bloody war against the heavens. I have no problem with this, and in fact, quite the romantic fascination (though I don't really believe in any of it.) In Norway, when they discovered Venom, no one found an ounce of humor in it. Making good on the promises of albums like Welcome to Hell, the Norwegian BM scene unleashed a slew of grave desecrations, ancient church burnings, and eventually several homicides. Needless to say these were mostly perpetrated by angry youths who lived in a country that had all the catatonic boredom of a US suburb. Like it or hate it this type of environment, in recent history, has always produced movements such as this.

Now here comes the part of the, quite true, story that I don't get. When the original founders of the Norwegian BM scene got a little older they turned this love for Satan into a love for Wotan. Not all mind you, but a number of influential names. And the belief system (some type of Asatru) goes a little something like this: (judeo-) Christianity is a plague on the earth, the way to overcome this plague is by returning to the previous culture, to return to this previous culture we must delve into the fatherland, in order to do this we must believe that our fatherland needs to stay pure, in order to keep der faterland pure we must overcome all other lands. In other words, we begin with, destroy christianity, and end with, kill the jews. I have no idea how this came about.

With the ever reaching influence of people like Varg Vikerns (BURZUM YOU IDIOTS! VARG VIKERNS IS BURZUM, AND ALSO A NATIONAL SOCIALIST!!) much of the modern BM scene has at least toyed with the imagery and language involved with asatru/national socialist aryan supremacy. With this increased reach, and ever growing popularity of all BM this point of view has started to permeate even our own backyards.

I remember flipping through the friends of my favorite local black metal band's ( Time of the Wolf, no NSBM just good old satanism. Everyone should check out this awesome band) myspace page looking for other good area black metal, and comming across a symbol I knew to be quite aryan. Below the image was the exclamation,"Wotan Mit Unst!" (Wotan be with us). I sent this statement to an at the time German friend of mine who sent back a reply that started,"Viking Scum!" She went on to explain that this might fly in the US, but was a very serious statement in Germany. At the time I had little grasp of her letter, but after reading Lords of Chaos I know exactly what she means.

This viking/wotan/NS craze has started to pop up everywhere. The trouble is, you have to know what you are looking for. For example, I listen to the streaming web Black Metal Radio on a regular basis. I've always assumed it was relatively safe. However tonight a band came on called Breath of Sorrows, who sounded like the real deal. Since I like the original sound better than the newer commodified sound, I decided to look them up. Comming across their myspace profile I could not help but notice that one of their friends was "HLP," and while I had no idea what the other two letters stood for, I could have put money on the first. Well, I was right. It took me straight to the "Heathen (anything 'Heathen' is a dead giveaway, as this is mostly a Vikernes term) Luciferian propaganda Army, who actually had the nerve to put Graveland in their top eight. For those of you who don't know, Graveland is Polands biggest NS, asatru, aryan, 14 word following moron. The FP of "Darken" (who IS the band (yea, Burzum part II)) looks innocent enough. Mostly a bunch of dorky, renfair looking Viking re-enactment photos. But even then if you look at the quirky cultural symbols slapped here and there, you might begin to know that something is up. Sure enough, click on any option of his website, and out comes the hate, from very scary beliefs, to his praising a new band for not be too afraid to praise the white man. (I guess he has lost all memory of Hitler's first empirical action)

All of the above mentioned US groups come from Vegas, and as the right wing leaning bands in the DC area mostly come from the suburbs of VA and MD, you can see the trend starting all over again. A lot of these kids come to shows, are nice and polite, are down with kids who have the right idea, and then sport a Darkthrone shirt (a band who thinks anyone who doesn't like their albums must be jewish). I do not shake my head at inverted crosses, pentagrams, corpsepaint, adorning footlong nails, and brandishing swords and axes, but for christ sake let's not start worshiping Odin for the white race.

In conclusion: SATAN YES WOTAN NO!!

(Some bands are just funny. 1349 claims that their name comes from the year when the plague first invaded Norway.....oh and purely coincidentally, according to Wiki, the same year that the Jewish Population of Basel are (I kid you not) incinerated being believed to have brought the plague to Switzerland, aaaand 2,000 Jews are burned to death in Strasbourg.
I also wonder if I get more trouble from this post from the FBI for visiting these websites, or the NSP for saying the inflammatory things.)