The last word on Norwegian black metal?

In three stunning posts, here, here and here, the ever-wonderful Documents  blog muses on Euronymous, the Norwegian black metal scene, transgression, the artist and repression. The conclusion of the second post:

The artist as a creator who desires a society that denies his right to exist, is a paradoxical symbol. An artist embodying the left-handed side of this paradox was murdered by a fellow artist who embodies the right-handed side of the paradox: the drama which unfolded in the Dream Time of Norwegian Black Metal certainly had a "...strange processual inevitability overriding questions of interest, expediency, or even morality" (Turner). The murder of Mayhem's Aarseth by Burzum's Vikernes was not only a tragedy in the Classical sense of the word. It was and is more than that: it is the frozen image of a configuration pregnant with tensions between opposing but interdependent socio-cultural forces, a configuration that was shocked into crystallization into a monad, not by the thought of the dialectical critic (Benjamin), but by the violence of the act.

The conclusion to the third part:

By interpreting the murder as the result of a dramatic or narrative process model, I have hoped to deny Vikernes the authorship of the killing. One might counter that the "author is dead", that there is no need to "kill" him as an author of a murder. But Vikernes as an author still reigns on the internet, in interviews, magazines, in "Lords of Chaos", as in the very consciousness of metalheads. Vikernes still has authority over the murder: in this sense he is an undead author. These three posts then are an attempt to drive a stake through his fascist heart.

These posts are probably the smartest thing anyone has ever written on the early 90s Norwegian black metal scene.

The Documents blog shames me a bit. I'm an academic who has written on metal and transgression, yet my blogging is mostly light-hearted. I simply don't have the time and energy to direct my creativity too far into this blog. I'm glad that there are people around, like the author of Documents, to do so in my absence.

Comments

[GS]

You shouldn't beat yourself up too much. First two posts are interesting. The last one is just a silly bit of over-wrought acadamese. From that conclusion it sounds like the impetus can be found in the author's inability to reconcile his own beliefs and enjoyment of Vikernes' music with Varg's rather extreme viewpoints, which were one of several factors (including Euronymous threatening to "snitch" on Vikernes to the police and the claim that he owed V.V. 30,000 kroner) that led to the the actual murder. And so linking it exclusively to a "fascist ideology" is pushing it.

Not that the author comes off as agreeing with Euronymous politics, but "at least he wasn't a racist."

And all this talk about Tragedy...can't we move past over-romanticizing this shit already?

[Keith Kahn-Harris]

Thanks for the comment. I guess one of the reasons I liked these blog posts was that I share the same ambivalence about Vikerenes - I think he was an extraordinary musician but a revolting character.

[Graeme]

But isn't the inability (or difficulty) in reconciling the aesthetics and politics one of the main appeals of black metal? For listeners with broadly liberal-democratic politics, there's certainly a sense of transgressiveness in listening to these bands that you don't get from your average death metal or grindcore band.

[Keith Kahn-Harris]

Yes indeed Graeme - as a liberal lefty there's a real frisson in listening to Burzem. Maybe some contradictions were never meant to be solved...