I haven't had time to do a big post recently, but here's a round up of some interesting stuff:
Meshuggah Beach Party do surf music covers of Jewish standards. They're pretty shticky (they play dressed as Haredim) but the music sounds great. Maybe everything sounds good surf-style? Check out black metal surf-style
Ever since hearing about the recent terrorist attack in Norway I have wondered about what Varg Vikernes's reaction would be. Well, wonder no longer: he has posted his thoughts in a post on his website entitled War in Europe: Part I - Cui bono?. The answer to the question 'Cui Bono' is of course is the Jews! Vikernes condemns the attack and sees it as probably a Mossad-run 'false flag' operation. I'm not going to quote from it directly here. What surprises me is the explictness with which Vikernes regurgitates the most predictable elements of antisemitism (Jews invented Marxism, feminism, freemasonry, psychology etc etc). I never had any illusions about his beliefs but I did feel that at the very least he had more subtelty and originality in their expression (not that it makes them any better of course). Maybe I've been wasting too much time grappling with the Vikernes question - maybe he's just a dull neo-Nazi after all...
Israel's Metalist website recently published this interview with Varg Vikernes. I think it's great that they secured the interview and more importantly, that the interviewer Alon Miasnikov did not shirk from answering the hard questions. These days Vikernes' interviews seem to be characterised by his charm and good humour rather than a desire to shock (and they can be all the more dangerous for that). He is also extremely evasive and sometimes downright misleading. When asked for his views on Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust he first of all talks about other massacres throughout history and the way the facts are distorted and then goes on to argue that:
My problem with all these massacres is that I really don't know if they happened as described by the victors. Nor do I trust the descriptions of the victims, as they tend to at least exaggerate. I say this because I see how even my unimportant and (to most) uninteresting story has been presented by the Norwegian system. They actually teach children in school today that I am a devil-worshipping satanist who burned churches, and they use me to prove the existence of a satanic presence in our midst. Everything they teach them is a lie, and what they teach is even easily unveiled as nonsense. You don't even need any sources to figure this out. The whole story falls apart on its own due to a complete lack of logic. When it comes to the Holocaust I have the same problem. I don't trust the official story, because I have no reason to trust those who tell me this story.
So is he a Holocaust denier or not? I guess he is, although he couches it in terms of suspicion of all mainstream historical narratives. He has never made denial a central part of his work and public statements though and it's good that the interview got this out of him. His proof of why official narratives can't be trusted is also hilariously weak. While he may never been a Satanist in the conventional sense of the word, he did indeed burned churches.
Vikernes is also asked in the interview about the notorious incident when he sent a letter bomb to Zeev Tannenboim of the Israeli metal band Salem. His response is as follows:
Well, I don't remember much of this. I was 18 years at the time and was «at war with the world», so to speak. All I remember was that I sent an electronic detonator to a guy in Salem and wrote to him that «Here is the device you needed to blow up that government building», as if he had asked for it. Then I wrote «cassette tape» on the customs note, knowing perfectly well that it did not look as if the package contained a cassette tape. It was a rotten joke intended to end our communication. As far as I know he was interviewed by the police and that was it, and I expected nothing more than that. It did, by the way, very efficiently end our comunication, as intended. «Big surprise».
Who knows whether this is true or not as Vikernes tends to manipulate his past continuously. It may be true though and in which case the conventional story only needs to be rewritten to the extent that the letter momb was only a detnonator and that it was couched as a joke designed to get Tannenboim into trouble. Whatever - Vikernes was clearly aiming to attack an Israeli musician for the simple reason that he was Israel and hence a Jew.
I was dissapointed with the interview to the extent that Vikernes could have been pushed more on his views on Jews. Still, kudos to Metalist for asking questions that other avoid.
One criticism sometimes levelled at Satanism and black metal is that anti-Christianity is an easy option in places like Norway and that if they'd have any guts they'd attack Islam. I am torn over this question as I believe Islamophobia to be a real problem and that western societies hardly need to have more abuse directed at Islamic minorities, but at the same time I cannot deny that blasphemy should never be ruled artistically out of bounds. More than that - blasphemy can, in certain contexts be a radical act. Such might (and I stress might) be the case with the Arabic Anti-Islamic Legion, a small grouping of black metal acts based in the Islamic world. Some of these may undoubtedly be brave (although they keep themselves anonymous), such as the woman behind the Iraqi solo act Janaza . I can't deny that such a project could be an act of resistance against fundamentalist domination. Yet my worry is that in a western context, anti-Islamic black metal may simply fuel racism and Islamophobia.
Yes I know, I am a confused lefty metal-lover trying to have my cake and eat it: I enjoy the thrill of transgression but abhore oppression, bigotry and racism; I respect Islam immensely (honestly) but also respect blasphemous art. Is such a position viable? Well in the sense that I manage to get up in the morning and live a fairly normal life I guess that it is. Of course, life is easy for me as a middle class Londoner. Where would I jump if I had to make hard choices? I don't know, but I guess I have lived my life so far with the aim of avoiding those choices. I am 39 now, if I can just manage to keep this ludicrous position going for another 40 or so years, then I guess I will have showed it's possible to have my cake and eat it too.
I'm very conscious of the fact that I am posting pretty rarely on this blog and when I do my posts are generally brief. This post won't change things - I'm still too busy with other stuff for now - but I'm glad to have the opportunity to recommend two excellent posts by Graeme on black metal and the extreme right: here and here.
Later this year I am planning to submit a couple of research grant applications looking at NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal).
During my time doing research on the Israeli metal scene in 1998 I heard an interesting story: Apparently an Israeli metal fan was doing his military service in an undercover unit in Hebron. Every day he was woken up early by the call to prayer from a nearby minaret. So he snuk into the mosque and replaced the tape of the call to prayer with one of Sepultura's 'Beneath the Remains' and the next morning Hebron was awoken by death metal.
Now this story was never corroborated so it's possible that it's some kind of urban myth. But, assuming it is true, it raises some thought-provoking questions about the politics of metal. On the one hand, the story highlights the oppressive nature of the occupation - the ability of Israeli soldiers to create mayhem at will. You can hear echoes in this story of how music has been used in military oppression and torture in the Iraq war and indeed other wars. On the other hand, you can read the story as a kind of nihilistic form of resistance at the insanity of the religion-stoked war between Israelis and Palestinians. Let's not forget that the militant settlers of Hebron, whom the IDF is protecting, are hardly metal fans. Israeli conscripts do not stop being metal fans once they join up and the story provides a hint of the complex ways in which a love of metal can both reinforce a kind of imperialism and stoke a kind of disorder that undermines military discipline in potentially subversive ways. As ever, metal is an ambivalent presence within 'real world' politics.
This story has been on my mind again due to the viral circulation of this video, made by an IDF unit in Hebron:
Unlike the Sepultura story, this prank does not appear to disturb the daily lives of Palestinians in Hebron. The dance seems to have taken place on a back street and the music itself looks like it's been overdubbed. But there's a similar kind of politics at work: the gap between the relative freedom of the IDF to 'play' in Hebron versus the lack of freedom of Palestinian residents is still stark. Again, the IDF soldiers seem to inhabit another world, not only from the Palestinians, but from the religious Jewish settlers in Hebron. The incongruity of Ke$ha's music in this context is even greater than Sepultura's (at least death metal is a sound with resonances of conflict) and perhaps this, together with the image of soldiers performing a choreographed dance while fully armed, gives the video a kind of whimsical quality that is sort of endearing.
Are some contexts too 'serious' for pranks to be appropriate? Can the pranks be read as cynical comments by soldiers stuck between two sets of fundamentalists? Does the lack of freedom of the Palestinians to engage in such pranks neccessarily mean that no one else should either?
I'm not sure what the answers are to these questions. What I do know is that they are worth taking seriously. As ever, popular music opens doors on the complexity of the political.
Amber Clifford, an American academic, is conducting research on queer metal fans. For those who fall into that category, there's an online questionnaire to fill out here.
The black metal that attracts me most is ambiguous black metal - black metal where you are never sure where you stand with regard to the transgressive fantasies of its creators. So I have always been drawn to the Meads of Asphodel who play around with the twisted interconnections between jihad, early Christianity and the occult. I just found out that there next release will be called 'The Murder of Jesus the Jew' which will take the band ever closer to some truly dangerous and antisemitic fantasies. They aren't NSBM - like most other smart black metal bands, they prefer to revel in voluptuous fantasies of hatred rather than permanently fixing their sites on any one category of persons - but you can easily see how they might be construed as one. Their record label has the following statement from Metatron from the Meads:
‘NSBM, has obvious grievances towards the Jews, hence its fascist
Nazi imagery and stark one dimensional theology. Most NSBM owes much to
cultural independence rather than blatant anti Semitism, but this very
real and for most, disturbing genre is not necessarily [although by
nature] aligned directly to the all consuming aura of Hitler.
Anti-Semitism at its root form is rooted to the early
Roman Church, itself an extension of the Roman Empire, both subversive
institutions of conversion by persuasion. The Romans
levelled Jerusalem in 70BC, killing around a million Jews from a
population of three million. With the Roman Empire in decline, its transformation into the Holy Roman
Empire through the adopted Judaic cult of Jesus [eventually stripped of
all its Judaism] was the next crucial factor in our perceptions of
anti-Semitism today. The growth of early Christianity depended on its
sellable nature to a Pagan Roman Audience; hence the blame for their
Gods death [Jesus] could not be pointed towards a Roman [Pontius
Pilate]. The blame was therefore placed firmly on the Jews, and
Anti-Semitism was truly born. The Christian religion, already based on
debatable foundations grew at an astonishing rate, consuming half the
globe, and dragging its dark anti-Semitic guilt with it. The Jews were
bundled in groups and ghettos throughout Europe, their main source of
survival money lending and their drive to succeed gained wealth and
business attributes worldwide. This was the bane of German Fascism, a
twisted excuse to drag a nation into the bowels of war.
The whole Jewish question during Hitler's reign is one of the
Holocaust, indiscriminate extermination, and calculated cruelty. The
systematic destruction of a race had no name at the time, so one was
invented for it, Genocide. Whether you accept History's stark truth of
gas chambers and deliberate mass murder, or take the revisionist view,
[that it never occurred] is neither there nor there. What is important
is the freedom to discus without prejudice individual views, and NSBM is
a medium for a minority to express those views. It is your choice
whether to listen ,but to silence this view is to become the very beast
you attempt to muzzle.
This is a classic example of ambiguous black metal discourse: on the one hand it scorns antisemitism as a lunatic Christian invention, on the other hand it rejects suppression of NSBM in the name of free speach. This is where black metal's frisson lies, in never turnin away from evil but never wholeheartedly embracing it either. I can live with this - sometimes only just - but you can see how in the wrong hands this is mighty dangerous stuff.
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