Den Norrøne Rase må Slakte den andre … (Darkthrone, ‘Over Fjell Og Gjennom Torner’, Transilvania Hunger)
Dead killed himself because he lived only for the true old black metal scene and lifestyle [… ]. We must take this scene to what it was in the past! Dead died for this cause and now I have declared war! [… ] Death to false black metal or death metal!! Also to the trendy hardcore people… Aarrgghh! (Euronymous of Mayhem; Moynihan and Søderlind Reference Moynihan and Søderlind2003, p. 60)
Introduction
On 8 April 1991, Dead, vocalist for Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, took his life in such a manner that completely obliterated any possibility for his survival: while home alone, he slit his wrists and throat before blowing his brains out with a shotgun. Although Mayhem's drummer, Hellhammer, accused guitarist Euronymous of using Dead's suicide to facilitate the image of the band, it is nevertheless curious that, for Euronymous, Dead's motivation to kill himself stemmed not from Dead's lifelong obsession with death and with the thought of being dead but from, above all, Dead's apparent concern with the authenticity and purity of the Norwegian black metal scene (Moynihan and Søderlind Reference Moynihan and Søderlind2003, p. 60).
The relationship between black metal and narratives of authenticity is not a markedly new concern within popular critical and academic scholarship. Within the fields of sociology, cultural studies and, more recently, popular music studies, fan studies and metal music studies, theorists have examined the concern and complexity of qualifying or defining authenticity in music – we need only think of Philip Auslander's (Reference Auslander1999) or Paul Sanden's (Reference Sanden2013) work on liveness, recording and authenticity. Since the 1990s, there has also been a strong output of works that address the social and cultural history of the phenomenon of black metal, as we have seen in the work of Dayal Patterson (Reference Patterson2014) or Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind (Reference Moynihan and Søderlind2003). Still more recently, and emerging out of the field of continental philosophy, Black Metal Theory situates itself as a ‘speculative and creative endeavour’ rather than empirical and analytical study that allows for a thinking through black metal (Helvete n.d.). While Black Metal Theory is not strictly concerned with the question of authenticity in black metal, this particular field offers curious, creative and critical ways of approaching black metal and theory. Scott Wilson asks what it may mean to think of ecology through black metal – through a negative or ‘black’ reengagement with the environment. Black Metal Theory, however, is not merely apophatic in its approach to black metal and to theory, but draws on a double negative, which, for Nicola Masciandaro and Edia Connole, situates Black Metal Theory as ‘Not black metal. Not theory. Not not black metal. Not not theory’ (cited Connole Reference Connole and Stronge2017, p. 200). This focus on negation, blackness and metal has also ushered in a renewed interest in the theory of more marginalised twentieth-century thinkers whose work was largely overlooked in the era of its production for being non-systematic, anti-philosophical, mystical or nihilistic – among other thinkers, we have seen a particular renewed readership in the work of twentieth-century French anti-philosopher Georges Bataille.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Bataille's work, as well as the more curious aspects of his biography, have been taken up in Black Metal Theory, given Bataille's lifelong concern with transgression, the (re)establishment of a sui generis Nietzschean religious order, and his explorations of the sacred, ritual human sacrifice and eroticism. Bataille's work not only explored ‘the edge’ conceptually but, at the level of practice, engaged in the sacrifice of ‘form’ – Bataille's work rejects systematisation and formula, and incorporates elements of the parabolic, drunken musings, prayer, fiction and poetry. Edia Connole (Reference Connole and Stronge2017) proposes the possibility of an immersive reading with black metal theory that is guided very much by a reading with Bataille. Connole notes that ‘opposition’ is central to both Bataille and black metal – indeed, it is a seeming paradoxical ‘oppositionality’ that positions Bataille's theory and black metal's politics as at once godless and Satanic, and it is a form of opposition that seeks to undermine the specific concern with rationality, reason, knowledge and stability that emerged in the modern period (p. 197). Curiously, Connole employs a Bataillean form of opposition and inversion in her own work, rejecting the ‘good’ and ‘distanced’ ‘observation’ of the academic to instead explore what it might mean to think with Bataille, to think with black metal. It is this thinking with Bataille and black metal, Connole argues, that produces a ‘theoretical blackening of metal’, and a ‘metallic blackening of theory’ (Connole Reference Connole and Stronge2017, p. 200).
In any discussion of Black Metal Theory, it would be careless to suppose that black metal is merely a case study through which to read theory, and it is certainly worth noting the appropriation and exploration of Bataille's theory within black metal itself. While Bataille's name and theory has been taken up across various musical genres (consider Bjork's early musical references to Bataille's novella, Story of the Eye, the Japanese Goth/cold-wave band Madame Edwarda (titled after Bataille's novella of the same name), or American punk band Bataille, who, in their bio propose: ‘This is not punk rock. This is theology’ (Bataille n.d.), black metal outfit, Deathspell Omega are well known for adopting Bataille's thought in their music and in their musical ethos. In an interview with record label AJNA Offensive, Deathspell Omega discuss the aesthetical transition from the more overt Satanic implications in their earlier album art, to the less overt Satanic references in their albums by way of Bataille – specifically, they address Bataille's preface to his 1941 novella Madame Edwarda, and his discussion of the Sadean and the satanic, and the sly deflection of the horror of death and delight onto the other (Deathspell Omega n.d.). Given both the theoretical and musical interest in and ability to read black metal through Bataille and read Bataille through black metal, I propose that Bataille's concept of authentic literature is very much applicable to a reading of black metal (and to a ‘blackening’ that goes beyond music) because of Bataille's and black metal's invocation of evil and the Luciferian in their interpretation of authenticity.
In this article I will limit my examination of black metal to a particular musical and political phenomenon that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the black metal scene in Norway. Specifically, I will examine what was referred to as the ‘second wave’ of the Norwegian black metal scene, and I will examine the crimes and offences that were committed by a handful of ‘members’ in this scene. I will explore the rationale that underpinned the logic of these crimes, not in an attempt to explain away the perpetrators’ brutality or their prejudices, but to problematise the narrative of authenticity that positioned these crimes as committed in the name of ‘true Norwegian black metal’. Thus, this article will focus on a small subsection of second-wave Norwegain black metallers who, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, enacted a series of politically motivated offences: church burnings (particularly of churches that were alleged to have been built on top of heathen religious sites), Christian grave desecrations, flirtations with fascistic ideology and the nineteenth-century Völkish tradition, and murders both within and without the scene. While these offences were not geographically limited to Norway alone (we might think of the burning of the Lundby Gothenburg Church in Sweden), nor were they restricted to the second wave Norwegian black metal scene (various black metal bands across Europe, America and Australia have joined national socialist alliance groups, including (although not limited to) bands like Waffenbruder, Graveland and Judas Iscariot), I propose that the second wave's concern with an ‘authentic’ or ‘True Norwegian Black Metal’ underpinned the scene's rejection of ‘aesthetic iconoclasm’ (what Euronymous referred to when he decreed ‘death to fake black metal and heavy metal’) and enabled an activation of ‘criminal violence’ that saw the performance of on-stage menace taken up off-stage.Footnote 1 Thus, in what follows, I will examine the specific concern with authenticity, nationhood and ‘tradition’ that underlie both the sound and the political actions of a small group of Norwegian black metallers.
While I hope to avoid cluttering this piece with semantics, it is important that we problematise from the very start the ‘title’ or ‘name’ to which second wave Norwegian black metal groups pinned their music: ‘Norwegian black metal’. Obviously, such a title cannot account for all black metal bands that emerge out of Norway – not their politics, not their sound nor their aesthetic. While we might typically refer to bands like Mayhem, Dimmu Borgir and Tristania as ‘Norwegian black metal’, given that all three bands, geographically, emerge out of Norway, there is little in their sound or their politics that overlaps. My intention here is to limit my focus to a very specific subsection of Norwegian black metal – specifically to bands like Mayhem, Darkthrone and Burzum – and to the very particular narrative of authenticity that underpinned both their approach to music and their criminal actions. I will also readily address the limitations and the narrow scope of this essay, in its focus on Norwegian black metal as opposed to black metal as a global phenomenon, and in its examination of authenticity and nationalism (as opposed to an exploration of authenticity and gender or authenticity and class). Nevertheless, I would like to propose that such limitations are necessary so as to position this research within broader and ongoing investigations into the politics of authenticity and in examining black metal as a global phenomenon.
Luciferian authenticity at the ‘Necrohell Studios’
In 1994 Norwegian black metal band Darkthrone released their fourth album, Transilvanian Hunger. The album's back cover sported the slogan ‘True Norwegian Black Metal’ – an alteration of the statement that they had originally intended to publish: ‘Norsk Arisk Black Metal’ or ‘Norwegian Aryan Black Metal’ – as well as the assertion that ‘Darkthrone is for all the evil in man’.Footnote 2 Thus, for Darkthrone there is not only a true and authentic (Aryan) Norway, as well as a true and authentic (Aryan) Norwegian black metal (for, are Darkthrone not declaring themselves the bearers of this ‘truth’?), but, most intriguingly, they also propose that this very ‘truth’ is ultimately entangled with evil.
This entanglement with authenticity and evil is not unique to black metal, but is prefigured in the writing of Georges Bataille. In both his 1950 letter to poet and friend René Char, and his 1957 Literature and Evil, Bataille argues that authentic literature is necessarily evil, necessarily diabolical (in both the Miltonian and Romantic sense) because of a Nietzschean form of sovereignty that the author momentarily attains at the conception of the modern world – that is, in the wake of the death of God. For Scott Wilson, the evil that Bataille imagines here, in this moment of ‘Nietzschean sovereignty’, is an evil that, paradoxically, is at once bound up both with the godless (a pre-Christian heathenism) and the satanic. In the modern, secular world, Wilson argues, any trace of the divine has at once been rendered both servile and subordinate to scientific rationalism's desire for empiricism and consistency – in its attempts to overcome or replace God, Western rationality has produced in itself what Bataille would call a ‘blind spot’ at the heart of our ability to ‘know’ (Wilson Reference Wilson and Wilson2014, p. 10). Through his reading of Nick Land's Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Wilson argues that Bataille and black metal eschew this modern, secular atheism to instead pursue a more radical, divine atheism that invokes the satanic. For Wilson, such an atheistic approach to the divine is contained in Land's assertion that, ‘An atheism that does not hunger for God's blood is an inanity’ (Land, cited in Wilson Reference Wilson and Wilson2014). What I would like to propose is that what both Bataille and black metal develop through their pursuits for authenticity is a form of political (if not musical) conservatism that is nevertheless concerned with its own seeming marginality, with its disdain for the mainstream as well as for any form of ‘falsity’ that may masquerade as authenticity.Footnote 3 Thus, both Bataille's and black metal's political conservatism is a conservatism that inhabits ‘the edge’.Footnote 4
It is to evil and the satanic that Bataille dedicates his notion of authenticity, for at the heart of Bataille's belief in the birth of the sovereignty of the author (the author of authentic literature) is the death of God. While Bataille – much in the same way as many black metal bands – celebrates the death of God, he believed that modernity also witnessed the breakdown of the Romantic image of the Gemeinschaft, a pre-modern world in which humans were embedded in nature and steeped in the sacred. However, unlike the Romantics, the pre-modern world that Bataille imagined was not one of unending sweetness that was populated by chimerical animals and nymphs, but was, rather, a world where brutality and ritualistic violence both signalled and opened into the sacred. Bataille, who was certainly not alone in his at once Romantic/anti-Romantic reading of the pre-modern world (and, it must also be noted that Bataille was highly sceptical of any attempt to condense and simplify the pre-modern world – Bataille articulates this through the very title of his final and posthumous work, Theory of Religion), nevertheless noted the impossibility of ever attaining or returning to what was essentially a hypothetical, mythological primordial state. Indeed, Bataille notes that the very idealisation of the pre-modern world (and the modern drive to return to the past) was itself a product of modernity. It is therefore curious that the advent of modernity, which we might say was articulated through Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God, should signal a reawakening or renewal of a long dormant pre-modern (heathen) world. I propose that both Bataille's and black metal's concern with authenticity, which is determined by their – black metal's/Bataille's notion of the author's and literature's – complicity with ‘evil’, is centred on a critique of modernity and a desire to commune with a mythological pre-modern world. I therefore argue that, through their fascination with the authenticity of evil, both Bataille and black metal have attempted to develop an arena where paganism not only activates the satanic, but where these older gods overthrow the petulant, ‘inauthentic’ god of Christianity.Footnote 5
Dead music for a dead culture: ‘necro-sound’ and the crisis of modernity
Dominic Fox (Reference Fox2009) proposes that a particular collective within the early 1990's Norwegian black metal scene (the so-called ‘second wave’, among them Mayhem, Burzum, and Darkthrone) became identifiable and ‘authenticated’ through certain sonic phenomena – specifically, through what is the now-iconic low-quality cassette-recorded ‘sound’ of their musical output. For Fox, this appeal to the sound of cheap home recording was both an artistic and a political concern and, ‘was established as a token of authenticity, a sign that the artist had sincerely broken away from what was regarded as a sterile and commercialised mainstream metal scene’ (Fox Reference Fox2009, p. 51). It is important to note that this particular ‘low quality’ or ‘cassette home recording’ sound is clearly not a marker of or a concern for all black metal that emerges out of Norway.Footnote 6 Indeed, Fox goes on to clarify that even this very marker of ‘authentication’ (or recognisability), this low-quality production sound, was not the sole indicator of a ‘true’ Norwegian black metal, although it is perhaps indicative of a broader political concern for authenticity. Among bands that purport to be second wave Norwegian black metal, narratives of authenticity or ‘truth’ are largely bound up with a drive to reconnect with a nostalgic romanticisation of nationhood and ‘tradition’ rather than with a concern for sound-quality alone.
Fox makes a curious observation of the divergent narratives of authenticity and ‘truth’ in second wave Norwegian and some ‘late’ (contemporary/global) black metal. He proposes that some ‘late’ black metal as the ‘inheritor of a re-aestheticising of a radically anti-aesthetic [second wave] moment’ seeks ‘validity’ ‘through the extent to which its creators’ declarations of intent coincide with real acts of rebellion and destruction’ (Fox Reference Fox2009, p. 53). What has remained central to both second wave Norwegian and some ‘late’ global black metal, however, is a fascination with the pre-modern that is manifest in second wave Norwegian black metal's revolt against high-quality forms of recording technologies, in favour of maintaining the ‘authentic’ necro-sound and production quality that has become characteristic of black metal. For Fox, this ‘necro-sound’ ‘was originally an artefact of the limited means of production and distribution available to black metal musicians’, who, in the early years of the Norwegian black metal scene, would swap cassettes of their low-quality, often live home-recordings (Fox Reference Fox2009, p. 51). These recordings often expressed a flattened, tinny sound that was further distorted by the ambient noises, whirs and hisses caught on tape.
For Eugene Thacker , black metal's ‘necro-sound’ is not merely an aural experience, but rather addresses a violent negotiation between what might be typically understood as the composition of music and the barbarity of sound. Thacker proposes that black metal's ‘necro-sound’ is undeniably the sound of negation. Indeed, this necro-sound, he argues, ‘presents music as a negation of the soundness of sound’ (Thacker Reference Thacker and Wilson2014, p. 183). This negation, Thacker says, underpins what he calls the ‘unsound’, or that which is at once not sound, but is also not-not sound, and is also not silence. The ‘unsound’ of black metal is at once not entirely dissociable from what might traditionally be called ‘sound’ given its ‘articulation’ from a material world, and yet it cannot be called ‘silence’ either, even if it is not what might traditionally be called ‘audible’ and, further still, the ‘unsound’ of black metal is utterly distinct from both sound and silence, by dint of its ‘sonic characteristics that exist on the horizon of sound’ (Thacker Reference Thacker2011).Footnote 7 What is so particular about second wave Norwegian black metal's appeal to ‘authenticity’ then, is its persistence with and for the negative – for a ‘true’ or ‘pure’ necrosis. Curiously, a ‘true’ or ‘pure’ black metal is in no way bound up with any articulation of ‘the good’.Footnote 8 Rather, second wave Norwegian black metal revels in its own darkness, its dismalness, and in its exposing and disclosing an evil and unblinking ‘truth’ that is at the heart of humanity and at the heart of the cosmos.
Authenticity and the death of god
In both his letter to his ‘dear friend’ the poet René Char and Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille defines literature – or rather, ‘authentic literature’ – as that which eschews the boredom of bourgeois life and that which instead revels in the guilt of its own (as well as its author's) evil (Bataille Reference Bataille2006b, p. x). While both his letter and book functioned as a response to Jean Paul Sartre's What is Literature? and Baudelaire, what illuminates Bataille's notion of the evils of authentic literature is the intimacy of his exchange with Char. Their friendship, which developed over the 1940s and 1950s, saw the two men come to a mutual understanding of poetry's and literature's ‘essence’ – as that which brings the writer and reader to the terrifying precipice where life merges with death, as that which, according to Bataille, is ‘completely other’, as that which ‘is horrifying and gives us a sacred shiver’(Bataille Reference Bataille and Richardson2006a, p. 132) .
I propose that a similar ‘essence’ can be found in black metal. While Bataille talks of the otherness, the horror and the sacred shiver that a reader experiences in their perusal of works by Baudelaire or de Sade – or, he says, even in the works of Emily Brönte or Kafka – this otherness, horror and sacred shiver can be found not only in the themes of black metal songs, but also in their ‘necro’ sound. Consider Mayhem's ‘Funeral Fog’ – both its official recording on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and the unofficial Dead versions – the lyrics to which describe a dead and blasted landscape, a cold and dark world that is filled with fog, a place that is at once hideous but also enchanting. ‘Funeral Fog’ produces something of a sacred shiver in its listener not only through the lyrical imagery of an ‘other’ dead world (recognisable as a decayed and desecrated parallel to our own apparently ‘living’ world – a merging of life with death), but also through the song's depiction of the victory of this dead world against the attempted ‘messing’ or perhaps ‘meddling’ of a priest – what Scott Wilson would call a ‘melancological’, and heathen world triumphing against the voice of God. The cassette-tape quality of even the official recording of ‘Funeral Fog’, with its ever-present hiss of ambient noise, the audibly obstructed vocals and guitar, all station the listener as somehow present at the apparently live recording of the song, and as present in that dark and foggy world: here, authenticity is tied up not only with immediacy, but also with a refusal to ‘clean-up’ the brutality, the rawness, of a sound that simultaneously seeks its own brutality and rawness (and on this point I will say more shortly). But what is most intriguing about ‘Funeral Fog’ is that this sacred shiver – this demarcation of authenticity – should arise not out of black metal's mere indifference to religion or the sacred, but, rather, that it should arise out of a simultaneous satanic inversion as well as a heathen rejection of Christianity.
In Bataille's discussion of the essence of literature, the ‘otherness’ that he refers to is not simply found in the thematic elements of the work, or the author's own lived experience, but, rather, is found in literature's (and the action of writing's) very oppositional nature – its opposition to a mainstream which, for Bataille is the world of the bourgeois, the world of servitude and work. It is in his letter to Char that Bataille first explicitly identifies a category of what he calls ‘authentic literature’ – the sort of writing which, he proposes, evades and escapes the realm of productivity or the utilitarian. Through such a hypothesis, Bataille effectively stages a counterargument directed at Sartre: he not only rejects Sartre's interpretation of the productive purpose or ‘action’ of literature in the modern world, but also exemplifies this rejection through his manner of writing, which is stylistically incompatible with Sartre's own.Footnote 9 Bataille believes that while action or engagement may well be essential to human existence and everyday life, ‘action’ in the Sartrean sense is bound up with a form of utilitarianism that produces a literature of servitude. It is this servitude, this making-a-tool-of-literature, that strips literature of its ‘authenticity’. ‘[N]o one’, Bataille says, ‘can serve one master (whoever it may be) without denying the sovereignty of life within himself [sic]’ (Bataille Reference Bataille1990, p. 36).Footnote 10 Thus, Bataille proposes that to serve one master is to serve all (or any) masters – that to allow oneself to be subservient in one situation is to commit oneself to being a slave. However, Bataille believes that an individual can momentarily (although never fully or eternally) achieve a state of sovereignty through their resistance to work and productivity.
The sovereignty of ‘authentic literature’ or, more correctly, the sovereignty of the author who produces this non-productive literature, is, for Bataille, tied up with the historical death of a king – a death that Bataille links to Nietzsche's death of God thesis. In his letter to Char, Bataille dates the emergence of the very concept of the author with the demise of French monarchical authority (that is, he understands the birth of the droit d'auteur in parallel with the revolution and beheading of Louis XVI).Footnote 11 Indeed, Bataille not only links the authority of the king with the authority of the church and state, he also links the way that the collective ‘shedding of their blood’ (the death of the king as a literalisation of Nietzsche's death of God thesis) inaugurates a time when the author takes on a state of sovereignty or authority (however ambiguous this authority might be). Bataille's very definition of literature is clearly summarised in Nick Land's Thirst for Annihilation, where Land proposes that for Bataille: ‘the heart of literature is the death of God’ (Land Reference Land1992, p. xix). This literary deicide, this literary sovereignty, Bataille believes, is what constitutes the literature of evil – ‘evil’ because of the author's and the work's rejection and overcoming of utility, the evil themes of the work itself, and the author's overcoming of servitude through their albeit metaphorical sacrificing of the king-God.
While it may seem that black metal is not specifically concerned with a rejection of productivity and utilitarianism, it is certainly apparent that for black metal the concept of authenticity is tied up with an overcoming of a sense of religious servitude, submission or dilution. In 1992 a Norwegian church – the twelfth century Fantoft Stave Church in Bergen – was set aflame and burned to the ground by a group of black metallers.Footnote 12 The torching of the church sparked a string of church burnings that continued until 1996, and saw Burzum's Varg Vikernes accused of being the mastermind behind these arsons. According to Vikernes, the Fantoft, among other incinerated churches, had been built on top of heathen altars or pagan religious sites, and had thereby contributed to a suppression and silencing of heathenism in Norway. In 1994, Vikernes was sentenced to 21 years in prison, charged not only with murdering former band-mate Euronymous, who he had stabbed 23 times, but also for the church burnings.Footnote 13 Throughout his incarceration, and eventual release in 2009, Vikernes has continued to deny any involvement with the destruction of the churches, although he has vocally supported the arsonists’ actions. For Vikernes, the Fantoft, having been built on top of a heathen altar, was itself an act of violent blasphemy that needed to be corrected. In his interview with Moynihan and Søderlind, Vikernes explains his approval of church burnings and Christian grave desecrations: ‘Our culture’ – Nordic culture – Vikernes says, ‘lies in ruins below the churches’ (Moynihan and Søderlind Reference Moynihan and Søderlind2003, p. 163). According to Vikernes, the church immolations and grave desecrations were political: ‘[The Christians] desecrated [the pre-Christian Nordic people's] graves, or burial mounds, so it's revenge. The people who lie in the graves are the ones who built this society, which we are against’ (Moynihan and Søderlind Reference Moynihan and Søderlind2003, p. 162, emphasis in original). Among countless Burzum songs that explore the theme of pre-Christian Norwegian heathen culture, ‘A Lost Forgotten Sad Spirit’ from the 1992 Burzum EP Aske (or, ‘Ashes’ – an EP which, curiously, featured the burned remains of the Fantof Stave Church on its cover) perhaps best articulates what Vikernes sees as the ‘loss’ of this culture:
Once there was hatred
Once there was cold
Now
There is only
A dark stone tomb
With an altar
An altar which
Serves as a bed
A bed of eternal sleep
The dreams of the human in sleep
Are dreams of relief
A gate out of Hell
Into the void of death
Yet undisturbed
The human sleep
And one day
Will the grave be unlocked
And the soul
Must return to his world
But this time as
A lost forgotten sad spirit
Doomed
To haunt
Endlessly (Burzum 2016)
In ‘A Lost Forgotten Sad Spirit’ Vikernes laments what he sees as the loss and forgetting of Norway's pagan origins while he also actively opposes a Christianity that he feels has forcibly rendered Norway's ‘traditional’ or ‘original’ culture servile and submissive. The ‘bed of eternal sleep’ and ‘the human sleep’ that Vikernes refers to are reflective of his belief that Norwegian Christians are not consciously suppressing their heathen origins, but that they are simply people who are asleep – people who need to be awoken, revivified. At the heart of his philosophy Vikernes utters not only an anti-Semitic and anti-Christian sentiment, but also a form of anti-Semitism that understands Christianity as a Jewish conspiracy that has been implemented to weaken and overtake a ‘true’ Europe heathen culture.Footnote 14 What is of significance here is the way that for Vikernes present-day Norway is still haunted by the nation's seemingly more ‘authentic’ heathen past. Vikernes endorses an actual return to or recapturing of the past through a literal revenge that is exacted on the present. Much like Bataille's author, who metaphorically decapitates the king, the God, in their quest for liberation, Vikernes, in his commendation of church burnings and grave desecrations – the unlocking of a grave? – also seeks to reach the older, darker, blacker soil, where, beneath, according to Vikernes, the pagan origins of Norway are hidden, lost and forgotten. Like the pagan world's response to the meddling priest in Mayhem's ‘Funeral Fog’, Vikernes both imagines and calls for a heathen overthrowing of his Christian oppressors – an overthrowing that he carries out both literally (if we are to believe the jury's verdict) and metaphorically (through his music). Yet what is most intriguing about both Mayhem's and Vikernes's conceptualising of Nordic heathenism, is that they clearly imagine a form of heathenism that emerges out of the ‘persistence’ of evil in the modern world: what fascinates them, it seems, is the problem of evil in modernity.
Sans engagement
The problem of evil in the modern world is utterly connected to the question of authenticity in the modern world, where – in twentieth century continental philosophy and theory – after the death of God, there is (and was) a growing sense of disenchantment, a sense of the loss of an authentic and sacred world and way of being, and a sense of horror at being subsumed in a capitalist culture. While the very suggestion that there could be an ‘evil’ after the death of God might sound like something of a paradox, it was this very paradox that fascinated Bataille and led to his development of an anti-utilitarian philosophy of evil. For Bataille, the problem of evil after the death of God is indelibly bound up with what he sees as the problem of the crucifixion. We know that, when Nietzsche speaks of the death of God, he is not referring to the death of Christ and therefore is not speaking of the crucifixion. Bataille, however, uses Nietzsche's thesis to redefine and invert Christian moral terminology (words like ‘good’, ‘evil’ and ‘sin’), and to reread the sacrifice of the crucifixion and its significance in the modern world. Yet for Bataille this inversion went beyond terminology – he attempted to develop something of an inversion of the Christian moral system, and to reconsider seemingly taboo topics like eroticism and violence as transcending moral condemnation and thereby existing beyond the Christian notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
Bataille came to believe that of all things, communication was inextricably tied up with Christian notions of evil. Indeed, it is communication – authentic communication, we might say, in the form of eroticism or violence – that, Bataille believed, was tied up with a refusal to work or to be productive. For Bataille, this very act of rebellion, the refusal to serve or be subservient to a master/boss, is itself a form of evil that is reflective of Lucifer's rebellion, Lucifer's refusal to be a slave to God (here, it seems that Bataille is suggesting that evil might be understood as the opposite of Weber's hard-working Calvinist/capitalism ascetics). Thus, for Bataille, the waste products of a society are necessarily tied up with the sacred: eroticism, violence, sacrifice, the frivolities of festival and madness. In Bataille's later work, he describes the sacred in metaphorical terms: waste in the form of art, music, literature, poetry and laughter. Indeed, what Bataille is proposing here is that which is utterly opposed to the Sartrean notion of ‘action’ or ‘engagement’.Footnote 15 For Bataille, the authentic work of a sovereign being is that which not only has no immediate commercial value, but is also that which possesses no obvious, inherent ‘value’ but for its lack of value – it is a work that is guilty for not being work (we might compare Bataille's position, here, with his exploration of non-productivity and guilt in his war-time diary, Guilty). Literature, for Bataille, is therefore the work of evil. This is an evil that is connected to the desire to communicate. It is an ambivalent form of sin that, for Bataille, is comparable with the conflicted good/evil of the crucifixion: the crucifixion as the moment at which both the greatest good and the greatest evil were enacted – the evil of the murder of the God, and the good of the communication that this violence facilitated. After the Fall of Man (for Bataille this ‘fall’ was punctuated not by an exile from the garden of Eden but rather by the subject/object divide), the concept of evil became entangled with a Christian and particularly Calvinist disdain for non-productive forms of expenditure. However, for Bataille, it is utter non-productivity, a refusal of productivity, and a production of waste, that is at the heart of authentic literature, at the core of his notion of evil, and it is also, for Bataille, what is at the centre of a community.
Bataille's notion of evil, as an opposition to not only Christian utility, and as a form of non-productivity, but also as an opposition to Sartrean notions of ‘action’ and ‘engagement’, is central to the conceptualising of a ‘true’ black metal. In ‘A Burzum Story: Part VI – The Music’, Vikernes describes this very opposition as essential to the recording of his 1996 album Filosofem. Rather than demanding high-quality recording devices or studio space, Vikernes recounts asking his producer to give him the worst microphone available, a request that saw him record the album through a headset. In the recording of Filosofem Vikernes also avoided using a guitar amplifier because of what he perceived as the ‘too-mainstream’ quality of a Marshall amp. Instead, he used a set of pedals to produce the fuzzy, distorted, almost white-noise (or black-noise) that has become so characteristic of the black metal sound. When asked about his motives, Vikernes explains his rebellion against a form of ‘good’ production.
It is possible to extrapolate from Vikernes's action a rejection of the modern world: an attempt to re/claim something that is more authentic (be it a pre-modern world) than the modern world, an attempt to re/claim something that is lost (audibly) through modern recording technologies and that is lost through the very ‘productive’ nature – the ‘making a product’ of sound – of recording an album using high-end recording technologies or instruments.Footnote 16 This very form of rejection, Vikernes suggests, creates something of a life/death binary: ‘Call it “necro-sound,” “corpse-sound”’, Vikernes (Reference Vikernes2010) says of his music, ‘because it is supposed to sound the worst possible [sic]’. While it might be feasible to argue that Vikernes's conscious decision to record Filosofem with low-quality instruments and amplifiers allows him to make an example of Sartrean engagement because of his potentially social and political motivations, Vikernes's actions necessarily oppose Sartre's philosophy of a literature of engagement and instead revel in a form of Bataillean non-productivity: Vikernes's recording ruptures and disables engagement (or perhaps produces a negative- or non-(sans-?)engagement) because of his wilfully attempted annihilation of sound (making his music ‘sound the worst possible’), his attempted tearing apart of the qualities that make music listenable and therefore communicable in Sartrean literary terms.
However, it would be disingenuous to propose that black metal truly succeeds in its rejection of the modern world through its rejection of modern recording technologies. It is certainly true that black metal's rejection of modern recording has persisted right up to the present, even outside of the Norwegian black metal ‘scene’ – the necro-sound has not been lost: consider the almost celestial white-(or black-?)noise of Australian black metal outfit, Striborg's 2017 Procession of Lost Souls or the overexposed quality of American black metal-cum-neofolk act Xasthur's 2006 album Subliminal Genocide, the vocals hidden beneath buzzing guitars.Footnote 17 Yet, it seems that, while black metal opposes work and utilitarian notions of productivity, it also revels in its failure to fully overcome the modern world through its seeming rejection of modern musical innovations. In ‘At the Edge of the Smoking Pool of Death’ Timothy Morton refers to contemporary American black metal act Wolves in the Throne Room's response to the seeming paradox of black metal bands – so apparently obsessed with returning to a pre-modern world – using modern instruments and recording technologies like electric guitars at all. Although WITTR, an American ‘late’ black metal outfit, are clearly not a part the second wave Norwegian black metal scene, their concession to this paradox, that, black metal and black metallers, ‘are all hypocrites and failures’, curiously reflects Vikernes's revelling in the paradox of authenticity and ‘necro sound’ (Morton Reference Morton2013, p. 21). Indeed, WITTR, like Burzum, do not so much evade the paradox of black metal's place in the modern world, as, through signalling their rejoicing in this paradox (and in their own hypocrisy), oppose the very utility and perceived logic of ‘work’ by addressing black metal's very failure to fully disengage with that which it works to oppose – the modern world.
However, the black metal sound signals more than the rejection of the modern world (or the failure to fully reject the modern world) – the brutality and barbarity of the necro-sound also facilitates the fantasy of a mythical pre-modern world, a fantasy world that emerges out of the nationalistic obsession with origin stories. Indeed, it is possible to read black metal's drive to produce an authentic, ‘black’ sound through the Third Reich's fascination with Tacitus's Germania. The codex, written around 98 C.E., broadly offers a description of the landscape, history and peoples (the various tribes) of Germany. According to Simon Schama (Reference Schama1995, p. 81), Tacitus ‘paints a landscape of Germania in tones of dun and darkness: a cold, damp place, inured to a “bitter climate,” “pleasant neither to live in nor to look upon unless it be one's fatherland”’. It is possible to glimpse the way that Tacitus's very description of the German landscape is imbued with the sort of imagery and aesthetic that would inspire black metal. However, this depiction of an untameable, dark landscape is also paralleled in black metal's untameable, interminable black noise. For Schama it was both the ruggedness of the landscape and the people who lived on this land that inspired the Völkisch tradition's (and, eventually, the Nazis’) obsession with the German people's ‘mythical origins’ (Schama Reference Schama1995). According to Tacitus, the Germans were not simply, ‘primitive’ and barbaric, but also ‘a race so unmixed by other intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure [that they were] like no-one but themselves’ (Schama Reference Schama1995, p. 82). While Schama examines this statement alongside Nazi eugenics, it is possible to reread Tacitus's interpretation of the Germans through black metal authenticity and the black metal sound. Is not the sound of black metal something that is at once primitive and brutal? And, in its active/failed rejection of the modern world (and modern recording), does black metal not seek to attain (or retain) something of a mythological state of purity through its rejection of and isolation from a mainstream outer world?
Death of god, persistence of Lucifer
While second wave Norwegian black metal might fail to fully disengage with or oppose the modern world, ‘late’ black metal band WITTR's Aaron Weaver is nevertheless correct in saying that what ‘unites artists within black metal [… ] is a revolt against the modern world’ (Wilson Reference Wilson and Wilson2014, p. 7). This rejection of the modern world, he argues, is bound up with a belief that humanity has lost (and must renew) a sacred, primordial world, ‘where things were whole and full of depth’ (Wilson Reference Wilson and Wilson2014). Certainly, for Bataille, it was the disenchantment with the modern world that disabled human communication and effectively isolated people from one another. For Niklaus Largier (Reference Largier2009), the modern era witnessed the breakdown of all of the structures that the Romantics had forged, namely, the idealised, romanticised image of the Gemeinschaft – or pre-modern life – as being a world (or ‘umwelt’), or ‘community’, in which humans were embedded in nature and steeped in the sacred. Largier believes that, while certain pre-modern ritualistic practices (like sacrifice) bound primordial communities to the sacred, the ‘Modern Condition’ constitutes the alienation from, the loss of and nostalgia for this sense of communality and the sacred.Footnote 18 In the modern world, Largier says that we submitted ourselves to a neurotic and pathological culture where we lost not only the Dionysian, but also a form of ‘virility’ attributed to primordial ‘man’ and primordial civilisation. One of the attractions of the pre-modern in the modern era was the very fact that, despite the domination of Enlightenment rationality, the pre-modern signalled the survival of the so-called ‘primitive’.Footnote 19
For Bataille, certain core elements of the pre-modern world had, in modernity, become bound up with modern Christian notions of evil (and therefore of non-productive expenditure): sacrifice, festival, eroticism. However, Bataille believed that, when these ‘primitive’ forms of expenditure were enacted in the modern world, people were able to momentarily recapture a sacred form of communication and communal unity that had become lost in modernity. It is, of course, important to note that Bataille wasn't a nostalgic or romantic theorist who longed to return to a primordial existence. Rather, Largier proposes that Bataille – who was, by all accounts, very aware of his status as a member of the bourgeois – was a theorist who accepted his life in modern France, but who nevertheless critiqued and challenged the modern condition.
For Zeynep Direk, Bataille's talk of a ‘return’ to communality, or what Bataille refers to as a return to ‘lost intimacy’, is his desire to acquire ‘the self-consciousness of what we already are in our historical forgetfulness’ (Direk Reference Direk and Winnubst2007, p. 100). That is, Bataille does not delude himself into thinking that we can return to a past sense of communality through disruptive and violent actions like human sacrifice. Bataille realised that ancient sacrificial practices that required the brutality of dismemberment and death were something consigned to the past. Thus, he proposed, instead, that people could pierce the isolation that separated them through other forms of excessive and unproductive expenditure – eroticism, laughter and, yes, literature. Bataille believed that only literature that inhabited ‘the edge’ – a form of sacrificial literature – could rupture utilitarian language, thereby constituting a form of symbolic expenditure, which bordered on the sacrificial. Ever the paradoxical philosopher, Bataille nevertheless realised the impossibility of communicating the violence of sacrifice, the loss of the self, or death, through fiction alone because of fiction's necessarily representational nature.
Yet despite fiction's communicative shortcomings, it is through both literature and the author that Bataille believes both the divine and the satanic are able to persist in the modern world. For both Bataille and Scott Wilson, the modern world has managed to ‘sustain a trace of the divine in the death of God’ through the form (or, rather the continued presence) of Lucifer (Wilson Reference Wilson and Wilson2014, p. 7). Indeed, for Bataille this trace of the divine, of Lucifer, in the modern world, is presented through the author who, Bataille says, is at once a cursed and holy being (Bataille Reference Bataille1990, p. 42). It is to the prince of darkness that Bataille turns, in his letter to Char, as he accounts for the role of literature and the role of the author and their relationship to humanity after the death of God, after the death of the king, and after the death of the sacred. In his letter, Bataille argues that authentic literature is necessarily diabolical (in both the Miltonian and Romantic sense) because of the Nietzschean form of sovereignty that the author momentarily attains at the conception of the modern world – that is, in the wake of the death of God. The authenticity that Bataille and black metal seek is therefore bound up both with godlessness and the satanic. At the heart of his letter, Bataille asserts that: ‘Literature’ (and we may well replace the word ‘literature’ with ‘black metal’) ‘cannot be made to serve a master. NON SERVIAM is said to be the devil's motto. If this is so, then literature is diabolical’ (Bataille Reference Bataille1990, p. 34).
Wilson uses Bataille's argument that authentic literature, which is born out of the death of God, is entangled with the satanic – that literature becomes diabolical through its godlessness – to foster his proposition that ‘the black metal universe is [… ] paradoxically both Godless and evil, with the emphasis falling on the latter’ (Wilson Reference Wilson and Wilson2014, p. 11). It is through this curious comingling of the godless with the satanic that black metal comes to attempt a recovery of the sacred – a ‘true’ ‘old world’ – through a seeming satanic inversion or overthrowing of modernity and the modern Christian world. Yet this very attempted ‘overcoming’ reasserts Bataille's belief that of all religions Christianity is the least religious – that Christianity itself inverts religion – because of its gradual ‘cleaning-up’ of the violence of the crucifixion, and because of its trajectory towards a bloodless religion, where, in modernity, it (Christianity) becomes a religion of comfort, and a religion of the bourgeois. For black metal and for Bataille, Christianity is not simply objectionable because of its silencing and smothering of older religions, but also because of its very secularising nature – because of its bringing about the death of the sacred. According to Bataille, early Christianity conceived of the crucifixion as a form of violent communication – a form of non-productive expenditure in the form of sacrifice that enabled people to communicate with one another and with their conception of God. However, he believes that modern Christianity's attempt to remove itself from the ‘primitivity’ of sacrifice has created a ‘watered down’ version of Christianity that denies the very communication that is central to religion.
Bataille, who believed that modern French Christianity had failed to retain its very status as a religion, proposed that it was only through rapturous moments of irrationality and violence that the world could become re-enchanted after the death of God. While I have already clarified that Bataille, like Nietzsche, understands the death of God metaphorically – as a reference to the decentring of God and Christianity in modern Europe – he also repurposes Nietzsche's thesis to form a new reading of Christ's death at the crucifixion. Bataille attempts not only to write about a world that has been abandoned by god, but also writes about the continued significance of religion, religious practice and sacrifice after the death of God. Indeed, Bataille used his rereading of Nietzsche's philosophy to create a secret society – a godless religion and religious practice that he called Acéphale. According to Allan Stoekl, Acéphale, which literally means ‘headless’, was a Nietzschean religion; it was a sui generis religion through which Bataille attempt to regain the sacred through a form of de-sacralisation, through the performance of rituals that were not directed at a god, but, rather, were developed through the death of god, in the absence of god (Stoekl Reference Stoekl and Stoekl1985, p. 263).
Acéphale and the closed community
Allan Stoekl proposes that the ‘purpose’ of Acéphale (if we may say that it had a purpose without proposing that it was in any way a ‘project’, since Bataille's understanding of the sacred was the negation of all forms of productivity) was to revive mythic forms of ritual (Stoekl Reference Stoekl and Stoekl1985, p. xix). In attempting to revive mythic rituals, the secret society became something of a myth in its own right. As Laura Wittman says, in her interview with Robert Harrison, very little is known about what went on at the secret society's meetings, except that they were held in a forest about an hour's train trip from Paris, at the foot of a tree that had been struck by lightning. Nevertheless, knowing that there were secret meetings at a felled tree certainly creates something of a myth in itself (Harrison Reference Harrison2016).
The icon of this mythic society was, Stoekl says, the headless acéphalic-man – part dismembered Dionysus, part crucified Christ, and, curiously, part Nietzsche (Stoekel Reference Stoekl and Stoekl1985, p. xx). Indeed, the Nietzschean aspect of Acéphale was also central to the journal that emerged out of the religion's short life and quick demise. The first two issues of the journal, which was also entitled Acéphale, featured articles on Nietzsche, the second issue being entirely dedicated to protecting the German philosopher's name and ideas from fascism. Members of the secret society were said to have meditated on Nietzsche's work and, according to Jeremy Biles, Bataille believed that through staging violent ritualistic ceremonies he and his society members ‘activate[d] a Nietzschean myth and concomitant experience of the sacred predicated not on the presence of the divine, but paradoxically on the death of God’ (Biles Reference Biles2007, p. 128). For Stoekl, the acéphalic-man illustrated not only Nietzsche's death of God thesis, but also the death of the classical conception of man (for, the acéphalic-man clearly parodies da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, an image that embodied classical human reason), and also personified what Bataille understood as the death and absence of myth in modernity (Stoekl Reference Stoekl and Stoekl1985, p. xx).
The seeming paradox here – a paradox that, as I have noted, is not lost to black metal – is that, while Bataille celebrated the death of God, he lamented the death of myth. This lamentation for the death of myth was synonymous with a form of lost communality in modernity – a lost world of authenticity and depth, perhaps – because, for Bataille, myth is at the heart of religion and sacrifice, and is therefore bound up with the formation of community. In a drive to regain this lost sense of community and commonality, the secret society planned to carry out a singularly brutal and violent ritual that, while never performed, has not only captured the imagination of Bataille scholars, but has also continued to fascinate scholars of modern French and continental thought: the society was rumoured to have planned a ritual beheading – a literalisation of the very name of the society, the journal and Andre Masson's illustration of l'homme-acéphale.Footnote 20 The understanding, among acéphalic acolytes was that this beheaded (sacrificed) human would, unlike Christ, never resurrect. Therefore, the beheading would be entirely purposeless – an utterly useless and non-productive action that would signal the death and non-resurrection of God. However, rumour has it that while Bataille, among others, offered himself as a victim, no one was willing to play executioner, and so the society eventually disbanded.
While Bataille's biographer Michel Surya says that any information about Acéphale (the journal) will not illuminate the secretive goings-on of the society, it is possible to glimpse a parallel between Acéphale (the secret society) and the early Norwegian black metal scene's record shop, Helvete, which became involved with something of a secret black metal society that formed there, the Black Circle. Euronymous, who opened Helvete in Oslo in 1991 (and who was to close it in 1993 – the brevity of all things that contain secrets …), was known to have housed various members of the Norwegian black metal scene (including Vikernes, and Samoth and Faust of Emperor, among others), and to have used the record shop as a meeting place for black metallers. The people who lived at and visited the store allegedly formed the Black Circle, a secret society whose members were said to be responsible for the various offences that shook Norway in the early 1990s – the church burnings, the grave desecrations, the murders, the racist and fascistic propaganda. It is, of course, impossible to know whether the very concept of the ‘Black Circle’ was a result of political and media frenzy surrounding the church burnings (it may be possible to consider the name, ‘The Black Circle’ in comparison with something like George Bush's repetition of the title/term ‘Axis of Evil’), or whether the story of the secret society was created by black metallers to give gravitas to the scene (for even Vikernes has proposed that a secret society called the Black Circle never existed and was entirely Euronymous's fantasy; Vikernes Reference Vikernes2016a). Whatever the case, it is worth noting that, in much in the same way that the question of the very existence, rituals and practices of the secret society Acéphale have made both Acéphale and Bataille something of a legend, so too have the mysteries surrounding Helvete and the Black Circle. Indeed, it is curious that both Acéphale and the Black Circle – regardless of whether either existed as a secret society or not – which were concerned with the revivifying of myth and the sacred in the modern world (in an attempt to return to or regain a form of authentic pre-modern, pre-disenchanted existence) should, themselves, become mythical tales.
Conclusion
In ‘The absence of myth’, Bataille proposes that ‘today, because a myth is dead or dying, we see through it more easily than if it were alive: it is the need [to believe it] that perfects the transparency, the suffering [of the death and absence of myth] which makes the suffering become joyful’ (Bataille Reference Bataille and Richardson2006a, p. 59). So it is, Bataille argues, that the need to believe a myth (in the modern world) is also that which destroys the myth – that which makes it all the more see-through. Yet witnessing the death of God, despairing at the disenchantment of the world and believing (or revelling in) in the horrific suffering of a crucified Christ, even as one suffers their own doubt of the crucifixion narrative (or of God altogether), transforms this suffering into something of joy. It is precisely this simultaneous suffering and joy that characterises both Bataille's and black metal's obsession with authenticity, as well as their failure to ever attain (or regain) a connection with an authentic ‘past’ through a rejection of the present. While both Bataille and members of the early Norwegian black metal scene attempted to re-/create/instate the secretive and sacred violence of myth in modernity and postmodernity, it is their very attempt to regain the sacred that makes the question of whether or not they were successful a rather misdirected question. For, the question of success is necessarily bound up with the world of productivity and work – the very secularised and disenchanted world that Bataille and black metal reject.
Indeed, Philip Auslander (Reference Auslander1999) and Simon Schama (Reference Schama1995), who respectively discuss rock authenticity (and the connection between the live performance/experience and authenticity) and national identity in landscape (and, as his blurb suggests, the psychic claims that various peoples have made on nature), propose that the quest for authenticity is not only politically and socially fraught, but is also doomed to failure – much in the same way that WITTR's Aaron Weaver notes the failures of black metal – because of the very impossibility of recapturing an utterly mythical past (for, they claim, the past can only ever be mythical; cited Wilson Reference Wilson and Wilson2014, p. 7). However, for black metal it seems that this very failure to attain or retain an ‘authentic black metal’ or an ‘authentic past’, even as black metal seeks it, is perhaps central to black metal authenticity.
While Auslander and Schama persuasively position authenticity as a cultural concern, I am more interested in the philosophical implications of a black metal authenticity, or, of a black metal that revels in its own failure to attain authenticity, an authenticity that is, as Fenriz and Nocutrno Culto of Darkthrone have proposed, bound up with not with goodness, but with evil, the satanic, and something darker still – a blackness that goes beyond mere blackness, an evil that goes beyond mere godlessness, and a sense of the past that persistently haunts the present.
