Abstract
“Black Metal is a werewolf culture, a werewolf romanticism … Black Metal is Oskorei romanticism.” In his essay “Oskorei,” the Austrian writer and musician Kadmon compellingly links the musical and subcultural phenomenon that is black metal with the Norse tradition of the “wild hunt” and notably describes this conjunction as a “Romantic” one. This chapter argues that black metal challenges and expands the current grasp of Romanticism by regarding it neither as wispy nostalgia nor as a distinct historical period within the nineteenth century, but rather as a radical hermeneutic that expressly elides distinctions among the aesthetic, the political, and the spiritual en route to an overarching rejection of normativized concepts of temporality and history.
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Notes
- 1.
“Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht.” Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel, 2 vols. (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1978), 1: 149. Translation mine.
- 2.
Hymnen an die Nacht, 1800.
- 3.
“In the beginning was the Deed! [Im Anfang war die Tat!]” exclaims Goethe’s Faust upon having satisfactorily translated the opening verse of the Gospel of John, as the poodle form of Mephistopheles howls away. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke, ed. Ernst Merian-Genast, 12 vols. (Basel: Verlag Birkhäuser, 1944), ln. 1237.
- 4.
“You lead me to the cavern refuge, show / My own self to me, and of my own breast / The secret deep-laid miracles unfold” [Dann führst du mich zur sichern Höhle, zeigst / Mich dann mir selbst, und meiner eignen Brust / Geheime tiefe Wunder öffnen sich]” Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Arndt (New York: Norton, 2001), lns. 3232–34.
- 5.
“Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke” (2 April 1829) in Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. H. H. Houben (Wiesbaden: F. A. Brockhaus, 1959), 313. Translation mine.
- 6.
Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 1832; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795–1796.
- 7.
Although the young Novalis admired Goethe’s novel enough to commit large sections to memory, by 1800 he had come to regard it as the antithesis of his own poetic project: “Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship is to some extent prosaic—and modern. Within it, the Romantic perishes—as does nature-poesie, and the wonderful—it deals only with familiar, human things—nature and the mystical are entirely forgotten. It is a poeticized story of the civil and domestic.” [“Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre sind gewissermaaβen durchaus prosäisch—und modern. Das Romantische geht darinn zu Grunde—auch die Naturpoësie, das Wunderbare—Er handelt blos von gewöhnlichen menschlichen Dingen—die Natur und der Mystizism sind ganz vergessen. Es ist eine poëtisirte bürgerliche und häusliche Geschichte”] (2: 800–1). Translation mine. For a discussion of Hoffmann’s satirical repudiation of Wilhelm Meister on similar grounds, see my article “Hoffmann’s ‘Two Worlds’ and the Problem of Life-Writing,” E. T. A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism, ed. Christopher R. Clason (Liverpool UP, 2018).
- 8.
Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 3rd ed., Vol. 3, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1892) 518.
- 9.
“Himmlischer, als jene blitzenden Sterne, dünken uns die unendlichen Augen, die die Nacht in uns geöffnet” (1: 151). Translation mine.
- 10.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer, 1993, Vol. 9 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Princeton UP, 1969–2002), 30.
- 11.
Alluding to and building on Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Shelley opens “Mont Blanc” by establishing this interflow between “mind” and “universe” as an a priori principle:Verse
Verse The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters—with a sound but half its own.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), lns. 1–6.
Like the caves, caverns and chasms of the landscape, which receive more narrative attention than its peaks and promontories, the “secret springs” that constitute “the source of human thought” find Shelley dismantling the boundaries between “things” and “images” (or thoughts) that Coleridge proclaimed to have only so fleetingly experienced while composing “Kubla Khan” in his dream.
- 12.
“Sehnsucht nach dem Tode.” This is also the only of the six hymns with its own title.
- 13.
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” John Keats, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), ln. 55.
- 14.
In Jim Thompson’s 1952 crime novel, The Killer Inside Me, the narrator at one point attacks the interlocutor with clichés: “‘I was thinking the other day, Max; and all of a sudden I had the doggonedest thought. It came to me out of a clear sky—the boy is father to the man. Just like that. The boy is father to the man.’ The smile on his face was getting strained. I could hear his shoes creak as he squirmed.” Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 4. The saying is of course not the narrator’s but Wordsworth’s (albeit slightly mangled), but the crucial point is that he swears it came to him out of the ether, “out of a clear sky.”
- 15.
Burzum, “Dunkelheit,” in Filosofem, Misanthropy Records AMAZON 009, 1996, compact disc.
- 16.
Title of a song by German black metal band Sodom, which appears on its 1984 EP In the Sign of Evil.
- 17.
Varg Vikernes, “Varg Vikernes—A Burzum Story: Part VI—The Music,” burzum.org . Accessed Mar. 20, 2017.
- 18.
From line 6 of “Dunkelheit.”
- 19.
Ibid., ln. 8.
- 20.
“Ashes” in Norwegian.
- 21.
Keir Keightley, “Reconsidering Rock,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed. Simon Frith et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 125.
- 22.
Ibid., 131.
- 23.
Ibid., 135.
- 24.
Ibid., 137.
- 25.
Ibid., 137.
- 26.
Dominic Fox, Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 53.
- 27.
Ibid., 53.
- 28.
Black metal has spread to all of the continents except, understandably, Antarctica, with outposts as geographically and culturally far-flung from Scandinavia as Mongolia, Singapore, Iraq, and Chile.
- 29.
Wallace Stevens, “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” in Collected Poetry & Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1997), ln. 9.
- 30.
Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), 386.
- 31.
Keightley, 137.
- 32.
When Hoest of the band Taake (Norwegian for “fog”) proclaimed during a June 2016 performance that I attended in New Orleans, “We can’t wait to get back to Norway—it’s too fuckin’ hot down here for us!” the audience erupted into cheers, and not a beat was lost when he struck a drug-addled mosher who had gotten too close to the stage in the face with the bottom of his microphone stand. The inner gatefold of German band Vargsang’s 2005 LP, Throne of the Forgotten, warns readers, “No contact! No interviews!”
- 33.
Charlotte Smith describes the title figure of her 1783 sonnet, “On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic,” with a mixture of envy and awe: “He has no nice felicities that shrink / From giant horrors” (lns. 13–14). Black metal embodies this lunatic, channeling and performing “giant horrors” as a jolt to those who, in good bourgeois conscience, would caution against it. See Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, edited by Stuart Curran (London: Oxford UP, 1993), 72.
- 34.
Black metal releases are notorious for extremely limited pressings when it comes to the preferred analog media of LP and cassette. Music videos are rare, and radio play is virtually non-existent with the exception of specialty broadcasts. This ethos of complicating consumption might also be reflected in black metal’s at times almost comically illegible band logos, the subject of many a recent meme featuring photos of a pile of sticks or scratches on a wall. Of course, as Keightley’s reconsideration of rock helps us to see, there is a certain paradox to the fact that the rarity of many of these releases, and even sometimes re-releases, has driven their value to astronomical heights, thereby reflecting a mass demand. Varg Vikernes has spoken of shooting out the windows of the first McDonald’s franchise to open in his hometown of Bergen as his first act of violence.
- 35.
With the exception of the bizarre-even-by-black-metal-standards subgenre of “Unblack Metal,” it goes without saying that black metal regards Christianity with contempt. Upside-down crosses and pentagrams are ubiquitous features of its visual language. The reasons for the church burning, at least according to Vikernes, are however more complicated than mere Satanism and demon worship: “That church [Fantoft] is built on holy ground, a natural circle and a stone horg [a heathen altar]. They planted a big cross on top of the horg and built the church in the midst of a holy place” (Moynihan, 93). Vikernes’s issue is not with holiness or religiosity in themselves, but rather with the fact that the Christian church and—channeling Nietzsche—Judeo-Christianity as a whole embodies the hollowness of the progress narrative that it inherently perpetuates, co-opting holy sites that once held great significance to land and people, and building over them with an imported truth purporting to render obsolete the very spirit and associations of the place it occupies.
- 36.
William Blake, “The Chimney-Sweeper,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), lns. 13–16.
- 37.
Ibid., lns. 19, 24.
- 38.
Varathron, “Son of the Moon (Act II),” in His Majesty at the Swamp, Cyber Music CYBER CD 8, 1993, compact disc.
- 39.
“Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840): Paintings in Cover Art,” RateYourMusic.com , http://rateyourmusic.com/list/doom_trooper/caspar_david_friedrich__1774_1840___paintings_in_cover_art/. Accessed Mar. 24, 2017.
- 40.
I reached out to Caladan Brood for an interview while in Utah for the International Conference on Romanticism in fall 2015, but the band members never replied to me. Upon reflection, this was quite “black metal” of them. I discuss this album and its deployment of Romantic visual art in further detail in my essay, “Graven Voices: Black Metal and Romantic History,” Grave Notes Issue 1 (December 2016), http://gravestoneproject.com/?page_id=26184.
- 41.
Likely an allusion to the opening line of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”
- 42.
Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” 143.
- 43.
Nargaroth “Wenn Regen Liebt.” in Geliebte des Regens, No Colours Records NC 065, 2003, compact disc.
- 44.
Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 3 vols., Vol. 16 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2001), 1.1: 72–3.
- 45.
Agalloch, “Falling Snow,” in Ashes Against the Grain, The End Records TE070, 2006, compact disc.
- 46.
“Our Fortress is Burning… II—Bloodbirds,” ibid.
- 47.
This is the essence of the symbol, as distinguished by Coleridge from allegory, as “an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents.” Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, vol. 6 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1972) and qtd. in Nicholas Halmi, “Coleridge on Allegory and Symbol,” in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 352. Halmi offers a lucid explanation of Coleridge’s idea: “In other words, whereas allegories merely substitute fictional images for abstract ideas, symbols convey something beyond or greater than themselves precisely because of what they are in themselves” (352). The sonic textures of black metal, which often challenge the listener to locate melody amid the noise and dissonance, operate in much the same way, enacting in the listening experience the themes of destruction reconstitution that they lyrically represent.
- 48.
Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” ln. 64.
- 49.
Ibid., lns. 67, 69.
- 50.
These lines from The Tempest appear on Shelley’s gravestone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
- 51.
Shelley, Prometheus Unbound in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 4.76.
- 52.
Agalloch, “Limbs,” Ashes Against the Grain.
- 53.
Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” Poetical Works, 1.1: 47.
- 54.
Xasthur. “Telepathic with the deceased,” in Telepathic with the Deceased, Moribund Records DEAD 51 CD, 2004, compact disc.
- 55.
Fox, 49.
- 56.
Many such listeners indeed do not recognize Xasthur as such, including perhaps even sole member Scott “Malefic” Conner himself, who alternatingly in recent years as Nocturnal Poisoning and as Xasthur has ceased playing what he calls “metal” altogether. In a recent Facebook post promoting an acoustic tour, he warns followers “*if you’re only into metal and not into music, you’ll be wasting your time attending (or so I’ve heard).” Xasthur, acoustic/unplugged, Mar. 13, 2017, 12:28 p.m., Facebook post.
- 57.
Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet [Horror of Philosophy, vol 1] (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), 12.
- 58.
Ibid., 12.
- 59.
Ibid., 20.
- 60.
Italian black metal band Arcana Coelestia, for example, bases its lyrics on the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
- 61.
Mayhem, “Pagan Fears,” in Live in Leipzig, Obscure Plasma 92007, 1993, 33 1/3 rpm.
- 62.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 261.
- 63.
Ibid., 261.
- 64.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 35.
- 65.
“Mayhem—Øystein “Euronymous, Aarseth Interview (1 of 2),” YouTube, uploaded by Øystein Aarseth, Feb. 3, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuUUEr8CdR8. As YouTube did not exist at the time of Aarseth’s murder at the hands of Vikernes in 1993, he is obviously not the uploader of this video.
- 66.
“This is not the voice of the dying—as in the gruffer, deeper vocal delivery of black metal’s death metal cousins—but rather the voice of the already-dead, echoing up from the depths to assert its ghastly inviolability in the face of time and progress” Knox, “Graven Voices,” 2.
- 67.
Mayhem, “Pagan Fears,” Live in Leipzig.
- 68.
Coleridge, “Inscription for a Time-Piece” Poetical Works, 1.2: ln. 4.
- 69.
Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–1990), 2: 2832.
- 70.
William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis,” in The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant, ed. Parke Goodwin (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), ln. 45.
- 71.
Xasthur, “Telepathic with the deceased.”
- 72.
Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 508.
- 73.
Coleridge, Lectures 1818–1819 On the History of Philosophy, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols., Vol. 8 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2000), 1: 195.
- 74.
Ibid., 2: 711–12.
- 75.
Nagelfar, Hünengrab im Herbst (Ván Records, 2017). The album was originally released by Kettenhund Records in 1997.
- 76.
Nagelfar, “Seelenland,” Hünengrab im Herbst. Translation mine.
- 77.
According to Encyclopaedia Metallum, the first 666 copies of Norwegian band Abruptum’s compilation, Evil Genius, “came with a razorblade and a sticker encouraging the listener to ‘kill yourself.’” “Abruptum—Evil Genius,” Encyclopaedia Metallum, 3 Mar. 2017, http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Abruptum/Evil_Genius/7075. On Telepathic with the Deceased, Malefic credits himself with “(All instruments, razors, and voice).” Wrest of American one-man black metal band Leviathan dedicates his debut album, The Tenth Sub Level of Suicide, “To the first gash you rape into your own skin!!!” (Moribund Records, 2003).
- 78.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, “[A Fragment],” in The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), lns. 34–6.
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Knox, J. (2018). Ashes against the Grain: Black Metal and the Grim Rebirth of Romanticism. In: Rovira, J. (eds) Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_13
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