The song is called War, the band, Burzum. The sound of massive overdrive on the guitar, backed by drums, blares from the speakers. Then a shrieking voice joins in. It sounds like a Muppet being strangled, although I realize that someone is in deadly earnest here. The singer is alone. He plays the guitar and drums himself: Varg Vikernes, the only member of the Norwegian band Burzum. Vikernes is now in jail for killing Øystein Aarseth, the guitarist of the black metal band Mayhem, and for setting fire to churches. In jail he is devoting himself to the future of the Aryan race and his own Weltanschauung.¹ His writings and portraits reach the outside world through a website hosted in Russia.

I first read about the Norwegian group Mayhem and their legendary demo album Pure Fucking Armageddon back in 1987, in the magazine Aardschok/Metal Hammer. It was a time when bands recorded their own demos and distributed them on tape and an intensive network sprang up between small cells of bands and youths (mostly boys) who wanted a band of their own too: holding a guitar, reinventing yourself, making lots of noise, lulling your mind to sleep. Band names were essential, but equally important were the photos, cover design and logo with which you put a band on the map.

Just like a good restaurant in Rome is not to be found, the logo of an unknown black metal band is illegible; it is a symmetrical maze of jagged forms. According to the American designer Mark Owens, Mayhem was one of the first bands to have such a logo.² The logos of predecessors like Venom (England) and Celtic Frost (Switzerland) were still legible, albeit just barely. Mayhem’s logo took a tiny step over that line. So it is very well possible that the illegible band logo came into being around 1985. The illegible logo functions as a password; it is a boundary, behind which the secret begins.

Metal and Art

Culture likes metal. The soundtrack of the feature film Gummo (1998) by Harmony Korine partly consisted of music by Scandinavian black metal bands, including Burzum and Bathory. Fashion designer Lieve Van Gorp and graphic designers Experimental Jetset have used visual elements from black metal. Being seen in vintage T-shirts from Kiss, Judas Priest and other hard rock bands is extremely hip. And we are seeing the rise of artists like Jonathan Meese, Mark Titchner and Steven Shearer.

The Belgian curator and philosopher Dieter Roelstraete, himself active as a musician in the grindcore genre, wrote an article on Steven Shearer.³ Roelstraete: ‘The broad “cultural” attraction of grindcore is not only in the searing, destructive energy of the music (and the accompanying cathartic release) but also in the fiery passion with which this lifestyle has managed to embody a steely, evocative “NO”... and to propose this “no” as a legitimate cultural position.’⁴

The successful artist Bjarne Melgaard engages in black-metal inspired experimental music in collaboration with the Norwegian collective Thorns Ltd., who used to be simply known as ‘Thorns’ when they were a black metal band. Their founder was Bård ‘Faust’ Eithun, who is serving a prison sentence for murder. In 1993, Thorns band member Snorre Ruch was a witness (and according to the court, an accessory) to the murder of Mayhem’s guitarist by Varg Vikernes. But he has made a successful new start with Thorns Ltd. They are welcome to perform at art biennials all over the world. In 2004, the former black metal ensemble performed for the first time in the Palais de Tokyo. Dieter Roelstraete: ‘The art world looks with great envy and longing at the bizarre excesses of a handful of spoiled Norwegian teenagers because it thinks it recognizes a residue of “realness” that can no longer be genuinely experienced in its own habitat, which has long been paralyzed by the cult of irony. Enter the “Return of the Real”! The longing for negation and/or negativity which is really and truly “bodily” experienced – that is what interests the art world in its flirtation with the metal underground.’⁵

In the art world, the citation of black metal serves as a negative symbol. Metal produces signs that are not meant to appeal to the masses. The artist who introduces black metal aesthetics thus refers to a phenomenon that is considered to be taking place beyond the consciousness of the viewer. The artist becomes a messenger between the creative elite of viewers ‘paralyzed by irony’ and a dark subculture of abject and archaic symbols. Here, the contradistinction between good and bad (beautiful and ugly) has been almost unnoticeably replaced by that of good and evil.

The heavy postmodern artworks of Helmut Middendorf and Anselm Kiefer, and even the monolithic tombs of someone like Hubert Kiecol, are distant relatives of the Wagnerian posturing of the recent wave of artists who cite black metal and Gothic as the source of their personal visual power.

I Was Made for Loving You

The iconography of black metal has its origins in hard rock, which referred fairly systematically to the typography of the Third Reich. It represents what Alain Badiou calls ‘radical evil’.⁶ Recall if you will the logo of Kiss, designed in the early 70s by band member Ace Frehley, which unmistakably resembles the trademark of the SS. Yet academics have been quick to cast doubt on any connection with Neo Nazism. Deena Weinstein, author of Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture, believes, for instance, that metal is apolitical, and interested in the idea of power only in the more general sense. Fans as well as musicians behave rather naively. According to her, Frehley and the other members of Kiss see the two s’s in the logo as lightning bolts.⁷

Robert Walser, professor of musicology at the University of California, qualifies that image. In Running with the Devil he writes that heavy metal musicians make use of ‘images of horror and madness’ in order to comprehend and critique the world as they see it. ‘Although they are continually stereotyped and dismissed as apathetic nihilists, metal fans and musicians build on sedimented musical forms and cultural icons to create for themselves a world with more depth and intensity. If in some ways heavy metal replicates the ruthless individualism and violence that capitalism and government policy have naturalized, it also creates communal attachments, enacts collective empowerment, and works to assuage entirely reasonable anxieties.’⁸

The Utrecht professor of pop music Tom ter Bogt adds: ‘Metal is a form of escapism. Naturally you see this more often in youths who are up against it. A metal concert is a celebration by people with problems. I think this is less true in the Netherlands, by the way. If you are a hard-core metal fan in the United States, you are extremely marginalized socially. Dropouts from school, if they are white, are always metal fans.’⁹

Black Metal and Guantánamo Bay

I was interested in Ter Bogt’s views on the use of metal as an instrument of torture in Guantánamo Bay prison.¹⁰ This was penetratingly portrayed in The Road to Guantánamo, the documentary Michael Winterbottom made about Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed from Tipton, England, who were considered terrorists by the American occupation forces in Afghanistan and locked up in Guantánamo Bay.¹¹ The chained prisoners were forced to listen to black metal with the speakers blasting at concert volume. According to sources, the prison guards played Metallica’s Enter Sandman for hours on end; in Winterbottom’s version it was Cradle of Filth, a black metal band from Suffolk, England.¹²

Ter Bogt: ‘This type of music is very far from the musical idiom of the people who are imprisoned there. Even to Western ears, it can literally sound devilish. Most people will go crazy if you force them listen to that sort of music.... Particularly the so-called “grunting” brings out something devilish that is probably recognizable in other cultures too. I don’t know for sure, of course, but I think that this way of singing refers cross culturally to very dark things. That is why it is so effective. It could also be music that is popular amongst the prison guards there.’¹³

Guantánamo Bay is a place for prisoners ‘without status’; they have no representation or defence, neither as citizens nor as soldiers, and are handed over to a judicial system that operates outside the law. Is metal the music of this ‘national emergency’, the sovereign that is lawlessness incarnate, the Leviathan? I wonder whether metal is truly so apolitical as Weinstein claims. Maybe the problem is a confusion of ‘political’ with ‘politics’. Metal is indeed not concerned with politics in the sense of ‘policy’, but does not the way in which metal has developed in its most extreme form and the way in which this music is used, have everything to do with being ‘political’ in terms of ‘polarizing’, of articulating differences?

The Logo is a Password

For my 16th birthday I wanted the debut album of that Californian metal revelation, Possessed. The record was called Seven Churches and was devoted to human mortality. The band members posed on the cover swathed in spikes and leather, with blood, guitars and amplifiers. The photos of the band members expressed their desire to astrally travel out of those teenage bodies and be adored by thousands of women (in reality, four or five stout beer drinking men) – but also their desire to represent the destructive energy of the dropout.

Metal’s ‘no’ is more strongly connected with notions about power and violence or the imagined omnipotence of the totalitarian (the Mayhem guitarist had been a supporter of the Romanian dictator Ceauşescu), than with ideas about equality and anarchy. That is what distinguishes metal from punk. According to Dieter Roelstraete, such a distinction is ‘typical of the 80s’: ‘I think that punk always had more to do with the ethics of protest, and metal more with the aesthetics of protest; however, the idea that metal could be an affirmative cultural phenomenon seems to me impossible – “reactionary” does not necessarily imply identification with power.’¹⁴

Possessed’s logo used the Fraktur font. Prior to the illegible logos of bands like Mayhem, there was a long period in which metal and hard rock bands were primarily identifiable by their use of this ‘black letter’, which Bismarck had considered to be the ‘only correct’ one during the time of the German empire, and which later served as the logotype of the anti-Semitic magazine Der Stürmer put out by the Nazi ideologist Julius Streicher. The German occupying forces got rid of Fraktur as their house-style letter in 1943 because of its illegibility.

Despite its virtually exclusive association with the Nazis, Fraktur is very widespread. Respected newspapers like The New York Times, Le Monde and the Frankfurter Allgemeine deck themselves out with it, as do eminent lawyer’s offices, various brands of alcohol, and so on and so on. Metal and hard rock bands use Fraktur in combination with an umlaut (Motörhead), by which they refer to the Third Reich. As a form, Fraktur also resembles spikes, flames, foliage, castles, nights, scythes, church towers and fences, and in more than one respect is related to the later generation of illegible logos. Fraktur is still used a lot – for diplomas and wedding invitations, for instance. No one thinks of Possessed or Motörhead when they receive an engraved invitation in Fraktur lettering from Brian and Joanne inviting them to their wedding in Farnham Castle, Surrey on Saturday, February 28, 2004. How can Fraktur refer to evil, when this lettering is so widespread in practice and has so many applications, such as Warsteiner, Jägermeister, Hertog Jan? Who thinks of the Nazi paper Der Stürmer when they read these names on the beer labels?

The fact that Fraktur is used to typographically mark important, decisive and binding moments (such as graduation or marriage) does not conflict with its use as a symbol of power. And the gothic logos of the various brewery giants refer to their craftsmanship, tradition and origin, to a mode of production which precedes that of organized industry, whose true quality can only be appreciated by connoisseurs. The American Roberto Martinelli, editor in chief of the online magazine Maelstrom, writes: ‘A logo plays a huge part in the image of a company or product. This is also certainly the case with bands.... In black metal particularly, there is a certain revered aesthetic, like spikiness, illegibility, intricacy; to those things are added that intangible element that tells the connoisseur “this is a cult album that is worth your time.”‘¹⁵

One-Man Band

With the advent of activist, or violent, black metal, the band as a multiple entity disappears. The one-man collective comes into being, a single person who operates under his own logo. Music and logo become the vehicle for the distribution of highly personal ideas.

The creation of the one-man band can be traced back to punk’s influence on metal at the end of the 70s, when hard rock had degenerated into a symphonic genre for middle-aged men with ponytails and overly expensive audio equipment. Under the influence of the punk movement, metal bands became smaller and the music louder and faster. Metal split into countless sub genres, with metaphysics as the overarching theme: evil and the supernatural.

During ‘grindcore’, the technique of metal was used to transform punk into a metaphysical protest against a nameless total dominion, with the near apocalypse of Chernobyl, the deplorable living conditions in ‘the dirty old town’ under Margaret Thatcher, and the threat of nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union being thrown in as small change. Black metal opted for the encryption of logotype and music and a further elaboration of hate, Satanism and heathenism, and after awhile, action was suited to word. People got killed.

Venom, the legendary pack of brats from gray Newcastle who invented black metal, could hardly play, and in that sense were more of a two-man band than a trio. The Norwegian Darkthrone, with illegible logo, is one of the most famous and dubious of two-man groups. But the bizarrest metal band ever is probably the Swedish duo Abruptum, with a dwarf named ‘It’ as frontman. Abruptum’s music was produced through self torture. The influential Swedish black metal group Bathory was in essence the one-man project of Ace Börje ‘Quorthon’ Forsberg, who died of a heart attack in 2004. And then there is Burzum, with Varg Vikernes as the only musician and Leviathan in his personal holy war of everybody against everybody.

Simulacrum

The illegible black metal logo developed analogously with typographic forms of encryption and secrecy that have recently been applied to the Internet, such as the so-called ‘Captcha’: the ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’. Captchas are word pictures generated without human intervention, which must be retyped by a computer user (for instance, when setting up a free e-mail account) in order to guarantee that this is a person and not a machine, so as to prevent improper use by spammers. For this reason, such word pictures must be practically illegible. The words that are found in the captchas are often abstract combinations of letters that mean ‘nothing’. Graphic designer Jeremy Jansen came up with hundreds of thousands of such captchas, including words like ‘shehell’, ‘castro’, blutzn’ en ‘askednex’. These eerie letter pictures are reminiscent of the names and logos of black metal bands like ‘Arthimoth’, ‘Horna’, ‘Myrkskog’, ‘Toxocara’, Tsjuder’ and ‘Xasthur’.

Those who seek a way to portray evil automatically come up with signs and symbols that represent evil in its most extreme form. Black metal uses these to develop new symbols, which at the same time are encrypted cryptographic word pictures, illegible and unknowable, that correspond with, and function in, the age of individualization. Whereas the propaganda symbols of the Third Reich were meant for entire populations, black metal logos can symbolize the hate of individuals and small groups for others who are more or less specifically named. Alain Badiou specifies this when he calls evil a ‘simulacrum of truth’. ¹⁶

Metal has been under ideological fire for over twenty years now. People hearing the devil in metal want to forbid it on grounds of moral and religious arguments. Equally moralistic are the arguments (of unending tolerance for everything that is different) with which metal has been defended for more than twenty years by people who see only teenage rebellion in it. They point to the positive catharsis that metal fans experience during concerts. Both views of the situation are too simple. From Kiss to Burzum, black metal is the subcultural development of an aesthetic of evil. This development has lasted for decades and has been applied to signs (logos), group identities (bands) music (noise) and people (murder). All this has occurred against the background of an increasingly advanced information and network environment, such as MySpace and probably also Second Life, which offers possibilities to build groups from totally individualized cells or one-man collectives which continually alter their own (partially fictive) identities with ever new combinations of revelation and encryption. Black metal is used as an audiovisual torture instrument, making it symbolic for the national emergency system in Guantánamo Bay. In that sense, black metal is ultimately not only a political instrument but also a political project.