Purify - Bury Post-Everything

Below you'll find the text - with a few modifications - of an angry post I wrote four years ago after some encounters with shithead hipster co-option of black metal.  I'm still angry about this, what with bands like Deafheaven, Krallice, and more beside emerging from the "post-black metal" (read: hipster, because it's a real thing that's dangerous) sewer.  I'm re-posting this primarily because this wave of largely American bands full of entitled art school students with inferiority complexes and - worst of all - no genuine interest in metal music as such outside of their warped and unfair view of black metal as a fetishized, avantgarde curio is not dying out fast enough; if I can keep even one other person from buying their records or seeing them live, then I've succeeded.

Don't believe me?  Think I'm buying into a "myth of hipster metal?"  Kill yourself.  Have a listen to Liturgy's (by far the worst of the bunch) abomination of a record Aesthethica, and track down their notorious video interview, as well as the "manifesto" of the pretentious ass behind that group, absorb the three, and then come back and try and give me a valid reason for not discouraging people from supporting these bands. You won't be able to.  

This is still happening.  Yes, I've posted nothing in a year, but real life happens.  Ten, twelve, thirteen years ago (I'm now 27, 28 in July) this blog would have been my sole activity, but these days, whether I like it or not, I'm grown: I'm married, I have a 'career,' and I run a side-business with my wife which increasingly takes up more and more of my time.  Still, music - above all heavy metal, above all black metal - is yet my greatest passion, just as it was nearly 16 years ago when I heard Emperor for the very first time.

I won't let this project die.  The state of black metal, at least that state by which it's increasingly coming to be known, concerns me.  The other day, I ran into a gentleman in the audience of a show that my wife and I produced, and he discovered that I was partial to black/death/etc. metal.  He was young - barely college-aged, although that is inherently neither here nor there - and proceeded to very excitedly tell me about all of the black metal he'd been listening to: Alcest, Amesoeurs, Wolves in the Throne Room, Liturgy, that ilk.  I asked him about Emperor, and he said, "I don't really know much about them, only that they're old."  Taken aback, I asked him about Darkthrone, Mayhem, and Bathory, and he said "I don't know: they're a little too noisy for me."

Some months later, I ran into another gentleman at another show, again one that my wife and I had produced, who had sewn a Burzum - Hvis lyset tar oss patch onto the arm of a zip-up hoodie (sp?).  I asked him about it, and he responded sheepsihly, verbatim, "What can I say?  I have bad taste."  I raised an eyebrow and smirked, then inquired about his other patch, as I didn't recognize the logo.  "Wolves in the Throne Room," he answered, at which I hesitated before responding, "Of course: I should have known."  I abruptly excused myself.

There is a word that I hesitate to use for these two fellas, one based largely on their attitudes, but those of you who are old enough to know better and present enough to have been paying attention know what it is.  These bands (excluding Burzum, of course), their fans, and the general trend of which they seem to be a part will die out soon enough, and you'll never find any of them, or any groups resembling them, featured here.  I'll never use the terms "atmospheric," "depressive/suicidal," or "post-" to describe some mythological subset of black metal that the generation of listeners discovering this music - our music - of late have been applying in a (vain) attempt to refashion it more suitably in their own image.  Those of us who love honest-to-goodness black metal - unadulterated, untainted, unholy - won't let it die or be replaced or reappropriated.  It is still, at its core, heavy metal, not an outcropping of experimental arthouse rock, and I take it deadly seriously

The black flame still burns.


Æon