Black Metal Is Dead

Black metal is dead.  Dead forever.  May it rest in peace.

This doesn't mean that Blackened Relics is dead, of course.  I'm just pointing out a fact that is, at this point, indisputable by my reckoning.

Growing up - for the sake of reference, I heard my first black metal album (Emperor's Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk) at the age of 12 in early 1998, and after a few months had completely immersed myself in the stuff as much as was possible in the residual days of tape trading and fanzines and bedroom distros and minimal availability of online information - I always thought of black metal as "mine".  Perhaps that isn't fair, seeing especially how the strain of it - the Norwegian one that existed in proper form from approximately 1988 to 1994 - that is most readily regarded as "classic" and "canonical" was, by some measures, never meant to belong to any but its creators and their close associates.  Nevertheless, I very distinctly recall a time when this was possibly the only artistic medium that I'd ever encountered that truly resonated with me on a spiritual level - to an extent this is still true - and moreover, one when nobody knew what this stuff was.  This may seem difficult to conceive today in 2018, but extreme metal, and especially black metal, in the mid-to-late '90s was still very much an underground affair.

Granted, I'm from northern Middle Tennessee - hail the fatherland and the ancestors and all that noise - specifically a little place called Sumner County, where the northwest outskirts of the Nashville Basin commence their rapid rise toward the southernmost portion of the Northern Highland Rim.  Furthermore, I subscribe to a theory that reads thus: novel forms of expression in America tend to begin at the coasts and gradually migrate inward, with a few notable exceptions.  This theory is no longer as relevant today in the time of rapid and immediate transmission of information via the internet, but in 1998 it absolutely held true.  In and around Nashville (the closest metropolitan area to where I grew up, about 30 miles northeast thereof), most folks who were "in the know" barely knew what thrash metal - and I mean the pedestrian stuff, like Megadeth and Anthrax - was, and the "black metal" tag as I then espoused it was routinely met with head-scratching and shrugged shoulders and overall general indifference; bear in mind that, at the time, Nashville was not the rapidly growing, "hip" place that's become in the last five or ten years: it was an economically stagnating, decaying urban mecca that was decidedly not cool, and decidedly, collectively out-of-touch as far as the artistically-inclined went with things like extreme metal.  I point this out to illustrate the fact that the likes of black metal simply had no forum in my formative years.  I, meanwhile, had stumbled upon this music accidentally, via channels largely uninteresting or at best unavailable to others, and for the entirety of my youth before turning 18 or so, it would remain to me something that I and I alone loved and understood.

Those were genuinely magical times.  I have never since felt anything so powerful as the essence of the early Norwegian records, and even the Swedish and the Polish and the French ones, for that matter.  I believed in it.  It fucking spoke to me, understand?  It was the lens I had been searching for through which I might at last view with some degree of clarity my then-hazy conception of life, of the world, above all of the human condition, and it was serendipitous that it's prescription was such as it was.  Frankly, it - all of extreme metal, all of extreme music, even, but still above all black metal - has been one of the single most important chisels in sculpting my adult weltanschauung.  I wear that badge with pride even today, as a thirty-two year-old man.

Times are different now, though.  That was almost two decades ago, that explosion of crystalline realization wherein I discovered my aesthetic, my ideological, my spiritual home, and since then, black metal has, to the greatest degree that an artform as once- and theoretically uncompromising as it possibly can, entered the mainstream.  Whether I like it or not, it isn't mine anymore, or yours for that matter, and there's nothing that any of us could've done to stop it's slip from our skeletal-fingered grasps.  Outsiders, the other, moved in and co-opted all of the genuine elements that once made it vital.  Those same elements, those essential monads that gave the genre meaning and motion, were stolen and hollowed out and put on display on social media, in meaningles memes, and, worst of all, in records masquerading has having some link to black metal's glorious past, thus rendering them suddenly meaningless in these new venues and incarnations.  I suspect that my meaning is clear without the citation of specific examples, which in this case I absolutely refuse to do lest I bear the responsibility of disseminating them even further.

ALl of the above, in the end, in a process lasting 20 years as of today by my reckoning, has ultimately killed the genre.  Black metal is dead.  Dead and gone.  Dead forever.  Just like any lifeform, it cannot be resuscitated by any means presently known to us.  It's tragic, isn't it, that an artform, a veritable weltanschauung from which I drew so much during the formative years of my own, could become such a miserable shell of its former self.

However, this is the very reason that I continue to, even sparingly, update this blog: in spite of its physical expiration, the spirit, the ethos of the genre's zenith may yet be experienced as genuinely today herein, and in other places like this, by us, we true believers, who ever refuse to drop the torch bearing the Black Flame.  Though its vitality no longer exist, it's essence still inspires, still transports, still transforms those of us who still possess the fortitude, mental, physical, spiritual, to handle it.  The creators, your Tom Warriors and Quorthons and Euronymouses and Fenrizess and Vargs, belched forth something into the collective consciousness of those prepared and willing to receive it that was so powerful that it ceased to be theirs, that it transcended the limitations of sound and word and time and space and will always exist, ripe to be tapped and channeled through us in the present day.  May this blog remain a suitable spike.

The Black Flame burns eternal...


Æon