by Jenny Hval
Young Munchs, says the third, and all three feel the presence of the Puberty girl. She’s a Munch after all, painted half living, half dead. Munch’s people are exactly that, corpse paint before corpse paint, no real human underneath, nothing either living or dead.
Black metallers didn’t invent corpse paint; it has existed since the dawn of pigments. They didn’t even invent the Norwegian expressionist version. But they reinvented the technique as a post-modern teenage ritual, like a social medium before social media. They invented it for themselves and put their own living human faces underneath. Through this transformation we didn’t become just living dead, but also icons, tools for communication, apps. The mask was more real than my own face, a body part that was only partly my own, and only partly carried my sins. I was death, my own and others’; I was unrecognisable behind the white and black, as we all become unrecognisable when all our muscles relax in the moment of death. I rose from ancient culture to magic, to art, to teenage ritual and back again.
Rock music had already created a connection with ritual, with sex, with role playing, and black metal took that ritual all the way back to its roots. Or all the way back to its body, at least, if the male teenage body could be called the root. In 1997 I’m too late and the wrong gender for being part of black metal, but I get to take part in the aesthetics and the performance: the makeup, the images, the parties. I get to join the white party that is the South, Norway, Scandinavia, the white taciturn gruel, and the vaults of silence.
Black metal and I emerge from this whiteness, in the silent h’s, those that cover complete darkness, total misanthropy, a complete and devouring black hole that gorges its way down and into the Norwegian roots. Perhaps black metallers in ’91, ’87, ’93, like me in 2002, desire a black sheet to write on. Angry, lonely boys, looking for their own negative and a way to redefine the term evil. One winter they decide that everything should be black, the colour of evil, white upside down. When summer comes they decide to stop washing their hair, because the opposite of white is dirty. It’s unclear whether or not they start to stink of rotten milk and wet dog. The next summer people start dying. At that point I’m still a long way from discovering the subculture, and when I become part of the scene six or seven years later, it’s been cut up, jailed and convicted, become exalted and legendary.
But imagine what could have happened in ’91, ’93, ’98. Imagine if churches hadn’t needed to be burned down or gravestones toppled, but instead black metallers had reconsidered the craft and the traditions. Imagine if they had broken into churches and redecorated them to make spaceships, radical pirate radio studios and queer clubs … or maybe dropped a glitter bomb. Instead, the churches were set ablaze. A burning cross is a powerful cross. Crusading men have already planted them all over what we call history. Metal has become legendary; it gets press time and everyone is scared, it becomes tabloid and stripped of imagination. It becomes self-expression for insecure men who want to return to a time where they could have been strong. It concerns itself with mainstream values like dominance and control, it becomes monstrous, it simplifies, it’s a tour de force and a power demonstration; it doesn’t concern itself with critique. And no one questions the hate. Hatred is just an expression of strength. No one asks why the word hate actually has an audible h.
Black, we’re taught in school, isn’t a dynamic colour; it isn’t a colour at all. It’s just understood as the opposite of white. And it can’t go anywhere. We can’t hate. But I hate.
Can’t we move? Or do we just avoid going there?
Black metal hated too; it dug itself further in as the ’90s progressed, and opened up the underground to reveal something difficult and dangerous, but with the metallers’ blind, boyish mythological fascination it grew paler and paler, whiter and whiter. The epic drama, the hierarchy, the gender segregation, the authoritarianism, the xenophobia, the silence, became its defining elements – all the things that already define society. In college in 1997 black metallers don’t look different from neo- Nazis, and neo-Nazis don’t look different from black metallers, and no one knows exactly who to beat up. The only people who keep their heads on straight are the brightly coloured Jesus kids, who spend all their time praying for everyone, since upside-down crosses and Nazi violence are the same in their dramatic staging of the fight between God and hell. The battle unifies them, Nazism and black metal and Jesus Revolution, so that everyone is a player in the eternal battle between good and evil, in which individuals dominate thanks to their faith or their race, or their misanthropy, and look down on the sheeple who accept so-called secular social democracy. A fucking party banquet of Southern knights.
A few years later the neo-Nazis have grown up, and returned to the Free Church congregations during the Aryan surge to the right. Black metal is mainstream and America has awoken. Then the porridge is complete: metal knights are regular knights, copied from a subculture into the mainstream, from subversive recordings and misanthropy to big-budget cinema productions about Norwegian resistance during the Nazi occupation, or about postwar expeditions, films like Max Manus, The Battle for Heavy Water, and Kon-Tiki. We’re back where we started, outside Arendal, on Arne Myrdal’s lawn with the People’s Movement Against Immigration. We’re all Southerners now.
Why does resistance always end up just polishing the traditions? Terese asks.
Or making way for them.
Good question, I say, or maybe Venke says. None of us, not even Terese, has a good answer.
From the beginning black metal is just a blackened and dirty version of pre-existing society, its growling an attempt to express a long strain of spoken, silent HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHs, collected from endless appearances of the word white. Every battle is linguistic.
We’re able to see it differently now, twenty-five years after the golden era. We can say that early black metal is a modern version of Munch’s paintings, lo-fi visions of the Norwegian anxiety about death and art, a negative of ourselves that only shows us our reflection. My face in black-and-white death, constantly pointed out by people as I walk through the loathed streets of Grimstad and Arendal, is a modern Scream.
The comments are usually:
CLEAN THAT UP
Or
YOU’LL NEVER GET MARRIED WITH THAT MAKEUP / THOSE CLOTHES / THAT HAIR
or
GIVE US A SMILE, THEN, DON’T BE SO GRUMPY
The boys in the metal band I’m in, and the punk boys and the rave boys, all get beat up in turns by the steroid-fuelled body-builders at the Arendal bus station. They leave me alone, I’m not threatening anyone’s manhood, but I’m the one getting the predictions, the judgement, thrown at me. No one asks why I hate, no one uses that word, they call me grumpy, not even angry, but grumpy, six letters, something inconsequential and self- inflicted, something powerless, insignificant, something small in a small person, not something that’s about society, or about them, just something that means I’m ruining things for myself, something that’s in the way of my potential as an object.
We’re on our way to the concert venue now. It’s as if we have to open up the black again, and the music, to inject potential once more, and to add and?
Where is God?
In college I discover God in the mouth. He’s hidden between the lips of the Christian girls, and not just in the muted words and the silent h’s. God is a musical presence. He’s found in the heavy diphthongs and vowel sounds of the Southern accent, in their slow-paced speech and taciturn nature, in the vibrato that dominates the gospel choir’s hymns.
In the breaks between psalms I hear smiles and chewing. The entire choir is always chewing gum. Their chewing-gum breath is mild and sacred, clean and minty. It’s the corpse paint of the breath, I think. Something synthetic, white and clean to cover the human face. The little chemical wad of plastic and sorbitol that they chew is polished into a pearl in those soft and wet purgatories. They chew as if they’ve regurgitated it as cud, but they never swallow. Gum controls the mouth, stops it
from speaking out of turn, but keeps it active, sensual. The gum is a reminder of life, a reminder of what the pulse, the tongue and the teeth really desire. The sound doesn’t stop; like a beat it’s always there; it becomes the sound of eternity. It, if anything, is God.
I curse the voice, the gum and the whole mouth, at home in my Southern witch’s den. The school and the Christians try their best to control the mouth: through compulsory recitals of the Lord’s Prayer, psalms (1989–92) and speaking in tongues, bans on swearing, and worried conversations about the faithless, hell and the devil (1996–99). My whole upbringing condenses into one question: How do you pray without faith?
The only thing I value in my mouth is spit. Hatred spits, scorns, and finally becomes bulimic. Something happens in my throat: a spiritual retching. Throughout my childhood I feel like I’m being sick without the nausea. As if that’s how I talk and sing. I sense it in my dreams, walking to school, on the school bus. Under my desk every morning, like a glowing malpaís, is an oozing pool of black biblical sick.
At home, hidden behind black velvet curtains, I’m saved by the blasphemous material on my computer. I rush through Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs and Bataille’s Story of the Eye, on the uncensored and unfinished ’90s internet, and behind them I see my face mirrored on the computer screen. I scroll through eye and egg fetishes and voyeuristic fantasies, and in my own head I rename Bataille’s novella Story of the Throat, a translation I lick and gnaw until I can feel something other than God’s retching in my own throat. To do this, my throat has to become blasphemous. From my first year in primary school I spit out every school word contemptuously: When we sing psalms I harmonise off-key, adding evil resonances with my voice. The devil is always angry, and I’m always angry, I’m told, and that’s why I allow myself to sing off-key. The devil and I are always a quartertone over or a semitone under, I think, and I rub myself against the rituals, swallow them, polish them with spit and regurgitate them. But when I use my voice for blasphemy, I do it with pleasure. The malpaís oozes in ornate patterns. Look at me, I’m gushing, it doesn’t stop, but continues to drip down my desk, to the floor and down the drains in locker rooms, down to the underworld that supports us.
For the longest time I’m unable to understand what that feeling is. I can only feel it: the retching, the fear, the pleasure, and the overflowing. It’s only years after I’ve left the witch’s den and the classroom malpaís in exchange for a secular university in the capital, and long after I’ve repressed the feeling of God stuck in my throat, that I find the porn classic Deep Throat on an illegal peer-to-peer network, an awful low-resolution video. The file is so compressed, and all the moving genitals are so pixelated, that the film is practically censored and no longer fulfils its purpose. But it works for me. Early in the film the main character goes to see her doctor to ask why she can’t orgasm. The doctor identifies the problem easily: her clit is actually in her throat. He is of course immediately willing to demonstrate how the issue could be solved. This part is less exciting to me. My kink is the idea that the throat is a site for happiness, as in the Art Garfunkel interview where he talks about the moment he realised that he could sing and calls it ‘a feeling of happiness brought on by something that happened in my throat.’ Linda Lovelace and Art Garfunkel, from kink to kink, blasphemy and happiness, it’s all the same to me. Happiness is the throat that regurgitates God, as we clear that passage before we talk or sing, so that the throat can discover itself. In the throat’s ecstasy, in the eroticism of the throat, the throat’s hands are stretched out into the world. Out of the mouth gushes and?
I’m on my way home from practice with my first band in 1998. It’s nearly summer and the sun scorches my black clothes and black hair. Black velvet sticks to arms, thighs and back as I dash through fields and housing estates and churchyards, past churches and parish centres with their crosses flying high and windows peering at me. When the wind blows through my clothes, I feel it’s the Christian monuments sort of screaming at me. They know I’m the spawn of Satan. I’m a lonely black stain on the paper, one that isn’t even allowed to battle the Jesus soldiers as a knight. With my band-practice confidence I curse them all.
From the top of a small hill, behind a few beeches and a thin white cross that wavers in the wind, comes the sound of voices. Each gust of wind ushers them toward me, and when the wind changes direction I almost can’t hear them, until another word or phrase hits me in the face once more. The song is a psalm with lots of verses. Each phrase is stretched, the tones sustained, just as psalms are always sung, and within these sustained tones old women’s voices quiver into each other. Each individual voice quivers, too, the way hats, tablecloths and the white cross quiver in an open-air church service. Deep inside these old women’s throats their vocal cords vibrate against each other, body rubs against body, woodwork creaks against woodwork. Antiquated psalms, antiquated words, antiquated bodies, fossils united.
During this period in my life I scorn the vibrato. The Jesus girls have taught me that there’s something Christian about the vibrato; there has to be, since they do it so much. In their boring gospel songs, the vibrato trills between God and the world, reflecting norms and rules. The most beautiful trill, if sung appropriately and in the most conventional way, is closest to God.
When I sing in my band, there’s no vibrato, no sincerity, or depth. There’s also no growl, HHHHHHH, I don’t understand why that’s the direction you’re supposed to go, either. But deep down I’m actually tired of the metal conventions. Everyone in my circle missed the beginnings of black metal; it’s been five years since all the action went down, and now everyone plays doom, a slower version with a more romantic outlook. In that genre, the bands shroud everything in a beautiful veil of dictionary English. None of us understands all the words, but on paper they look complex and ornamental. The clothes I should be buying are Victorian dresses and corsets, props from a time even more conservative than the dress code at the parish centres. No one actually questions anything. No one’s really trying to rouse anything. Nor am I, except when I’m alone in the witch’s dorm, and then I’m under the covers with my clit in my throat, cursing all the villages around me – Fevik and Rykene and Songe, and especially Saron’s Valley – and all the radical evangelists. If it’s really true that singing and writing can transgress the borders between the real world and someplace else, then there’s no point in wrapping it all up in convention and corsets. Why should you not question, not doubt or go forth in chaos, not scream or bark or howl? You have to open up to the strange. You have to say something new.
I stay and listen to the parish choir at the top of the hill while I take off my jacket and jumper. I’ve been taught that song is a sacrament; it makes the holy words and the holy being real through the body. The same thing happens at band practice and when I curse, too, I take the words I and the others have written, preferably about denying god, about grief and hopelessness, and make them real. Composing a beautiful melody for the words I hate God excites me, but I don’t dare sing it in front of the boys in the band: it sounds too primitive, too ecstatic. It’s still better to let them find the lyrics, deep in their dictionaries.
The old women at the top of the hill lend their frail existence to the words that they find holy. The purity of the words and the physical entities of the voices melt together. It’s a deeply Christian, almost Catholic moment, where faith is reified through its own complex, deeply sexual, religious melding. But it’s the words, not Christ’s blood and body, that manifest as they pass through the larynx, vocal cords and mouth. It’s the faith, the story, that’s reified. The trees, wind and the whole landscape curves around them. Below them, in the churchyard where we’ll shoot our band photos later that same year, where I pretend to be crucified, is the underground, mile after mile of blood.
Perhaps art and magic are synonymous. Ever since someone worked out that a sound could be a word, or that you could draw an object. When signs, or words, emerged, you could describe t
he surrounding world, signless until then. And from there, figuring out that this language could also describe things that don’t exist in the world was no great leap. It’s possible to just make stuff up, take ourselves places we didn’t know existed and that perhaps don’t exist, that emerge only in the moment the voice, and later the reader or writer, is connected to language.
When this spell, language, is used to create gods and mythology, the fiction becomes so complex and self-referential that in fact it seems real, perhaps even self-aware. That might actually be what the singers in the old parish choir dream of: making God real through song, through their own real bodies, although they themselves of course would say that God is already real, that he exists. (And when they say that, he appears to them, in words.)
In ancient scriptures, and in everything written ever since, witches and magic have been a philosophical problem that stares God right in the eye. The witch’s artistic expression is of course witchcraft, but just like the priests and the establishment, she uses both the body and words to give the craft life. The threat becomes real because these processes are similar, or perhaps, when all is said and done, magic is just a better word for God, faith, words and the existence of God. Perhaps it’s this fear that makes my college class cross themselves when I exclaim fucking hell while our class photo is being taken, or maybe it’s this fear that drove the writer of Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches, to include such an infinite number of pages with extrapolations of witch characteristics. Page after page filled with descriptions of how a witch uses words, body, and ritual, systematically eradicate her human and womanly qualities: her genitals are a dry desert that cannot reproduce; her throat is a broken connection between voice and body. Her body can be dressed in tempting animal- or humanlike disguises, and her voice is an artificial, sickly-sweet additive that tempts us to drink from the poisoned cup. The heavens open and God’s holy presence is realised in the bodies of God-fearing people through their songs and sacraments, but the body of the witch, through her magical rituals, opens a parallel forbidden reality, underground, that doesn’t belong in reality and shouldn’t exist.