MORGAN HÅKANSSON: One of the basic ideas of the Inner Circle was that we should send a message that we were not like them. There are no limitations when you have an enemy. Why should you limit yourself from doing certain things? If you have to commit murder as part of your ideology, then so be it. To Varg, it was an internal problem that got solved.
HELLHAMMER: For all the new bands, it was kind of sad because they didn’t have Euronymous to lead them anymore. And that was a shame. When Euronymous was alive it was his duty to see that all the bands coming from Norway were authentic. Posers were told to quit, and a couple of bands did. The Norway scene has been blown out of proportion. There are hundreds of black metal bands coming out of Norway made of sixteen-year-olds. I laugh about it, but Euronymous really had done something to keep the music pure. The positive thing about it is it’s clear that he got Mayhem very much attention, PR-wise. It was the same thing when Dead died. Euronymous said band-wise it wasn’t so great, but the hype for us was cool. It was the same with Euronymous. We were friends, but I wasn’t upset when he was killed. I think that death is only natural. I don’t think death is sad or anything to be upset about. I was thinking about it after he died and I think he maybe didn’t have that much more to give, so maybe he just died at the right point.
Count Grishnackh and Faust weren’t the only black metal musicians to commit murder. In July 1997, the front man of Swedish death/black metal band Dissection, Jon Nödtveidt, was convicted of helping to kill thirty-eight-year-old Algerian Josef Ben Meddour, a gay man, and of possessing an illegal firearm. The story of the murder was chronicled in the movie Keiler’s Park. Nödtveidt was released from prison in 2004 and relaunched Dissection, but committed suicide in August 2006, claiming he had accomplished all he set out to do with the band and had nothing left to live for. It would be easy to dismiss Nödtveidt as a sadistic, homophobic Satanist, but like Count Grishnackh and Faust, he was a musical pioneer, creating a fiery hybrid of melodic, symphonic black metal on two highly influential albums: 1993’s The Somberlain and 1995’s Storm of the Light’s Bane.
JON NÖDTVEIDT (1975–2006) (Dissection) [2006 interview]: My lifestyle was always about breaking boundaries and reaching beyond a normal level of existence. I always put the emphasis on Satanism, since that’s the reason why I’m playing music.
ANDERS BJÖRLER (ex–At the Gates, Haunted): Dissection were really close friends. In the mid-nineties they moved down to Gothenburg [Sweden]. Jon was a good musician and a really nice guy. He was like the prankster in the class. The image that’s being presented doesn’t fit because he was so friendly. There was a shimmer of darkness somewhere inside of him, especially when he was writing and listening to music. You noticed that side sometimes, but overall he was very positive and very bright. He loved to make prank calls—picking up the phonebook, pointing at a name, and pretending to be from the electric company—just stupid, funny stuff. I didn’t think he was homophobic. I think they were high on amphetamines and drunk. I don’t think [he would have committed murder] if he was sober. Never. It was like 4 a.m. and they had been up for 24 hours partying, and one thing led to another. Of course, the reports said they had planned this sort of ritualistic murder, but I never knew that side of him.
JON NÖDTVEIDT: No matter how you twist and turn it, [what I did] can’t be undone. I must move forward with my life. I have taken responsibility for my actions by having served my time in prison. I’m not proud of the fact that I have to watch my mother cry, but I’m working with new strength and looking ahead.
ANDERS BJÖRLER: I talked to Jon a couple of weeks after he got out of prison and he was a totally changed person. He was strange and very cold. I wasn’t very shocked when I found out he killed himself.
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EXPRESSEN NEWSPAPER, August 19, 2006: At 7:21 p.m. CET [Central European Time] on Wednesday [August 16], a police patrol reported to the police communication center in Stockholm that a man had been found dead, the apparent victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to several of Expressen’s sources, the singer had placed an open copy of The Satanic Bible in front of him before pulling the trigger. “He shot himself in the head and lay dead in a ring of lit candles,” says a police source. At 5:44 p.m. on Wednesday, the police received a 911 call from Jon Nödtveidt’s family, who hadn’t been able to establish contact with him for a couple of days.
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It’s hard to imagine that an underground music scene that ignited in Scandinavia yielded at least two suicides, three murders, seven church burnings, and numerous incarcerations and lawsuits. It would be easier to understand if the musicians had been gang members or condemned sociopaths. But for the most part they were just naïve young men whose foolish, impulsive actions had dire consequences.
GRUTLE KJELLSON: I guess it’s kind of easy for a young and somewhat disturbed mind to commit crimes in order to be accepted and looked up to. That’s not only happening in black metal. It’s happened many times before in history. There are lots of equivalents to such actions. So there was nothing special about this.
SILENOZ: People were really impressionable and it felt like it was a competition to see who could be more extreme than the next guy. Sooner or later that’s going to turn into action somehow, and that’s exactly what happened. I’m glad we kept our heads cool, so to speak. We subconsciously made a decision to concentrate on the music and stay away from trouble.
IHSAHN: The whole philosophy and idealism within the black metal scene was about feeling nothing, which is kind of a paradox because in your teens you feel absolutely everything. You’re in emotional turmoil and you have an ideal where you want to handle everything with absolute control and not feel remorse, not feel regret, not feel anything. There’s this idea of absolute coldness.
Along with the rash of hate, church burnings, and murders came a flood of media attention. After the first wave of arson, the UK’s weekly Kerrang! ran a six-page story on black metal that sparked public interest, and after Euronymous was murdered, the story of the crime spread throughout Europe, and then to America. The bizarre nature of the Inner Circle crimes and the extreme quality of the music appealed to audiences seeking more intensity in metal; the harsh reality of black metal proved too tempting to resist. Some argue that the media attention stripped the scene of substance, but it certainly didn’t affect the music’s popularity. Black metal became Norway’s leading musical export; existing bands across the globe gained popularity, and new bands spread across the landscape like a virus.
COUNT GRISHNACKH: I am no friend of the modern so-called black metal culture. It is a tasteless, lowbrow parody of Norwegian so-called black metal circa 1991–1992, and if it was up to me it would meet its dishonorable end as soon as possible. However, rather than abandon my own music because others have soiled its name by claiming to have something in common with it, I will stick with it. The “black metallers” will probably continue to get loaded, get high, and in all other manners, too, behave like the stereotypical Negro; they will probably continue to get foreign tribal tattoos, dress, walk, talk, look, and act like homosexuals, and so forth. Some of the “black metallers,” their fans, and accomplices will probably even continue to pretend—and actually believe—they have something in common with Burzum, but let me assure you they don’t.
DANI FILTH: Black metal became a cliché because the whole thing started with passionate bands that probably didn’t have enough money to get a great production. So that’s been the formula for wave upon wave of bands to imitate. And when you’re imitating bands, you’re not putting your own distinctive mark on your music.
FROST: There have been times we felt that the whole scene was heading the wrong way, like ’97, ’98, ’99. The scene was permeated by this goth influence, and black metal was suddenly all about synthesizers and these large, pompous orchestrations and female vocals and harmonies and melody, and everything was so soft and so gothic and so romantic. It felt like black metal was becoming some sort of anachronism
, and there was this general misunderstanding of what the genre was about and where it came from.
FENRIZ: Wherever there is money, people want a part of it. For me, that killed it—like a party that’s cool and then all the idiots arrive.
IHSAHN: If you look at the scene as an artistic movement, and see the music, the imagery, the makeup, the crimes, the church burnings, and the murders as an expression, it’s all really, really extreme, and it affected a lot of people and got lots of attention. We had this youthful confidence and energy when we were doing In the Nightside Eclipse [in 1993] and Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk [in 1997], and that empowerment shines through even today.
GRUTLE KJELLSON: Everybody opened their eyes to the Norwegian metal scene [after the arsons and the murders]. Everyone was in shock and everything from Norway was suddenly exciting. But after a while, when the media lost interest, a lot of bands disappeared and people thought that most of the bands coming out of Norway had no quality and were mostly copycats, so a lot of bands lost followers. The remaining bands from Norway are mostly the same ones who started the whole thing. We suffered for a long time because the press did not pay attention to the music. We were labeled as criminals and Satanists—the whole bunch of us, all the bands. It was like that until 2002 or 2003. Then the press opened their eyes and discovered that there was actually some musical quality overshadowed by all of those crimes.
SILENOZ: We got discriminated against a lot. We got in trouble with the police unfairly. They stopped us on the street when we were wearing bullet belts and had the biggest upside down crosses we could carry. They said, “Hey, you come with us,” and we were like, “Why?” And they just spit in our face. [Our vocalist] Shaggy was in jail for two days and I was in an interrogation room for eight hours. It was horrible, but it just made us stronger.
ABBATH: When the music got more popular again, some of the fans got more crazy, too. This guy in a club in Germany cut his wrist just to get attention from the band. He went to the hospital and he never got to see the band at all [laughs].
FAUST: There are many groups that have turned black metal into a parody, but a few bands still manage to create that magic fire. . . . I know a band like Deathspell Omega would be something of a wet dream for Euronmyous; 1349 are doing it well, and so are Slagmaur, Forgotten Tomb, Impiety, Urgehal, Watain, Necrophobic, Wolves in the Throne Room, Blut Aus Nord, Malfeitor, and Black Witchery.
One of the most popular Norwegian black metal acts today is Dimmu Borgir, but despite their heaviness and dedication to darkness, some members of the old guard consider them charlatans. Dimmu released their debut, For All Tid, in 1994. Eleven years later they were one of the highlights at America’s leading summer metal music festival, Ozzfest, playing a style of grandiose, orchestral black metal that capitalized on the achievements of Emperor and Cradle of Filth.
FENRIZ: After people started calling bands like Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth black metal, the most black metal thing to do was to quit playing black metal, and since 2005 we have our own style, freestyle, mostly speed metal/heavy metal-punk.
SILENOZ: I don’t care if anyone has a problem with us. We’ve always looked at ourselves as the odd one, the black sheep in the family. But I always considered us a lot more than just black metal, even since the beginning. Of course, everything was simpler and straight to the point back then, but I think we’ve shown a huge progression that leads beyond any borders or categorization.
NERGAL: Dimmu are still honest and they still do what they feel like doing. There’s nothing wrong with becoming big in the black metal scene and spreading the word. Those who think that black metal should stay in the garage and that the message should remain very hermetic and be spread to just a small amount of people are narrow-minded. The whole point is to spread your music to the people that don’t know what the message is. How many times can you repeat the same shit to the same people?
12
WHEN DARKNESS FALLS: METALCORE, 1992–2006
In the early 2000s, a batch of bands from opposite coasts combined thrash and death metal rhythms, virtuosic guitar leads reminiscent of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, and vocals that veered from ferocious hardcore to soaring melodic eighties metal. After nearly a decade of gestation, Killswitch Engage, All That Remains, Shadows Fall, Underoath, Atreyu, and Avenged Sevenfold arose from the underground and gained varying degrees of mainstream acclaim. Still, it’s too simple to describe metalcore as a mere hybrid of metal and hardcore. The progenitors of the movement were just as inspired by the dissonance of American post-punk and noise-rock. Other bands incorporated avant-metal prog rock, straight-edge, and/or screamo. What they all shared was a commitment to inspire crowds on an emotional and physical level.
KEITH BUCKLEY (Every Time I Die): The whole metalcore thing started [in the late eighties and early nineties] with bands like Earth Crisis, Deadguy, Converge, Coalesce, and Cave In. On a disharmonic, technical level, the music had a frenzied feel to it that was totally new. They abandoned song structure and took their own approach to making music, and they really paved the way for bands like us.
STEVE AUSTIN (Today Is the Day): Whenever I see guys playing odd-time-signature-, heavy-type noise, I feel a sense of pride of being an old cat. We came around at a strange time in music. After Nirvana got big, there wasn’t really a band that took superextreme elements of Earache-type [grindcore] and infused them with the weird off-time rhythms of bands like Jesus Lizard and Big Black. I think our [1993] album Supernova is the first one that did that. When we came through Connecticut, kids in the band Deadguy said that we really threw a loop in the hardcore scene as far as what could be done and what couldn’t.
KARL BEUCHNER (Earth Crisis): I grew up loving the power of metal and connecting with a lot of the positive, straight-edge ideas that were being put forward by hardcore bands in the early eighties. So when [guitarist] Scott [Crouse] and I started writing and composing [in Syracuse, New York, in 1991], we put together what we felt were the best aspects of both of those genres. And we had lyrics about terrorism or wars for resources or territory, animal rights, and environmentalism. Plus, we were drug-free and committed to the straight-edge idealism, which made us different than a lot of bands.
RYAN DOWNEY (band manager, journalist): The first true metalcore band was [Cleveland, Ohio’s] Integrity, which drew equally from Cro-Mags and Judge. They formed in 1988 and they were very influential to Killswitch Engage and a lot of other bands. And they had a totally punk rock fuck-you attitude.
DWID HELLION (Integrity): I am a personally focused terrorist of destructive artistic creation. [I’m] not interested in acceptance, conformity, nor praise. If and when my music begins to rub the world the wrong way, then I am truly in my element. My musical interest has always been aggressive, metallic punk with noise and other extreme elements intertwined within—threatening sounds for hopeless souls. Whatever it has been misconstrued as by the mainstream is not of my own design. There are those who know and feel what I am creating, and there are those who only hear loud music.
BRIAN FAIR (ex-Overcast, Shadows Fall): When Overcast started [in Boston] in 1990, we were stealing ideas from Integrity and Starkweather. They were some of the first bands I heard who had amazing melodic singing and brutal screaming, and I loved Coalesce and Converge. It was an exciting time for music because that was before anyone was getting trapped into a formula.
JACOB BANNON (Converge): We’ve been doing this for twenty years, so we don’t align ourselves with anyone. We have always been on the outer fringes of the community, as much as we are responsible for unintentionally influencing a lot of it. We don’t see ourselves as peers of a lot of the bands we get credit for influencing. Some of them in spirit, sure, and in heart and approach, but certainly not in sound.
JESSE LEACH (Killswitch Engage, Times of Grace): Converge was great, but New Jersey’s Rorschach was also there [in 1989] right when hardcore was starting to fuse with metal. And I’d have to say they were probably the biggest in
fluence for any of the bands in the scene. They did it before anyone else, and didn’t get the credit they deserved.
CHARLES MAGGIO (Rorschach): We were all coming out of a scene of bands like Youth of Today and Bold, who were pissed off by people not being straight-edge. Then I got sick with cancer—Hodgkin’s disease—and it opened up a whole new slew of anger trigger points: cigarette smoking, socialized medicine, mortality, death. Things got darker. I had eight months of chemotherapy. It was two treatments a month, and I scheduled them on Mondays so that I would be recovered to go to the shows on weekends. I came out of it a changed man. I felt invincible, impervious to the petty things that affect mortal people. . . . And we were lucky enough to have generated enough in-band ill will toward each other to break up while we were still doing something seemingly valid. A lot of bands don’t have that kind of luck.
As the late nineties gave way to the new millennium, two distinct scenes emerged that were more musically focused and that often incorporated strong doses of melody. The first developed around a region that extended from Boston to Western Massachusetts, and the other was in the far smaller area of Orange County in Southern California. The former adhered to the sounds, but generally not the straight-edge ethic, of Earth Crisis and Rorschach, while most Cali bands, including Eighteen Visions, Throwdown, and Bleeding Through—at least at first—were clean, sober, and sonically brutal.
MIKE D’ANTONIO (Overcast, Killswitch Engage): Western Massachusetts is the little scene that could. It’s absolutely bizarre that so many bands made it so far, given that we were all just playing music for the love of it. You’d be playing with these other bands and then the next week you’d find out that a member left one band to go to another band, and members would swap out all the time. It seems like this big thing, but it’s really been a core of about fifty or sixty kids that were all friends that played together that intermingle and are very incestuous.
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 55