by Ian Christe
The mid-1990s brought widespread emulation of Norwegian black metal in distant lands. Norway briefly became a mythical realm to heavy metal in the way Africa was to rap music, with Vikings and Odinist artifacts instead of Zulu warriors and Kente cloth. As Emperor and Burzum had posed for photos in the Norwegian forest wielding axes and clubs, so in Japan would Sigh and Sabbat stand among bamboo stalks waving samurai swords. From Korea to Finland corpse-painted faces and upside-down crosses became symbols of solidarity, even in countries without Christianity. “Bands from fucking Greece and Italy going pagan Viking metal—how stupid can people be?” says Mortiis. “People are always picking up things in the wrong way. A guy from Greece holding on to Thor’s hammer, what’s the point of that? He should have a Zeus symbol or a Cronus symbol. At least respect that, his own mythological gods!”
Further confusing the distinction between fantasy and reality, headbangers in Germany, Sweden, Japan, and Poland boasted of church arson and graveyard desecration. As legends of the murderous black metal musicians spread through various channels, 1997 brought arash of church fires and bombings in the conflict-laden republic of Russia. “History repeats itself, even in the world of music,” wrote drummer Bard Eithun from prison. “Everything moves around like a constant cycle, some sort of dialectic interrelationship between the bands, the fans, and the cultural environment as a whole.”
Driven to embarrassment by this black metal bandwagon, a dedicated faction attempted to stick to the crudest sounds possible, championing spirit over obviousness. These included Norway’s Dark throne and Carpathian Forest and New York’s Havohej and Hemlock, all using corrosive sound as a yardstick of brutality. Havohej’s Black Perversion EP was probably the worst-sounding metal album ever made, seemingly recorded in the back of a van with a microcassette recorder, using low-grade samples of a dangerously neglected basement trash incinerator. Havohej leader Paul Ledney’s cruel vision was carried over from Profanatica, a band infamous for releasing an interview video of themselves drinking urine and masturbating onto a Bible.
Crudeness was an exciting aesthetic choice, and not necessarily self-defeating. Strapped for cash, black metal bands often historically recorded using rather cheap recording techniques anyway. Seemingly a rejection of heavy metal grandeur, this was acceptable for several reasons. For starters, even bands like Morbid Angel and Metallica first became known to fans via copied cassettes, and part of that experience was the loss of audio quality inherent in the process of infinite dubbing. Second, groups in Greece, Brazil, and Mexico simply did not have access to hitmaking studios. The silver lining in the coffin, so to speak, was that the cloudy, muffled sound fit the often claustrophobic and intensely personal nature of black metal.
Experienced bands like Norway’s Darkthrone and Sweden’s chaotic Abruptum saw the humor and relished the ironic badness of being black metal slumlords. A key band in Norway since 1991’s popular A Blaze in the Northern Sky, Darkthrone thrived on a wicked minimalist plan scribbled on sheets of rust-caked guitar. An inspiration to Burzum, Varg Vikernes returned the favor by writing folkloric lyrics for Darkthrone’s desperately ripped Transilvanian Hunger. After years of grim faces, however, drummer Gylve Nagell, aka Fenriz, began to pride himself on comic crappiness. “We’re not entertainers, we’re a black metal band,” he told Terrorizer. “There are limits to how much technical Neil Peart [of Rush] drumming there’s supposed to be on an album like Bathory’s The Return, y’know? I’m really happy about my drum sound. It’s really bad.”
It took five more years for the United States to gradually grasp black metal—as stories spread through fanzines and mass media alike, it was difficult to separate the facts from the urban legends. For Americans there remained very little firsthand exposure to Norwegian black metal bands, though they had sold hundreds of thousands of CDs. There was also unreliable distribution of music released through extremely tiny labels. Unscrupulous grave robbers capitalized greatly on Mayhem, releasing dozens of unlicensed pirate CDs of any existing scraps of tape. One famous set of live recordings featured a photo of Mayhem’s singer, Dead, lying at his suicide scene.
With all their high jinks and grand expectations, black metal bands rarely played live. Save for Immortal, Sweden’s Marduk, and a brief 1993 UK tour that paired Emperor with the British group Cradle of Filth, the top black metal bands had triumphed only in the studio environment. “I’m never going to sing live,” said Mortiis in 1998. “Playing keyboards with the makeup, that’s supposed to be timeless. I don’t want too much modern technology in my stage set. It’s just going to fuck things up.” Instead staging a theatrical event, at early shows Mortiis pantomimed to prerecorded music and a black-and-white film of himself wandering around castle ruins.
Even as black metal riveted the record stores, Florida death metal reigned supreme in the live arena—Deicide and Morbid Angel were formidable and professional stage acts whose perpetual touring schedules earned a constant influx of new devotees. When the black metal wave hit full force in the late 1990s, a large throng of death metallers dug in their spurs against the indulgent keyboards, costumes, and romantic trappings. One memorable sign of fealty at Milwaukee Metalfest in 1998 came from a tattered metal soldier wearing a homemade BLACK METAL SUCKS T-shirt with a SUPPORT DEATH METAL baseball cap worn backward over his long, frizzy hair.
Soon paroled and reconstituted, the members of Emperor, still only in their mid-twenties, were eager to burn their tabloid infamy in a flame of ferocious black metal. When Emperor guitarist Samoth was released from prison, he and Ihsahn recruited two new members for a regenerated version of their band, which finally came to America and toured with Morbid Angel. Even Mayhem returned after the passing of its leader, Euronymous, as drummer Hellhammer recruited singer Sven Erik Kristiansen, aka Maniac, and bassist Jorn Stubberud, aka Necrobutcher—both long-vanished members of the late-1980s Mayhem.
The new Mayhem announced its first American concerts in 1998, and a throng awaited the debut like children staying up late for Santa Claus. As trademark skinned cow heads were placed on stakes across the stage, the spectacle did not disappoint. Speaking fluently in the arcane cant of Mayhem’s eerie music, Maniac shrieked incantations of disaster while gray hair dye and corpse paint dripped off his face in the heat. Bassist Necrobutcher and new guitarist Rune Erickson, aka Blasphemer, spilled a blurry pool of black metal noise in reverent rendition of Euronymous’s familiar blazing style, while Hellhammer pushed the procession forward with his unique, superhuman, quadruple-time drumming. To think of conventional music during this blazing chaos was impossible.
America receives black metal gifts
Soon Mayhem even returned to the studio, creating esoteric, indulgent records like Grand Declaration of War, which took Euronymous’s primitive inspiration to a damaging intellectual realm—whether durable or not, it was impressively conceived to keep Mayhem at the forefront of the music the band helped create.
As it repeatedly influenced metal across the world and found a footing in the live concert setting, by 1999 the Norwegian black metal scene began to succumb to convention. While Emperor’s awesome In the Nightside Eclipse stung with infernal adolescent zeal, the polished later albums, Equilibrium IX and Prometheus, were majestic whirlwinds of angry regal riffs and demonic drama, recorded in state-of-the-art 48-track digital studios. The destructive impulse had been placated by rock stardom, or simply through natural maturity.
Always more a musician than a terrorist, Emperor leader Ihsahn at age twenty-three in 1999 struggled valiantly for professionalization and found the crimes of his peers a distraction. “I see things in a different perspective,” he says. “It’s quite common when you’re fifteen or sixteen to rebel and want to do bad things.” In particular, Ihsahn expressed frustration over being continually asked about crimes— even seven years after the fact by the New York paper the Village Voice. “Look at Marilyn Manson,” Ihsahn says. “He’s a millionaire and a big star, so it’s okay. He has much more taboos than
we have, but he’s okay because he makes a lot of money in the commercial market.”
Nonetheless their reputations preceded them—the price of fame drawn from a uniquely Faustian bargain. Having served most of his murder sentence by the end of the decade, former Emperor drummer, Faust, under Norwegian law was allowed weekend furloughs to attend the odd Kiss concert—despite professing his continued admiration for Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho in interviews. Yet there was little fear of reprisal. Emperor guitarist Samoth, after spending two years in Norwegian prison for his role in the destruction of the Skjold church, said he would not join a younger movement of church burners. His anger, boredom, or need for attention had mellowed. “Been there, done that,” he replied, as if refusing a day trip to the Eiffel Tower.
As purists struggled with their legacy of destruction, it was up to supporting characters to sell significant numbers of records. The happy-go-lucky English black metal band Cradle of Filth, a whirlwind of players led by the impish Dani Davey, sold half a million albums in Europe by emphasizing sexual and demonic characters and stage props. The group washed down its blasphemy with a typically British sense of camp—while showing a prodigious talent for dark eroticism in heavy metal T-shirt design. Behind them came Dimmu Borgir, a Norwegian group formed while its members were still in high school in 1993, during the heat of the country’s crime wave. Showing national loyalty by singing in the Norwegian language until after 1996’s Stormblast, Dimmu Borgir streamlined and simplified black metal—and the 1997 Enthrone Darkness Triumphant CD in turn sold more than a quarter million copies.
In Norway at the end of the 1990s, the extreme had eased into social acceptance. The pagan war against Christianity had been preempted by career concerns as the bands were perversely lauded for bringing the country a musical identity. Years after the torching of Fantoftkirke—in fact, not long after the church had been entirely reconstructed—black metal bands including Emperor could be seen battling over awards at the Norwegian Grammys. Another sign of the times: Militant black metallers were parodied in a mainstream Norwegian detergent ad that featured a mock black metal band wearing full stage garb. While they were washing up, one of the actors wiped his face with the cleansing soap. When his corpse paint rubbed off clean, his bandmates mocked him, saying, “It’s only ash!” The product’s slogan, translated: “It all comes out in the wash.”
XVII
Satan Goes to Court:
The people v. Heavy Metal
1988: Ozzy Osbourne “Suicide Solution” case tried in Los Angeles, California
1991: Judas Priest dual-suicide backward masking case tried in Reno, Nevada
Spring 1994: “West Memphis 3” defendants convicted in West Memphis, Arkansas
1996: HBO’s Paradise Lost documentary released, questioning West Memphis 3 trial
While dashing wildly toward unknown destinations, heavy metal earned its scars. Metallers in America often found themselves in skirmishes that erupted into destructive dramas—producing more heavy metal martyrs than metal terrorists. As the mystically powerful music and its myriad offshoots forced their way to the front of cultural change, they often crossed swords with factions of society that were dragging their feet, trying to reverse history and deny rather than embrace the new realities of the modern world.
In the simple terms of rhetorical shorthand, heavy metal remained the devil’s music—a convenient and reliable scapegoat for social and spiritual ills. “It’s so easy for Middle America to look to people who are slightly different and ostracize them,” says Bruce Sinofsky, director of the film Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. “Then, when a crime takes place that can’t be solved because there’s no evidence, they can say it’s an occult-related crime, and somehow it’s traced to the heavy metal music scene. The logic is pretzel logic. You can never figure out where it came from until you actually live in that environment. It’s scary.”
By its nature heavy metal had always threatened the status quo, offering an escape from the strip malls and fast food of Middle America. Since Black Sabbath, heavy metal lyrics investigated the corners of the subconscious, and bands from Judas Priest to Metallica took their gloom and doom straight from the pages of heretical writers like Goethe and Nietzsche. Naturally young people examining the big questions of God and the devil took to heavy metal—these musicians were the only adults who respected their curiosity. “I always consider my audience to be a lot brighter than most people think,” says Ronnie James Dio. “I gave them songs that I thought had a lot more fiber than most songs they’d heard, and I think they were smart enough to realize that.”
Even as heavy metal figures visited Congress in the 1990s to ask for election-law reform, they were still beleaguered by the prior effects of the PMRC censorship hearings on Capitol Hill in the 1980s. Metal witch-hunts still spotted the American cultural landscape, fueled by fundamentalist Christians for whom devils and witches were as real as floods and famine. Led by many of the same religious groups who had organized record-burning bonfires in the 1970s—when church leaders gathered all heavy metal albums from their young flocks for ritualistic nighttime conflagrations—the antimetal crusade flared during the 1990s into a wave of scary accusations and indictments.
Not that heavy metal was against the church. Even musicians who attacked organized religion, like Dave Mustaine of Megadeth, returned to Sunday services after coming to terms with personal beliefs. “You have to take into consideration that I died once,” Mustaine says. “I overdosed in 1992. My heart stopped, and I was dead as a doornail. You tend to be willing to look to a power greater than yourself after trying to live on your own terms fails. I’ve come to have my own understanding of God now. I’m not going to grow hairy palms for jerking off, and I’m not going to grow tits for smoking pot. I go to church, and my little kid goes to Sunday school, but it’s at a nondenominational place where I hang out and tell jokes with the pastor.”
The idea that heavy metal corrupted innocent minds was a myth. Hundreds of Christian metal groups surely demonstrated that there was nothing inherent in the music to lead civilization toward destruction. Even the music of the church-burning black metal band Emperor was once played for Dom Laurentino Saenz de Buruaga, the spiritual and musical leader of a choir of Spanish Benedictine monks whose records sold platinum numbers in the mid-1990s. Far from recoiling in horror, this holy figure assessed it bluntly: “It is the usual sort of noise in every sort of discotheque or dancing in the world. It’s a rhythm only.”
Yet early in the 1980s that rhythm became confused with the crimes of two famous sociopaths. Serial killer Richard Ramirez was dubbed the “Night Stalker,” owing to a reporter’s error based on the creepy crawler’s penchant for the eerie 1979 AC/DC song “Night Prowler.” Though heavy metal gave him a theme song, Ramirez’s character was shaped by much worse. Troubled with health problems since childhood, he was trained to kill silently by a psychopathic uncle—a decorated Green Beret who bragged of rape and other atrocities committed during duty in Vietnam. Later, Long Island LSD dealer Ricky Casso killed a client in the woods and was arrested wearing an AC/DC shirt that matched the heavy metal graffiti found across the playgrounds and alleys of his town. Though police refused to label the case satanic—the victim owed Casso a sum of money, and drugs seemed the obvious source of the conflict—provocateurs following the PMRC were more than willing to ring the heavy metal alarms.
During that same time period, there were more than 20 million AC/DC albums sold, and two criminals hardly amounted to a statistical majority. Attacking heavy metal for its lyrics was a case of blaming the messenger. It was a mistake to equate the nonconformity of many with the actual deviance of a few, but likewise the Beatles were dragged twenty years earlier into the circus of the Charles Manson trials. Showing a disturbing ignorance of the facts, accusers claimed that rock music had been Manson’s inspiration. As heavy metal became a powerful cause for the faithful, those who coveted social control realized that lack o
f understanding of heavy metal could be useful if played for political and financial gain.
When they first appeared, people immersed in the world of heavy metal occasionally found themselves stigmatized unfairly, targets of something resembling a homegrown heavy metal pogrom. By intensifying degree there were three basic levels of headbanger harassment: individual discrimination, lawsuits or criminal charges on a local level, and wide-ranging legislative moves that aimed to stifle heavy metal nationwide.
The most common kind of headbanger harassment was being “guilty of wearing black T-shirts,” an informal badgering of people marked as aberrant by virtue of their clothes and long hair. These conflicts ranged from tacitly approved social prejudice, like being watched too carefully by store owners, to outright harassment, such as being repeatedly targeted as a community troublemaker for wearing a black wardrobe. Solutions were often benign, leading to harmless battles over school dress codes that banned blasphemous clothing in the classroom. Such cases were to be expected—the friction of freedom of speech came with the self-chosen territory of dressing in black. To be sure, many metalheads relished the confrontations, as witnessed by the rise in facial piercings and dyed-black hair in the 1990s.
Unfortunately, there were also semiprofessional oppressors who sought to ban heavy metal not only from social-studies class but from society itself. As W.A.S.P. and Venom had capitalized on the sensationalism of their over-the-top stage shows, a caste of professional witch-hunters had learned how to stoke that shock value to a different and more profitable audience. Heavy metal “experts” such as Dr. Dale Griffis, a former Ohio policeman and self-proclaimed cult expert, appeared for a fee at court cases around the country. He insisted repeatedly that murderous underground satanic cults were operating in America and recruiting young people from the heavy metal scene. “We have kids being killed,” Griffis told 20/20 newsmagazine. “We have people missing. We have all types of perversion going on, and it’s affecting America.”