Playground magazine

How can we calibrate the relative importance of a band that plays extreme music? This is a question that I’ve asked myself many times, and there is no easy answer. The problem isn’t that extreme music groups are a minority, or that critics don’t take them seriously. In fact, it’s highly arguable whether a single canon even exists in the appreciation of popular music of recent decades. If we were going to formulate one based on the music media and “cultured” audiences, nevertheless, we would find the usual procession of Beastie Boys, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Wilco, Tom Waits and other sacred cows. We wouldn’t find Burzum, Merzbow, Throbbing Gristle and the rest of the sacred cows of noisy screamers. But although they may not appear on the lists of albums of the year, this second group is praised by a sector of specialised criticism and occupies a small but respected position in the “independent” press. There is, however, a generalised belief that they are not playing in the major leagues of musical creation, and that their goal is not necessarily to make good music, but rather to satisfy the unhealthy urges of their somewhat disturbed audience.

I believe that the main explanation comes from the attitude of extreme music bands themselves. It may be that in many cases, musical extremism (noise, to be clear) is approached as a sound exploration, but there is no doubt that it also has an element of confrontation, a desire to scare away the respectable and reject the music scene in general. Noise is only one of the self-excluding strategies of extreme music. The extreme music scene has traditionally used many more. The facial make-up of black metal or the tattoos, piercings and military clothing of neo-folk and industrial groups are elements clearly designed to alienate the uninitiated. In this sense, although one can’t speak of subcultures to define the extreme music scene, it has always behaved like a subculture, even when it is more intellectual. Another of its self-excluding strategies is the creation of musical patterns where innovation barely comes into play. This is why all neo-folk bands sound like Death In June, or all black metal bands, sound like Mayhem sounded in ‘89.

So all of these (obvious) arguments explain why today it’s hard to ask oneself how historically important Mayhem is, or to what extent it’s a classic or canonical band. Obviously it’s a vital influence within the black metal subculture, and its history of violence has been integrated into popular culture. But in general, if I go to a “serious” music critic or listener and I talk about how great Mayhem is, they invariably give me a patronising smile. It makes no difference if I tell them that you needn’t like metal to understand and enjoy Mayhem. I suppose the reaction is understandable. With these notes, I intend to explain (at least in summary) why I think that Mayhem is one of the best bands of the last 30 years. Not one of the best extreme music bands. Not one of the best metal bands. Possibly one of the five best contemporary music bands in the last three decades. This is, therefore, like the title says, a proselytising column. Something designed to be read outside of the subculture, passing right over the noise and the corpse paint and the onstage eccentricities and other sinister, often parodied stage elements used in black metal. If you are a black metal fan, don’t read this column. This is Mayhem for beginners.

Before I forget about black metal, I would like (of course) to speak briefly about black metal. For many years, I have been saying that I think that BM is the last great musical vanguard of the 20th century. If we compare it with a previous revolutionary movement like punk, the differences are plain to see. Punk was a vanguard generated in the centre of the musical system, in the metropolis, with marketing machinery at work, with media attention, and with a clearly commercial purpose. BM was born absolutely on the outskirts, in a basement in Oslo, invented by a dozen teenagers without any training at all, disaffected Tolkien and metal fans, like the ones there are in all of the suburbs in the world. It was a genuinely pagan movement, in the sense of barbarian, outside of the frontiers of the empire. Both punk and BM created music largely disconnected from tradition. Freedom from the technical requirement of performance gave punk its Dadaist energy. BM followed a similar course: setting aside the idea of knowing how to play instruments, it invented a trademark sound that had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with metal - but more to do with minimalism, noise, and drone, to which it added its famed ghostly voice and an eccentric show of make-up, gore, and medieval weapons.

Punk was born with an ideology, a strange mixture of anarchy, teenage rebellion, amphetamine bounce, and the personal ideas of one John Lydon. BM cloaked itself from the very beginning in an ideological device. The way the dozen teenagers who invented the genre chose to rebel against the system was to revolt against the official Christian Lutheranism that informs Norwegian ethics, and they did so blandishing Viking ethics as a sort of antidote. As it is a tremendously violent ethic, it became an (excessive, as would soon be seen) vehicle for the angst of its believers. Their neo-Viking ethic had elements that were very exciting from a cultural point of view. Its moral cornerstone was the vindication of the indigenous religion annihilated by Christianity between the 11th and 13th century, one of the richest, most fabulous old European religions in mythological terms, and which had lasted the furthest into the Middle Ages before being eradicated. Its rejection of Christian ethics in this sense - as something foreign, strange, and malignant - was no more preposterous than the historical revisionism of feminist or post-colonial academia. Its famous burning of churches was in reality based on the fact that these same churches were built on the sacred sites of the old religion, which were symbolically re-appropriated in this manner. The most fascinating thing about it, though, is that BM came to all of this in a purely intuitive way, without any type of training or intellectual baggage. They were literally a handful of teenagers, led ideologically by Varg Vikernes, who carried out a campaign of religious affirmation unparalleled in modern Europe. Not an affirmation of theoretical paganism, but rather a temporary resurrection (from 1990 to 1994) of the Viking world, including the famous burning of churches, suicides, and murders. It was a shock to the system whose echoes are still resounding today in Norway.

As a popular phenomenon, BM has followed a different, paradoxical course. First it underwent a period of enormous unpopularity, from the moment that the media spread news of the first violent actions until Vikernes went to prison; during this phase BM became a violent, satanic, Nazi caricature. After some years and the passing of the trauma of the violent legend, came a period of popularity. BM was glamorised by a later generation of creators, starting with Harmony Korine’s “Gummo” and continuing with best-sellers and films like “Lords Of Chaos”, and BM’s integration into mainstream popular culture. To me, Peter Beste’s luxurious book of photographs represents the epitome of the genre’s adoption by trendy culture. Currently, and for about the last five years or so, much of independent, experimental rock has been permeated by BM, taking it in as a growing influence.

Much has been said about the evolution of BM, but the truth is that the very idea of BM is contrary to evolution. The later invention of musical precedents for the genre was carried out with the intention of dignifying the music by attributing a tradition to it, especially a tradition of musicians who knew how to play instruments and who were Anglo-Saxon. The operation seems absurd to me. The alleged precedents were metal bands, speed or thrash, or those 80s subgenres, while Mayhem - from the first album - was not a metal band. Chroniclers who invent the genealogy of BM skip over the most important thing. In the same way, BM as an idea cannot evolve. It can only evolve by not being BM, by giving up its minimalist, catatonic approach to go back to being metal, Gothic rock, punk, folk or any of the other paths taken by BM bands that stopped being BM bands. Strictly speaking, there were only half a dozen true BM bands, the ones that made up Euronymus’ Black Inner Circle – Mayhem, Burzum, Emperor, Inmortal, Darkthrone and Thorn s– and they were only BM in their early years. Later bands, even pioneers like Satyricon, Dimmu Borgir, Gorgoroth, Ulver or Carpathian Forest, of the so-called “True Norwegian Black Metal”, limited themselves to repeating a formula, or popularising it, or even diluting its ideas (although many of them are fantastic bands). BM was something too intense and wild, a unique explosion that left an expansive wave that was not soon forgotten; even so, it didn’t last longer than three or four years. In 1994 BM no longer existed. It had killed itself off.

So what is left of Black Metal today? What is left, beyond that pop image of tall, slim Norwegians with corpse paint, stereotypes, jokes on YouTube and the infinite replication of the same music and stage formulas? The answer is very simple. One thing remains. Mayhem.