framing or forgetting the debate within black metal

"Jesus With The Pharisees" by Friedrich August Ludy, 1843

  

The big questions in life aren't necessarily the big questions in life by anything other than convention.  Beware of the ancient human ability to turn something trivial into something important.  Beware of parodelia, the human tendency to recognize patterns and meaning where none exists.  I try to think of this when considering which battles to fight.  We need to consider carefully our conduct in dealing with those ideas which we find reason to oppose.  Any attention brought to any cause can be transformed into publicity and the mere realization that a debate exists will automatically lend implied legitimacy to the debate itself.  The scientist will debate the creationist, and in doing so will create a feeling of importance about the creationist viewpoint.  The scientist will also create the impression that there is some controversy simply by acknowledging an opposing viewpoint.  But the importance of the debate itself with its implications for scientific literacy (etc.) combined with confidence in the superiority of the viewpoint being argued for make the exercise of debate worthwhile for many.  We are told that Jesus debated the Pharisees, and the fame of this fact can be attributed not to any extant evidence we have of such debates, but to the caricature of debate presented by the gospels.  We are not shown the actual arguments and counterarguments that might have been exchanged two thousand years ago, instead we are presented with an idealized version of the debate where Jesus plays genius as softball theological challenges are lobbed his way.  The targets of derision in these gospel stories are the supposed views of the Pharisees, and it is vital to the rhetorical goal of the authors that the target appear not realistically but as a literary device to be employed as needed.  In contrasting the approaches of the scientist and the evangelist we see the extremes available to us: to engage the opposition directly and openly, or to marginalize the opposition utterly through propagandistic representation.

Metal music exists largely to antagonize, to target a viewpoint for disagreement and to dismantle that viewpoint through criticism and mockery.  Much of metal, punk and hip hop music is conceived in this same confrontational way (as are countless examples from other genres).  Black metal in particular has its historical development inexorably tied into a conflict against Christianity.  The scientist must weigh the best approaches in defeating the creationist while not helping their opponent achieve a greater level of notoriety than they started with.  So too the black metal artist could gain something from considering the various ways in which the opponent can be approached, so as to minimize any counterproductive effects.  Some point between open dialectic and propaganda must be decided upon.

There is a paradox in how Christianity must be kept alive at the centre of the black metal mind so that metaphorical attacks can be raised against it indefinitely.  While it might be argued to what extent the battle has already been won, consider that the Christian shadow in the heart of black metal need not merely be battled against.  We may also build new structures on top of it.  There are two alternate forces of destruction and construction that can be traced from the early stages of the genre, if we consider black metal as a particular style of music built around anti-religious and most significantly anti-Christian sentiment.  Whether or not it can continue to be considered a majority for long, a huge portion of the scene builds art around and against Christianity, or at the least makes substantial use of inverted Christian mythology and iconography.  These are perhaps to be considered the purists, and among them we can discern varied approaches.  Blatant attacks against Christian belief free of subtext and metaphor continue to be composed, but aside from cathartic purposes (which are important) I'm not sure whether any greater purpose is being served.  More popular is the creative inversion of Christian symbols, an exercise in construction alongside destruction.  Irreverence and mockery are emblematic of this approach, making it effective in marginalization.  These tones convey the impression that the black metal album is not one side of a legitimate ongoing debate, but an expression of the self-evident global Satanic status quo.  Christian beliefs are characterized through inversion as quaint or superstitious, or lacking power compared to the true god(s) of Satanism, paganisms, and all varieties of atheistic nihilistic self-worship.

The other side of the dichotomy we're considering here is the remainder of black metal that doesn't deal with Christianity directly and explicitly whatsoever (it is immediately granted that we will run into music here that might quite legitimately be argued to not be properly considered as black metal at all, but should instead be considered as a distinct artistic movement altogether.  For the moment we will simply consider these bands as an outgrowth of the black metal movement if not necessarily an inarguable representation of it.)  The bands in question here are those who embrace Satanism in and of itself, as a complete belief system or library of themes and symbols that may be drawn upon in a wholly post-Christian context.  To be clear, we are speaking of artists obsessed with demons and devils and gods not as champions in a inter-religious battle with Christianity but as independent objects of worship or inspiration.  Think of the majesty of Enslaved on Vikingligr Veldi, the blackness of Mutiilation on Vampires Of Black Imperial Blood, the bleakness of Xasthur on Telepathic With The Deceased, or the focus on notorious historical figures like Countess Bathory and Vlad the Impaler exemplified in many seminal tracks like Transilvanian Hunger:

Feel the call freeze you with the uppermost desire
...
So pure... evil, cold

Such pieces are evidence of something often overlooked: the blackness of black metal, even at its early stages, is not confined to a direct religious debate.  All the blackness of humanity throughout history is part of the same malevolent force that the genre recognizes and has always drawn power from.

While black metal may be considered as either dependent upon or independent from Christianity, we should avoid the temptation to label one path as superior to the other.  While some of the greatest creativity is unlocked as black metal moves deeper and deeper into the amoral darkness of the post-Christian world, other groups are finding inspiration in less obvious places.  These bands retain the Christianity fixation of the purists, but instead of facing the enemy with raw abrasive hatred they take inversion and mockery to extents not immediately imagined by genre pioneers.  Consider The Meads Of Asphodel or Grand Belial's Key, where a comparatively obsessive understanding of biblical stories leads to an in-depth re-imagining of the very world which Jesus comes from.  Grand Belial's Key creates a world where Jesus and his followers lead the sort of life of sexual deviancy that would make the more conservative of his present-day followers go pale.  The Meads Of Asphodel's The Murder Of Jesus The Jew represents this trend at its most conspicuous, as biblical knowledge at least equal to the average Christian is on display alongside the metallic commentary.  Stiller Of Tempests takes the everyday life of a man named Jesus, and takes us along with him on a jaunt around the holy land in a rousing folk stomp (sung in call and response style with "Kyrie eleison"): 

Casting forth the demon seed, walking round the still dead sea
Shaking hands with human scum, giving all to who have none
But I can’t get pissed with the man on the moon
But I can’t eat shit with a make believe spoon
But I can’t go fishing on a red mushroom
But I can’t raise the dead from a cold dark tomb

Even without the cynical chorus lyrics, we see that effective criticism of Christianity doesn't require denouncing Jesus in the most extreme and shocking ways imaginable.  Instead, simply by playing with what Jesus might very well have been based on the stories we have been told about him, a deeper irreverence can be reached.  Jesus as a naive and well-meaning nice guy who hung out with disreputable folk can be just as blasphemous towards the foundation of Christianity.  By inverting the popular image of Jesus into something more mundane and flawed, the entire premise of the religion is ignored in favour of a more human alternative.  Most surprisingly, we find a Jesus transformed from an all-powerful God-man who can do no wrong into an actual relatable and sympathetic character.  For a modern skeptic, this should be more appealing than the endless images of Jesus the failed saviour being defeated by Satan at the apocalypse, because such an approach takes and endorses much of Christianity at face value in order to destroy it.  Even the torture and debasement of Jesus can send an ambiguous message, as such imagery has been used to promote the religion often enough as in Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ.  Such destructive fantasies lend credence to the target of destruction.  This is avoided when instead the very base premises of that target are rejected as the faithful conjecture that they actually are.  Indifference can be as powerful an approach as hostility if the goal is the marginalization of another viewpoint.

The extensive iconography of Christianity has been wholly absorbed at this point in black metal history, the most inspirational images of the church's history borrowed and inverted by wave after artistic wave.  Alongside this process, a parallel stream of thought has developed from the start.  Post-Christian black metal will be a descendent of anti-Christian black metal, first conceptually and later as a historical fact.  Can metal outlive religion globally and absolutely?  It seems hard to imagine any modern styles surviving the thousand(s) of years it might take to do it.  But consider that should the population continue to expand at anything like the present rate for such a period there could realistically be a continuous state attained where there are more people than musical styles to accommodate differences in taste.  That is, there will always be enough people to listen to all the music created by the minority musical artist population because the artist population always makes up a constant(ish) fraction.  So in the year 4000 metal could still have a following of millions in a population of quadrillions thanks to the eternal persistence of digital media.  This is of course barring major unforeseen musical developments, such as a song that becomes such a hit that for centuries the entire human race listened only to that song and that by the time there was a musical renaissance so much forgotten music would have to be rediscovered by historians that a complete knowledge could never hope to be achieved.

These are the big questions.