{"id":2115,"date":"2021-02-11T21:16:45","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T21:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=2115"},"modified":"2021-02-11T21:16:48","modified_gmt":"2021-02-11T21:16:48","slug":"black-metal-music-nationalism-in-the-era-of-globalisation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2021\/02\/11\/black-metal-music-nationalism-in-the-era-of-globalisation\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Metal: Music Nationalism in the era of Globalisation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When coming up for a project to explore within this module I had a few ideas.<\/span><\/strong> For instance, I wanted to explore the reasoning behind international media reaction to Bashar al-Assad\u2019s regime\u2019s use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil War varying from country to country. When the first attacks were reported by American media outlets in 2012, many other media sources, for instance in South Asia and Central Europe, were very sceptical of the validity of American sources. To explore why some national medias supported American claims and why others questioned them was something I wanted to do because this cynicism was not coming from enemies of America, and nor was it coming from nations which supported Assad\u2019s regime. However, this would have required lengthy ontological questions asking what lies at the foundations of \u201ctruth\u201d and \u201cpower\u201d and thus would better be written as a question in the field of IR. A few other questions also arose, for instance regarding why certain countries have similar single-citizenship policies, or how a single city in Pakistan has been able to monopolise the world\u2019s football market, supplying something around 80% of the world\u2019s footballs. Other topics that interested me included the role which remittances from America and the UK play in the Jamaican economy, or how natalist politics became popularised throughout the world in the 1920s. However, the topic I am currently looking at exploring is one that I have toyed with for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am into all varieties of music, and I genuinely mean that. If it has a beat and a rhythm, I\u2019ll happily \u201cdance\u201d (awkwardly sway) to it. However, in my earlier teen years I was really drawn to metal and alternative rock music.<\/span><\/strong> I burrowed deeper into the rabbit-hole as my tastes became more extreme and I got thoroughly stuck into some of the heavier Thrash and Death metal bands. Despite this, I could never bring myself to listen to Black metal. I despised the style of vocals (as opposed to a guttural growl as you would find in Death metal, Black metal singers tend to screech or employ flamboyantly emotional screaming which is incredibly harsh on the ears), the guitars were too high pitched, and the recording quality was generally awful (a stylistic choice from a lot of bands in an attempt to remain \u201chardcore\u201d and \u201cunderground\u201d). Also, they wear face-paint and massive needles on leather straps on their arms, which\u2026 just isn\u2019t very cool. It was only when I got into more atmospheric music genres such as shoegaze, trance, or even some classical, that I began to appreciate the aspects of Black metal that draw so many people. When you attend a Black metal gig you don\u2019t tend to see many people moshing. Rather, these people dressed in the most intimidating clothing they could find, really just stand about calmly listening to the band in a reflective mood, and if the purists are satisfied that the band was \u201cgood\u201d enough then they might clap slightly at the end of the show. The reason these people don\u2019t dance to the music they listen to is because its really too atmospheric to do so. \u201cSound-walling\u201d is a technique used in many genres, but in Black metal it is almost ubiquitous, with the rapid riffs from the heavily distorted guitars designed to overwhelm the listener. The music\u2019s intention is for the sound to sonically wash over the audience. It is a genre which explores themes of individualism, depression (probably the biggest, and occasionally a very problematic, theme in the genre), and anger, which fit well because of the sound\u2019s ability to encourage reflection (for some people).<\/span> It is a wonderfully diverse sound and that is why there is a vibrant and growing wave of shoegaze\/Black metal bands collaborating with DJs and electro-pop musicians (particularly in France). That being said, I must now address huge problems within the Black metal music scene and why I have chosen to explore it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To briefly condense the history of Black metal, I would say that it began as a form of Thrash metal with the English band, Venom (who coined the term \u201cBlack Metal\u201d in their sophomore release) in the early 1980s with themes of Satanism and Anti-Christianity.<\/span><\/strong> As an aside, an Anglican priest attempted to convince a court to ban their records for containing subliminal messaging designed to turn teenagers into Satan-worshippers, which the band refuted because, with songs titled In League with Satan<\/em> and Leave Me In Hell<\/em>, they weren\u2019t being particularly subliminal with the messaging. Venom\u2019s style of music spread across Europe throughout the 1980s with bands such as Sweden\u2019s Bathory and Switzerland\u2019s Celtic Frost defining the sound of this underground scene, as well as its themes as a bunch of teenagers playing Anti-Christian music ironically to annoy their parents as well as their local community\u2019s religious leaders.<\/span> This changed in the early 1990s in Norway. A band called Mayhem defined what the modern genre\u2019s sound is, but they also lent to the genre their brand of bigotry. <\/span>As well as cassette tapes, they would also spread manifestos encouraging Europeans to return to Pre-Christian Paganism as a way to counter 1,000 years of globalisation and cosmopolitanism which had made the European man \u201ceffeminate\u201d. Most members of the band and their inner circle had either been arrested for burning down churches (one member was convicted of arsons on at least three churches) and homophobic\/racist attacks on others, or had been murdered by one of the other members of the band by 1993. The vile nature of the band\u2019s membership only served to further popularise their music and, to a lesser but still troubling extent, their political messages.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One reason why I want to explore the transnational influence of Mayhem is because I believe there is a gap in current historical knowledge.<\/span><\/strong> It has become ubiquitous in political studies to refer to the late-1990s and early-2000s in terms of a nationalistic backlash, that in the Post-Cold War world the lack of choice in terms of ideological identity resulted in a \u201creversion\u201d to national identity as the primary form of self-identification and group-formation. Hence, we have 20-30 years of ethnic conflict, religious extremism, and anti-globalisation movements around the world. Now this is of course a very overgeneralised view of Post-Soviet world history, but works such as Samuel Huntington\u2019s The Clash of Civilizations<\/em> (1996) popularised this current of discourse. A big issue with this paradigm is that it holds a \u201cWest\/the Rest\u201d conception at its centre.<\/span> \u201cIt\u2019s the rest of the world: Muslims, Slavic, Asian, African, and South American peoples who are reacting badly to globalisation, not the west\u201d is the sort of logic shown by adherents to this kind of discourse. Well, I would like to point out that anti-globalist movements are global, and the Black metal scene in the early 1990s is a perfect example of this within Europe and North America.<\/span> There are other debates which can be benefited by introducing analysis of the Black metal music scene, such as debates revolving around the nature of stress, anxiety, and depression in modern society. Well, you have right in front of you a sub-genre of Black metal (called DSBM) dedicated to exploring such themes which is followed by millions (not many millions, but still millions) of, primarily young and European, people across the world, and the inclusion of this human experience as an historical fact would add an interesting avenue of exploration for any modern historian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Following this exploration of what the inclusion of Black metal in history can provide for these questions of modern societal stress and anti-globalism, I would also be interested in focusing upon where modern Black metal music in Eastern Europe is now, and this is the broadly transnational experience that I may analyse as my term project.<\/strong><\/span> <\/span>On one level, there are dozens of bands who tour various countries in Eastern Europe as part of a far-right and bigoted movement with members of their various organisations contributing to protests in the Ukraine, as well as shockingly travelling overseas to appear at pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and far-right rallies in the USA. On the other hand, you have some other bands who explore themes which could be likened to 19th<\/sup> Century Romanticist music, who make records around the concepts of national-heroes or of times of national struggle, but who reject the far-right minority within the genre. To take Ukraine as an example, Drudkh, who have millions of streams on Spotify (Spotify was only expanded to Ukraine in late-July 2020, so the absolute majority of these have come from overseas listeners, which means it is easy to say that while still \u201cunderground\u201d, they are one of the more popular Black metal bands in Europe), conceptualised their 2005 album around the 19th<\/sup> Century poet Taras Shevchenko, and recent political history has only further encouraged their music to become Romanticist around Ukrainian national figures who opposed the historical inclusion of Ukraine in the Russian Empire. I suppose the question is, in rough general terms, \u201chow does Black metal music lend itself to nationalism\/anti-globalism in Eastern Europe?<\/span><\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Apologies for the mini-essay, but I\u2019ve been thinking about what I could do my project on for a while now and rambling could help. I also felt like I had to provide a reasonable amount of context given the niche nature of the subject. Hope anyone who made it to the end found this relatively interesting :).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When coming up for a project to explore within this module I had a few ideas. For instance, I wanted to explore the reasoning behind international media reaction to Bashar al-Assad\u2019s regime\u2019s use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-y7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2115"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2116,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115\/revisions\/2116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}