| Ásatrú, metal, and the ugly spectres known as -isms | ||||||
| Jul. 15th, 2009 | 03:10 pm | ||||||
First, a quick ident, so you know where I'm coming from with this. I am Caucasian, of Norwegian and Danish descent (mostly), British, female-assigned and on the female side of genderqueer, lesbian, an atheist, involved in the Ásatrú movement, politically liberal, a feminist, a queer rights activist, a civil rights activist, and maybe the biggest extreme metal geek you'll ever meet. My particular corner of extreme metal, and certainly the place I spend most of my time in terms of forums and publications, is in the grimy nook of black metal, folk metal, Viking metal, and pagan metal. And pirate metal, but let's not get into that inevitable argument here. We all - and by "we" I mean "me and other extreme metal nerds" - know how black metal started, over twenty years ago. A group of upper-middle-class white teenagers from Norway (mostly) took a look at the conformist, moderate-Christian atmosphere they'd been brought up in and decided they needed to rebel. They took their cues from the darker end of the metal scene of the day - the heaviness of American thrash and speed, the lyrical themes of the NWOBHM, and the visual style (but not the dreadful glasses) of Venom. They made a conscious and sincere effort to reach for the most extreme, the most despised, and the most fearsome things they could emulate, because if you're going to rebel you should damn well do it properly. Amongst those extreme things were Satanism, Ásatrú, and - and this is the big one - National Socialism. Varg Vikernes and his cohorts (I must point out that I include Euronymous in their number, because being murdered didn't actually make him a nice person to begin with) found a monstrous ideology and put it on like a costume, because it scared people and made them feel important and powerful. In doing so, they also made some very, very good music (to my ears.) Other people heard that music - teenagers, young people, people - like me - who were thirteen or fourteen when they first heard harsh vocals and downtuned guitars, and had yet to develop the critical capacity to filter the messages they were being presented with. Teenagers, especially rebellious and non-mainstream ones, are massively idolatrous - at least, in my experience - and those who listened to Burzum, to Absurd, to Infernum, poured their admiration and respect onto the men at the forefront of those bands, men - and they were always men - who espoused the most vile, dangerous, and divisive ideologies the world has seen in a long time. I don't necessarily blame these teenagers, these children; I spent two years of my life parroting the sayings of Anton LaVey because I respected him and didn't yet know how to separate a man's creative work from his thoughts. I'm long past that now, but some of the black metal youth, those touched by the pollution that took hold of the genre, never moved on. Let us look, now, before I get too far ahead of myself, at religion. Religious discord, disharmony, and dissonance were major motivating forces for the Black Metal Inner Circle back in the day, and for those who work in the genre now. It began as an anti-Christian movement and, but for some Christian bands (generally known as "unblack"), has stayed true to its origins. The anti-Christianity took two paths, which have traded dominance at various points in the last two decades. First, Satanism. As an anti-Christian ideology it is, and was, the logical step: what better way to strike back against a hated religion than to align yourself with its direct adversary? Some bands stuck to LaVey, holding high their Satanic Bibles, whereas others went back to Crowley, or to earlier (purported) Satanists such as the Hellfire Club of the 18th century. All you need to do is look at black metal, past and present, to see the influence in the imagery - Baphomets, inverted crosses, naked women covered in blood, severed goat heads...it's a popular theme, to say the least. The pioneers of the genre largely subscribed to this avenue of anti-Christianity, at least at the beginning. What came later was Ásatrú. Ásatrú (those who subscribe to it are known as Ásatruar) is the worship of the Norse gods - Odin, Thor, Týr, and so on. It was, of course, the dominant religion of Scandinavia for about fifteen hundred years, between 500 BCE (once it had evolved from proto-Norse Germanic mythology) and 1000 CE, when the Norse people were forcibly converted to Christianity as part of the Danelaw. Black metal musicians who chose this route (many of whom had previously gone for Satanism and quickly retconned their past interests as "an artistic posture" or "an avatar for the All-Father") argued that the truer way to strike back at the Christian oppressor was to opt for the pre-Christian belief system of their land and ancestors. (As an atheist who nevertheless wears a Mjollnir pendant at all times, I can see where they're coming from.) There was never much of a clash of ideologies between Satanism and Ásatrú in black metal, or at least not a big enough one to warrant mentioning - the general understanding was that we're all against the Christians, so it doesn't matter that much whether you're fighting for Odin or for Satan. Either way, let's sever some heads. Unfortunately, the price of a lack of clash was that some assimilation occurred between the National Socialist Black Metal crowd, who were largely neutral on the Satanism-Ásatrú question, and the two differing factions. The assimilation took the form of a worrying trend that began to emerge perhaps a year before the murder of Euronymous - the conflating of a racist, sexist, and homophobic ideology with the teachings of Ásatrú. This simmered for a long time, edged along by the occasional mad dribbling by Vikernes (by then safely in his prison cell, from which he was released in May of this year) and similar. Vikernes' longest dribble took the form of a Mein Kampf-like volume, written in prison, entitled Vargsmål (-smål is an Old Norse word meaning "speech" or "treatise", so the title translates as "Varg's Speech".) This book (and I use the term loosely) solidified his oft-meandering and famously mercurial ideologies (he had, in the past, been a vocal member of various Nazi, white-supremacist, or similar groups, but generally not for very long - he invariably decried them after leaving, sometimes denying he had ever been involved in the first place) into a weighty slab of racist, perverse bullshit. The basic idea was thus: "The Norse race, to whose gods I hail, are superior to all others and destined to rule the Earth, because the All-Father decreed us strongest and wisest amongst the people of the world. Men, who hold the swords with which we will reclaim dominion over the land, are superior, and women must breed with them to produce pure-blood Aryan children. Homosexuality is abominable for no defined reason, but those who engage in it are to be put to death. I am the leader of this movement, and though the enemy holds me within his fortress I shall suffer for the betterment of my people." I think I've gotten the general tone more or less right. Mad, self-aggrandising, racist, sexist, homophobic, and generally monstrous. But it was too late for some people to realise just how far away from "reasonable" or "humane" Vikernes' views had gotten - they'd been touched (as I had, with notably different consequences) by the music, and more or less surrendered their critical capacities in the face of blind idolatry and obedience. Or, perhaps, they were just insecure teenagers who needed a group in which they could feel accepted and important. Either way, black metal changed. Not all of it, not by a long shot - some of the bands who had been there from more or less the start, bands like Gorgoroth and Satyricon, had never subscribed to that kind of ideology, and were never on Vikernes' side to begin with. But other bands, newer bands, American and British and German bands, saw Vikernes as a hero, or - worse - a martyr (never mind that he wasn't dead, in stark contrast to the people whose murders he was responsible for, both directly and indirectly.) But, nevertheless, in dark corners of my beloved genre, a rot set in. A rot that said "We are the white man, and we want racial purity." A rot that said "We are the strong man, and we want female subjugation." A rot that said "We are the straight man, and we want gay extinction." Time moved on. Come the year two thousand, and the rise of newer genres in the miasma we call metal - pagan metal, folk metal, Viking metal. Bands took up their swords in a more literal sense, not to chop anyone's head off, but to hold high in photoshoots. Vocals refined, cleared, became chants. Hair was left undyed, leather became brown armguards rather than black trousers, and my musical home was born. It started small - to be truthful, the concept of battle metal had been around since before Manowar, and folk metal had started with Skyclad some ten years previously, but the two had never really met in such a way - but it grew, and grew, and now, nearly a decade later, seems to be poised over the dourer side of metal with a big sword in one hand and an alehorn in the other. A joyous thing, surely? After a rough ten years of enforced misery and bad ideology the dominant force in metal was shifting to a group who were rather more aware of the distinction between fantasy and reality. The pioneers and sustaining forces of the genre - Ensiferum, Amon Amarth (not, in the genre sense, folk or Viking metal - closer to melodic death - but lyrically and visually basically the same), Týr - were neither extremists nor violent madmen, opting for alcohol over the blood of dissenters as their beverage of choice. Yes, a good thing. But the rot, steadily eating away at a few corners of black metal for ten years, had touched some of the more obscure members of this new genre, many of whom had spent their teenage years listening to just the kind of thing that this new move was hoped to change. They were by far in the minority, these clingers-on to the old ways, and they were a far smaller proportion of folk metallers than of black metallers at any time, but they existed. And the rot kept on going. So, today. The year 2009, nearly twenty years since the genesis of black metal, a decade or so since pagan metal first stuck its head above the parapet. Where are we? And why do I care in the first place? Where we are is something of an impasse. The racists, the sexists, the homophobes - the Nazis - are still there, griping and spitting and polluting a beautiful genre and an ancient mythology with their filth. Everyone knows this, no-one outside their group likes it, but there's nothing we can do. After all, we're a genre (a super-genre, I suppose) built on freedom of expression, freedom of speech, even for that which we find distasteful or horrifying. We try not to associate with them, and look with shame or sadness on the idols of our youths, who now, as middle-aged men, spew the same muck to an ever-dwindling audience. We learn that a band we liked (and this happens rather a lot, in a genre in which it's more or less impossible to hear any of the lyrics) have, all along, been promoting white supremacy, and we feel sick. We treasure people like Satyr, Gaahl, and Tom G Warrior, because they were there in the beginning and are still with us and never fell to the same madness as some of the others. Certainly, Gaahl is a good example of how an Ásatruar black metaller can avoid being a Nazi - he severed all links with those like Varg Vikernes a long time ago, and is now possibly the only openly gay black metal musician to have achieved any semblance of success. Ásatrú as a faith has been...less fortunate. There's a moderate core - those of us who honour our ancestors and their ways, and who have taken their gods as our own, but acknowledge that there are some aspects of an Iron Age war-based society that don't translate to 21st century living, such as the mad bigotry that other people seem rather fond of. Those other people, however...they're still there. They're sitting there with shaven heads and Algiz tattoos (I have my own gripes about that, since that's my namerune and I don't like seeing it at BNP rallies), saying that the Norsemen will come again, that the All-Father will "cleanse" the Northlands of what they see as "pollutants" - people of races other than theirs, women who know their own minds, people who aren't necessarily into breeding. They take the faith of my people - of my musical clans, of my ancestors, and of the gods I love - and twist it and poison it and then hold it up as a broken caricature of what it could be, what it should be. And I sit here, with my Guardian newspaper and Pride flag and feminist books, and wonder what to do now. |
||||||
|
Choke | |||||
![[mood icon]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v119/Crimson_Moon/K9%20Moodtheme/sad.gif){kind=small}
sad
| Is "Blatant Sexism" their new flavour or something? | ||||||
| Jul. 15th, 2009 | 10:39 pm | ||||||
My list of "Things to Boycott" keeps getting bigger and bigger. Which is a pisser because before this advert, McCoy's were my favourites. |
||||||
|
Choke | |||||
![[mood icon]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v119/Crimson_Moon/K9%20Moodtheme/angry.gif){kind=small}
pissed off|
Moose |
||
|
Purges Contaminated File Chart Outpatient |
||
| days | ||
|
One apple less One apple more |
||