I always enjoy the discovery of a scholarly approach to a silly or lowbrow subject. Remember when Camille Paglia used to write about Madonna?
I had no idea that Black Metal Theory is now a philosophy and field of study complete with international symposia and experts who say things like this:
We have been told by the living that the idea of a vital world is that of comfort and warmth. [Writer] Dominic Fox assures us that this is not the case. With an unparalleled militant efficiency, Cold World [a book about Black Metal] blackens the lines between poetics and politics, music and negative resistance. It is a haunting sermon from the world of the dead exhorting the living to revolt in the name of a life whose vitality has been disenchanted by coldness and whose sacredness has been profaned by nigredo. Reza Negarestan – Author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
God. What the hell is “nigredo,” right? I looked it up and you can, too. But there’s no way that Black Metal Theory can be taken seriously, especially when it’s discussed in dense academic mumbo jumbo of the first oder. Here is Scott Wilson, a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Kingston University in London:
Black Metal is clearly a form of environmental writing, but one that could not easily be accommodated into current ecological discourse. Participants seriously considered the idea of melancology both as black ecology, exploring black metal as a geophilosophy of real and psychic spaces (the frozen desert is not so much ‘out there’ but inside you), and as an ethos, looking at black metal as the re-occultation of black blood and bile in rituals of mourning and celebration for the death of God and the extinction of his creation, particularly humanity, under the black sun of melancholy. As such, the symposium connected with a new strain in contemporary philosophy that regards extinction as a speculative opportunity for thought. Black metal resounds from the abyss and it is precisely only in relation to its sonic forces that the question of intervention in the environment arises in the articulation of melancology with ethics. That is, in deciding ‘which way out’ we should take, in deciding with what surpluses to dwell, with what waste, what detritus or decay in a process of unbinding with sonic forces that traverse an earth choking in wealth and death.
Ha! Blah blah blah. What a bunch of fucking wankers. All I know is that Varg Vikernes, leader of the band Burzum, was released from jail after serving 16 years for killing a guy from Mayhem, a rival band, and burning down some churches.
Now he has a website, http://www.burzum.org, and two new albums. For some reason he hates Black people, despite all the dark black negredo of his chosen musical genre. He probably needs to study the Theory.
