Black Metal, Red Politics
In attempting to trace parallels between black metal orthodoxy and left-wing intellectual traditions, this book sets itself apart from the vast majority of left leaning treatments of black metal. No heavy handed call for fan responsibility or demands that black metal be “safer”. Pitched into a more theoretical space, it instead asks us to use black metal as a means of gaining new perspectives on academic left-wing thinking, highlighting some of its shortcomings in the process.
Not to overstate the matter, but Peel is essentially breaking new ground here. He has set himself an unenviable task. Marrying two traditions widely regarded as entirely at odds with one another is difficult enough. Poking the hornet’s nest of baggage that comes with both black metal and leftist discourse is nothing short of masochism.
I am therefore being complimentary when I say that it may be beneficial to treat this as a rough draft, a leap into unknown theoretical space that requires new terminology to chart. It consciously avoids setting out a structured thesis. Instead it selects broad themes within black metal – distortion, decay, secrecy, coldness, and heresy – and aligns them with various historical and contemporary critiques of capitalism.
If we were to draw out a proto hypothesis, it would be that black metal’s transgression of musical, cultural, aesthetic, and political norms is potentially instructive for anyone interested in engaging in the final heresy, that of dismantling capitalism and the existential threat it poses to our planet. This approach is novel within leftie treatments of black metal because it starts with the theory before tentatively suggesting any practical implications, instead of barrelling out of the gate with urgent calls for us to form more Marxist bands.
For anyone invested in the success of this project, it is therefore essential to emphasise that drawing links between black metal and various academic critiques of capitalism requires us to indulge Peel as he slowly works his thoughts round to a place of relevance. Patience usually pays off, raising plenty of talking points for anyone versed in left-wing activism.
For instance, Peel uses decay to highlight black metal’s ability to constantly renew itself on the foundations of the old. A process of radical rejuvenation (we have to bear with him while he talks about matsutake mushrooms for a bit). He then uses this to call out the left’s “death fetishism” as outlined by Mark Fisher. Both socialism and black metal have a problem with requiring people to “do the reading”, constantly refighting debates and moments decades in the past as opposed to applying theory to contemporary political challenges.
The chapter on secrecy highlights how pseudonyms, anonymity, and black circles mirror historical examples of left-wing activism. Being a socialist was once a dangerous pursuit (and still is in many places). That lefties are constantly “making oneself known to power” through online engagement without fear of consequence demonstrates how unthreatened the established order feels by this brand of media centric activism. Equally, capitalism now thrives on the constant flow of personal information. Corporations harvest our data for profit, our location and activities can be constantly monitored. Our complicity in capitalism’s prerequisite for us to be visible, to be a marketable, targetable audience warrants a re-evaluation of the power of secrecy in political agitation.
The chapter on coldness characterises capitalism as overheating the workforce through the constant need to engage, improve, develop, stay active, whilst at the same time literally heating the planet through the burning of fossil fuels. Black metal’s obsession with frozen stasis is therefore recast as a call for us to make ourselves unproductive, thus obstructing the process of exploitation and planetary destruction. This poses another interesting question. Paradigmatic activist thinking is that we must be productive and “vitalistic”. But if this is not connected to wider political objectives, activism is nothing but hot air. This is perhaps one reason why leftist media (podcasts, YouTube channels, blogs) takes up more space than meaningful political agitation (trade union membership and labour strikes).
Despite my positive reception to this book, when it comes to the discussion of distortion, I do, in all good faith, wish to unpack one specific course correction.
Peel begins this chapter by positioning distortion in the context of Byng-Chul Han’s concept of “psychopolitics”. It is not oppression but permissiveness that makes capitalism such a porous opponent, by encouraging us to “actively pursue what we want free from external obstacles”. Spotify’s streaming model is so successful because it not only gives us exactly what we want but actively anticipates our desires. Black metal, by contrast, trades on the rare and uncommodifiable trait of distortion, both in the literal and metaphorical sense. It puts up barriers, makes itself unlikeable, unlistenable, difficult.
Having established this, Peel asserts that once black metal’s distortion became formalised, it risked stasis and commodification like any other genre: “Herein lies the downside to black metal’s oppositional attitude. The genre’s walls of distortion, in keeping out psychopolitics and the encroaching forces of commercialisation, also work to keep the genre rooted in place”. Distortion is the rope with which the revolutionary spirit of black metal hanged itself.
Peel singles out Nargaroth’s joke/tribute album ‘Black Metal ist Krieg’ to chastise the genre for fixating on a single tragedian moment in 1990s Norway. He argues that the homogeneity exemplified by Nargaroth misunderstood the Oslo scene’s initial hostility to imitation, with “all fetters removed instrumentally speaking, bands were able to experiment with different sounds while maintaining their black metal credentials”. But instead, “when black metal cries out for more albums that sound like Under a Funeral Moon and Aske [not an album], to distort no longer means to make music dirtier, but to make music that evades and overcomes those strictures and demands”.
Peel predictably posits Alcest, Deafheaven, and Liturgy as the true inheritors of Euronymous’s vision for black metal because they subverted the mould by taking it in “unexpected” directions, and are thus more “distorted”. This is because distortion for Peel is not a guitar effect but a nomadic process, a way for us to make ourselves anathema to the convenience of consumerism.
He then outlines three contemporary examples of subgenres demonstrating “that distortion doesn’t hide behind walls of familiarity but is instead nomadic and divergent”, these are raw black metal, dissonant black metal, and hipster black metal.
It is here that Peel makes the common mistake of fashioning a rod for black metal’s back by reciting a selective and skewed reading of its history. The orthodoxy he parrots roughly traces black metal from its birth in Newcastle to a climax and slow death in Norway, before it was salvaged in Brooklyn and California. This is evidenced by him repeating the fallacy that the Norwegian scene had no defining style.
Whilst it’s certainly true that there was great divergence between the Norwegian bands, the commonalities of trebly guitars, tremolo strumming, blast-beats, and high-pitched vocals set them apart from the epic NWOBHM flavour of Greek black metal for example, or the dirty occultism of Italy, the lo-fi eccentricity of Czechia, Swedish melodicism, the blackened thrash of South America, or the dark grind of Finland. All scenes that emerged in tandem with (and some prior to) Norway. By omitting this and simply retracing the “common sense” Norwegian centric narrative, it’s easy to argue that black metal was regressive once this scene burnt itself out.
Peel is hardly unique in this regard. A series of well documented extracurricular activities leads academics and journalists to continue evaluating the merits of a diverse, international movement within extreme metal solely on the merits of a small set of Norwegian bands. In rehashing this narrative it allows him to needlessly wag a finger at black metal for failing to live up to its own revolutionary promises.
To unpack this further, it’s worth examining Peel’s choice to position Nargaroth as emblematic of the “traditionalist” wing and Deafheaven the forward thinking/revolutionary wing.
Nargaroth, according to Peel, “refuse to engage with the genre’s present”, as evinced by their album ‘Black Metal ist Krieg’. It’s worth noting that after this release, Nargaroth’s output includes a black metal reinterpretation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a blackened electronica/ambient collaboration with Nychts on ‘Spectral Visions of Mental Warfare’, and a hybrid of flamenco, black metal, prog, and black ‘n’ roll on their latest album ‘Era of Threnody’. You may not like Nargaroth’s attempts at experimentation, but one could hardly accuse them of working to “keep the genre rooted in place”.
Deafheaven, by contrast, plot “lines of escape [for black metal] that connect it to something outside itself”. According to Peel, they do this by introducing it to “unexpected genres”. Essentially by applying a handful of hallmarks from a specific branch of second wave Norwegian black metal to a variant of indie-cum-post-rock rooted in highly conventional harmonic traditions present in the vast majority of Western pop and rock music since the 1950s. Peel is correct to say that this is certainly “unexpected”. I certainly did not expect that stripping black metal of its ambitious compositional architecture and assimilating some of its tropes into Western pop-rock orthodoxy would attract so many otherwise intelligent cheerleaders.
The common sense narrative parroted here allows Peel to position Nargaroth as misunderstanding “black metal’s original spirit” and Deafheaven as an example of the desire “to construct something different to it” because this view reduces black metal to a simple binary of traditionalists and forward thinkers. All the while the substance of these terms goes unexamined, because they serve a lazy fiction manufactured by journalists to generate tribalist brand loyalty.
I draw all this out because if we are to follow Peel’s lead in plotting a route between black metal and left-wing theory, we need to challenge the narratives thrust upon it by mainstream journalism. Black metal was a hugely diverse and experimental European and South American (and more recently Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Southeast Asian) reinterpretation of metal that carried the genre into all manner of experimental avenues throughout the 1990s and beyond.
To take another example, his use of raw black metal as a potential “line of escape” fails to take into account the fact that raw black metal has been a subgenre since at least 1995 with the release of Ildjarn’s self-titled debut, earlier if we account for Blasphemy and VON. Again, a trait outlined as new and novel in this book was baked within black metal’s DNA decades ago.
By fixing our gaze on a small set of Norwegian artists and those that followed immediately in their wake we mistakenly perceive black metal as being in need of “saving” by the latter-day saints of Brooklyn and California. Peel therefore misses the point when he feels the need to highlight to us that the members of Deafheaven actually love Burzum and Darkthrone, “defenders of ‘trve kvlt black metal’ are opposed to the new developments of the genre, and presume that fans of these new bands are opposed to traditional black metal”. This, frankly, is just not true. We “traditionalists” are acutely aware of the interest Deafheaven et al. have in “old-school” black metal, we simply await enlightenment on their ability to meaningfully translate this into an artistic statement worthy of the genre we are told they are the future of.
Seen from this angle, using the concept of distortion to mark black metal’s homework is utterly superfluous. Peel is right that distortion is nomadic, a metaphorical and literal means to transgress, subvert, and create friction. But these things only have meaning when working in tandem with other important facets of the music. Proper analysis of these facets requires us to treat black metal on its own terms, and not the terms of a retroactively applied history contrived by commercial interests to generate publicity for a select group of artists.
I would not usually fixate on one chapter in a book review for so long. I have laboured this point because I want this project to succeed. For all the critiques Peel aims at left wing orthodoxy, it would be beneficial to aim some barbs toward orthodox assumptions about black metal thrust upon it by a disinterested status quo, and dissect how these lazy narratives skew our understanding of the genre’s history and by extension our ability to plot its possible futures. Using black metal as a theoretical toolbox to subvert capitalist orthodoxy proves to be an effective method of critique, one that allows us to highlight the shortcomings of left-wing activism in the process. But it must be done whilst paying due respect to black metal as a global phenomenon, one that accommodates the nuances of its history, and avoids once again subjecting it to the enormous condescension of posterity.
Hate Meditations 
Leave a comment