Book report – Melancology: black metal theory and ecology
Dominik Irtenkauf: [black metal theory] seems to be more about speculative interpretations of a musical sub-culture than developing a coherent system of theory. Is that perception correct?
Nicola Masciandaro: Yes.
I recently had the misfortune of stumbling onto a debate raging across Substack between continental and analytic philosophers. The main contentions being that the former lack clarity in their writing, and the latter disguise their intellectual imperialism behind axiomatic language. As an alumnus of a staunchly analytic philosophy department I may have a horse in this race. But it would be deeply disingenuous to write off continental thinking entirely (as some of the pro-analytic Substack writers do). Let’s not forget that Nietzsche, Hegel, and Sartre are usually included in their number. I suspect that some of these disagreements are down to a category error. The perennial touchstones of continental nonsense repeatedly dragged out by the analytic philosophers such as Judith Butler, Foucault, Derrida, certain members of the Frankfurt school, these people aren’t doing philosophy in the strictest sense. They are interdisciplinary thinkers. Their work requires some assistance from sociology, history, politics, economics. For all the examples of word treacle this tradition has generated, it has produced many advances in thought we would be mad to dismiss in their entirety.
But to my mind, the real problem with this debate is the fact that it’s raging in public. For all the hostility academia attracts, that it’s shut off, out of touch, elite, to some extent it needs to be these things. Complex ideas take time to finesse. Some ideas aren’t ready for the rough and tumble of the public realm. One only has to look at what happens when scientific findings are released into the world before they are properly contextualised and digested by scientists to see how disastrous this can be. Equally, critical race theory and gender studies are complex fields with competing schools of thought that have made important advances for previously marginalised groups, but frequently find themselves in the line of media fire whenever an academic concept escapes containment.
Which brings us to ‘Melancology: black metal theory and ecology’, a collection of essays on black metal and ecology. Even a cursory read of the synopsis makes clear that this is an academic work. But I’m agnostic as to whether it sees itself as such. Being published by Zero Books implies that it may have been intended to find its way to a broader audience. But the writing style, the knowledge of theory assumed on the part of the reader, the jargon, and the “in this essay I wish to” preambles say otherwise.
This isn’t a problem of dirty academic laundry being aired in public, it’s a problem with black metal theory itself. Namely, it doesn’t know what it is. It has no academic tradition independent of the preestablished theorists it pulls from, nor does it properly connect with its chosen subject matter. And that’s even if we ignore the achingly opaque prose. Let’s start by looking at how black metal theory is defined in this book. In the above quoted passages, Masciandaro goes on to say:
And yet there is ‘coherence’ to black metal. There is a principle according to which we rightly insist and argue that things are and are not black metal. In this respect black metal theory territorializes the potentiality of a non-systematizable coherence, a substance without law. Or we could say that black metal is formally equivalent to Kurt Gödel‘s incompleteness theorem, that its topos or place is the black spaces or unreachable interiors/exteriors that system per se cannot reach. [his typo]
Black metal theory starts from the premise that black metal is inherently obscurantist, both sonically and philosophically. Rather than attempting to bottle this obscurity into some theoretical framework, black metal theory wishes to apply this obscurantist ethos to theory itself, in what they call “the blackening of theory”. Or to put it another way, to create the academic equivalent of black metal. In the introduction to this collection of essays, editor Scott Wilson is pretty explicit that this is not aligned with Metal Studies, the interdisciplinary study of metal as an object in the world, explainable through academic theory. Rather, these writers see themselves as doing black metal, they are a part of black metal, writing alongside the music, not about it.
I’ll come back to this. But first, what the devil is melancology? Broadly speaking, it is the “blackening” of ecology, or, as Scott Wilson elaborates:
In order to regard extinction as a speculative opportunity for thought, including ecological thought, black metal provides the locus of the atheological a-musicality of the cosmos denoting the intimacy of and with exteriorization and with cosmic processes of binding and unbinding, consciousness, unconsciousness, and even nonconsciousness. [my Oxford comma]
Well, naturally. He goes on:
Black metal provides a locus from which one might question human intervention in and adaptation of ‘its’ environment through the articulation of melancology with ethics that projects the latter beyond the threshold of the human. That is to say in deciding with which forms to dwell and expire, in deciding how to discover death rather than seek its perpetual human deferral…
I will freely admit that Wilson is not responsible for my intellectual shortcomings, but clarity, please sir, can I have some more. What I glean from this is that melancology is in some sense an attempt to invert ecology and its preoccupation with the preservation of life, and instead takes a broader view in seeking to reconcile us to the possibility that some aspects of nature will be lost forever as a result of human activity. But at the level of black metal theory, whatever this concept is meant to achieve is limited to the aesthetic realm. A tool through which to generate a limitless morass of syllables straddling the link between black metal music and critical theory. What it means in actuality, in the context of humanity’s relationship to the planet, remains jealously obscured by these authors (if they address the topic at all).
So, is ‘Melancology’ good, in the sense that it’s worth reading? It’s a tough question to answer because whatever angle we approach it from, ‘Melancology’ has a get-out-of-gaol free card. If we attack its lack of clarity, its elitism, and incoherence, maybe we’ve missed the point that it’s an academic work. It’s not aimed at us. This is the chatter of experts chewing over ideas between themselves, whilst we, the unwashed many must await the fruits of their theoretical labours. Yet, per Wilson, these writers aren’t doing theory, they’re doing black metal, which purportedly “seeks inspiration from black metal, and writes alongside and in conjunction with it.”
So, let’s treat this as a work of black metal. I hate to brag, but that’s something I do know a thing or two about. In order to “write alongside” something, presumably one must know what that thing is. What, according to these writers, is black metal? In the introduction, Wilson briefly states that it is a music genre (can confirm) that grew out of heavy metal, owing stylistic traits to Venom, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and Bathory, and found its “ultimate definition in the Scandinavian ‘second generation’ bands Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone, Emperor, Beherit among others.” Nothing to argue with here. I could quibble that Beherit are Finnish which isn’t actually part of Scandinavia…but I won’t. He goes on to assure us that black metal’s characteristics will become more apparent throughout the book. Fair enough, let’s plough on then.
Further into Wilson’s elaboration on melancology he asserts that black metal is “a negative form of environmental writing bearing on a world that has become blackened”. Burrowing into other essays reveals that for Drew Daniel, black metal “hotwires the historical poetics of early modern humoral theory”. According to Steven Shakespeare it finds “the ‘inner contradiction’, which for Schelling is the source of life: forces which belong to one another in their very antagonism. It finds the absolute in duplicity. What we once called: evil.” For Amelia Ishmael it’s “a language of contemporary visual art”. For Liviu Mantescu, “the main characteristic and novelty of black metal is indeed not to bring the world’s mysteries to light but to increase them”. For Dominik Irtenkauf, in the context of ecology, black metal “asks for a world that is akin to extreme expressive eruptions.” For Eugene Thacker, it is music as a “negation of the soundness of sound, an encrusted, distorted music that is about to rot, not only the musical foundation of melody, but the physical substrate of music itself”.
This, to quote John Berger, is mystification. I might be tempted to explore some of these notions further, but as formulated here, to get analytical, they are to a greater or lesser extent a form of question begging. That is, they assume the conclusion of the argument within the premise. Claiming to be doing the black metal equivalent of writing, only to then make a “black metal is x” statement is a sleight of hand. Effectively writing themselves a blank cheque, one that allows them to define black metal however they wish without the need to refer back to black metal as a preexisting entity external to their text. This mystifies black metal, colouring it with their theoretical preoccupations, which then allows them to engage in an intellectual flight of fancy justified on the grounds that they are merely doing black metal in written form, but black metal as defined by them (my fucking italics). Let’s quickly rehash some facts to make this clearer.
Black metal is a form of underground metal that emerged across Europe in the 1980s. Although its earliest practitioners were diffuse and not referred to as black metal at the time, they were bound by a similar interest in the occult, Satanic, or mythological themes, they took a proto narrative approach to song writing, their public personas and live performances were darkly flamboyant, and they readily accommodated sloppy musicianship and sound quality on recorded output. By the early 1990s, younger musicians, drawing influence from Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, Mercyful Fate, Sarcófago, and early German Thrash started calling their music black metal. Although the most famous practitioners in this “second wave” were from Norway, who defined the core technique of tremolo strumming set to blast-beats and lo-fi production values, concurrent scenes emerged in Sweden, Finland, Central and Eastern Europe, France, Greece, and South America, along with some isolated but important artists in North America, with each scene developing distinct but interconnected stylistic approaches and thematic preoccupations. By the 2000s and the so called third wave, a wider pool of musicians from the US and UK emerged heavily influenced by Norwegian black metal specifically. Thematically, they either took the genre in a more naturalistic direction or explored personal struggle resulting in so called depressive black metal.
Each scene listed above has left its own legacy on the techniques and theory of black metal. Swedish bands were more preoccupied with traditional melody and rhythmic variation. French bands prized its sonic extremity. Greek bands married classic heavy metal riffing with arcane themes and more elaborate, episodic compositions. Finnish bands like Impaled Nazarene, Belial, and Mythos favoured a bass heavy approach in contrast to Scandinavian frigidity. Ukrainian and Russian bands initially favoured sparse soundscapes with limited thematic development but later moved into rich folk influenced styles.
I could go on. But the point, quite simply, is that this is what black metal is. For all I hold dear about it, black metal is not some unknowable, sui generis musical construct whose essence is visible only through the lacquer of academic verbal concrete. For all its diversity today, it has a clearly documented history, rooted in knowable music theory, and is explainable within the context that it emerged (it’s no coincidence that the bland security of social democratic Nordic countries produced such a concentration of extreme music for example). There is a clear chronology of events. The statements and actions of its many practitioners are easy to find and, barring the usual hyperbole that’s hardly unique to black metal, the intentions and mindset of the artists is not hard to discern with a little research. Its relationship to other genres both in and outside of metal is also transparent. The Greek tragedy that was Norwegian black metal, the links between black metal and National Socialism, and the larger than life characters, all continue to infatuate us. But treating these things as mystical, esoteric events obscures the real legacy of black metal as a tangible, artistic, and technically original form of music that can and does speak for itself.
And so we get throwaway lines like “the acosmic sonic drive evoked by black metal’s sovereign dissonance”, dissonant black metal is a thing, but it’s far from sovereign, in fact throughout its history black metal is often characterised by harmony, in contrast to death metal’s atonality. Or Amelia Ishmael’s claim that black metal “[in its third wave], is no longer temporally or spatially contained within the perimeters of Norway”, it never was contained within Norway during the second wave, and the most basic research would demonstrate as much. Or Thacker’s claim that black metal is “distorted music that is about to rot, not only the musical foundation of melody, but the physical substrate of music itself”, to which I give you the highly melodic Sacramantum, Dawn, Vinterland, Kvist, Lord Belial, Dissection etc. And so it goes on, a series of remarkable or highly contentious claims served up with no scaffolding to speak of, left to stand on their own terms, to baffle or hoodwink the unguarded reader.
That’s not to say that there is no benefit in applying academic concepts to black metal. It can, when done with rigour, be very illuminating. But that’s not what’s going on in ‘Melancology’. Keeping these historical facts in mind, we can read between the saturated lines of these essays and maybe illuminate the real conceit at the heart of black metal theory. It’s a problem I’ve come across in different forms before, from the infamous ‘Transcendental Black Metal’ essay, to ‘Black Metal Rainbows’, to ‘Tonight it’s a World we Bury’. Namely, selective history. The writers in ‘Melancology’ tend to leap straight from Bathory, to Norway, to the Pacific Northwest, largely ignoring the broader picture of a pan-European and South American event that was only later exported to North America and the UK. I can only speculate as to why this is. So let’s. I suspect that confronting the complexity of black metal as it actually occurred in the world is just a less interesting prospect. Acknowledging it as a living, breathing entity deeply embedded in the global history of metal affords fewer opportunities to spin elaborate, hyperbolic, jargon laden sentences together. Boiling it down to a pithy, conceptually laden “black metal is x” statement is actually more challenging than one would have you believe, at least if you want the statement to bear any relationship to the actual phenomenon. Better to brush over this nuance in favour of viewing it as some unprecedented, sui generis event unique to Norway and later redeemed by the Anglosphere. Per Masciandaro once again, “I think black metal theory attaches importance not to social identities and roles, but to the act of penetrating once again into the essence of black metal”, and that essence is defined as….?
To be somewhat charitable, maybe these writers are genuinely interested in black metal, but are so enamoured with looking at it through a certain theoretical lens because it allows them to produce reems of academic writing that no longer bears any resemblance to the music it claims to speak for (or from, if we take the blackening of theory ethos literally). The concept of melancology itself, insofar as it relates to black metal, requires a very selective reading of the genre, one that relies heavily on bands like Wolves in the Throne Room (easily the most referenced and quoted artist in the book), a band who, for all their popularity within the scene, have an outsized presence in theoretical writing on black metal because they fit so readily into the academic’s preconceived notions of what black metal is, rather than a more rounded treatment of the genre’s broad history (much of which still conducted well outside the US).
Wilson’s insistence on trying to “write in conjunction with black metal” rather than viewing it as an object of study relieves him and his peers from the burden of research and the development of theory in response to real world findings, one that genuinely connects up with its subject matter. None of this is to say that there are no interesting insights within these pages. There is potential in exploring black metal’s links to ecology, one that could perhaps engage in a more thorough treatment of the source material, where it aligns with ecology, but also where it conflicts. A more efficacious but no doubt less sexy prospect. For any bookish black metal fan then, it’s probably not worth the trouble of slogging through sentences like “Corpsepaint hypertrophically externalizes the internal affective dynamic already implicit in what one could call melancholy self-presentation or, termed less kindly but more accurately, melancholy posturing: the social production of a legible outward display of an inward relation to death”.
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