I found an awesome book on Amazon called Hideous Gnosis- it's a compilation of essays on Black Metal theory and it is my new source for my research paper.
Black Metal theory has never looked so grim.
There is also a blog behind the book- here. Descriptions from Amazon:
Essays and documents related to Hideous Gnosis, a symposium on black metal theory, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. Expanded and Revised.
"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous." - H.P. Lovecraft
"Poison yourself . . . with thought" - Arizmenda
______________________
So far, I have only read one essay- Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism, by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. It's slightly dry and very abstract, but pleasing revelations have come from reading it.
Here is a sample passage:
"The technique of Hyperborean Black Metal is the blast beat. Pure black metal, represented byTransilvanian Hunger, means continuous open strumming and a continuous blast beat. But the pure blast beat is eternity in itself. No articulated figures, no beginning, no end, no pauses, no dynamic range. It is a bird soaring in the air with nowhere to perch even for a moment. What seemed at first to be a great clamor atrophied hum."
Veterans of the tattoo world were trying to make sense of the allegations made against a renowned tattoo artist who Cook County prosecutors say used the tools of his trade to sexually assault his girlfriend after he slammed her head against a floor and choked her.
Jef Whitehead, 42, was charged with criminal sexual assault and aggravated domestic battery Sunday and held on $350,000 bond after allegedly attacking his girlfriend.
Prosecutors said an argument between the couple began about 12:30 a.m. Saturday at a home connected to a tattoo shop in the 1100 block of West Taylor Street.
___________________________________________________________________________
Who is Jef Whitehead and why is this relevant to my research blog? Well, in addition to being a renowned tattoo artist, Whitehead is also the one-man artist behind black metal outfits Leviathan and Lurker of Chalice.
COMPLETE TEXT OF SOURCE
(796 words)
Copyright NT Media, LLC Apr 10, 2002
Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites spent the last year and a half interviewing convicted murderers, neo-Nazis, and arsonists for a documentary called Until the Light Takes Us. The filmmakers weren't located in the bowels of some Texas prison, though; they were living in Norway, one of the richest, cleanest, and most socially conscious countries in the world. And these subjects weren't your run-of-the-mill menaces -- they were "black metal" musicians.For the record, Ewell and Aites are not metalheads. During an interview at a Lower Haight cafe, both locals profess their allegiance to experimental indie rock. (Aites even records his own noisy tunes under the name Iran.) But back in 1999, their friend Andee Connors -- drummer for P.E.E., A Minor Forest, and Lumen -- kept hounding them to listen to these heavy Norwegian acts. "I didn't realize there'd be ... a lot of common ground with the music I like and the music I make," Aites says. "It really took us both by surprise." After buying a couple of discs, Ewell says, "We liked Burzum more than we liked Ulver, and I thought, "That's weird, because that guy's a murderer and a church burner, and so now we're getting into murderer metal.'" Black metal, it turns out, isn't the wussy, flounce-around-in-spandex kind of metal. Black metal is dead serious -- so serious that in 1992 the drummer for influential act Emperor stabbed a Norwegian Olympic skier to death; two days later, he and other members of the black metal scene burned Oslo's Holmenkollen Chapel to the ground. In the next year, a dozen more churches would go up in flames, and Burzum's leader, Varg Vikernes, would slay his rival Euronymous. The media grabbed hold of the story and ran sensational reports, depicting the musicians as a Satanist cult that kidnapped and sacrificed young virgins. The truth was far different, of course -- the artists believed they were protesting Christianity and its coddling of the weak -- but as the black metal scene grew, it spawned copycat bands that were more interested in using the genre's scare tactics and harsh sound for commercial purposes. Vikernes and many of the original musicians were eventually thrown in jail, while their disciples torched the occasional church and shouted at the devil.
When they heard the story behind the music, Ewell and Aites went looking for a movie about the events, but they came up empty. After doing further research, they decided to head off to Norway to shoot the documentary -- even though neither of them had made one before. They soon found themselves sitting across the table from musicians who advocated the slaughter of anyone stupid enough to listen to their music. Amazingly enough, the documentarians discovered they liked their subjects. "I've seldom met a person before with as much integrity as [Fenriz, leader of Darkthrone]," says Ewell. "He cared so much about creating this kind of music that could not be co-opted, that was so ugly and extreme that it would never be a commercial thing. ... He's amazing and funny and smart -- and also very depressed." "Fenriz and I have a ridiculous amount of common ground," Aites says. "It's kind of freaky," Ewell admits. It was clear the planned six-month shoot would take far longer. It didn't help that their subjects had a natural suspicion of American media, or that Aites and Ewell's Bergen landlord allegedly burned down their building and then told the police they'd done it. "We now know what it's like to be interrogated for arson -- through an interpreter," Aites says ruefully. One complaint about the film they got from Norwegians is that the documentarians didn't plan to interview any of the victims of the metalers' crimes. Ewell explains that the movie isn't intended to be a journalistic view of both sides of the story; rather, it's an unnerving look into the minds of intelligent men who became so isolated from the rest of the world that they found it natural to commit heinous acts. Ewell says the film's also about re-contextualization -- how the followers' mistaken ideas of black metal became the reality to the rest of the world. "There's a particular sadness in that [the artists] specifically set out to do something that couldn't be appropriated or commercialized, and it was," Ewell says. Ewell and Aites plan to spend the rest of the year editing Until the Light Takes Us. They've received interest from distributors in the U.S. and abroad and will be sending it out to festivals. For now, though, they're having a difficult time readjusting to life in the States. "It's hard to get used to urine in the street," Aites says.
MY SUMMARY/ EVALUATION
Basically, this article discusses the massive misinterpretation of the genre known as Norwegian black metal. NBM is the misunderstood teenager of the extreme metal genres. What started out as a revolt against the peacock-strutting of thrash metal, a fervent denial of christianity, and the blatant rejection of commercialism, black metal was bought, sold and used up by the very people who the "original/ kvlt/ true" members considered to be an enemy. The following quote accurately represents this point:
"There's a particular sadness in that [the artists] specifically set out to do something that couldn't be appropriated or commercialized, and it was"
I hate this school year. I don't know what has happened to me, but I went from optimistic learner to swamped, depressed loner, ready to just say "fuckitall" because my life has become the equivalent of a massive pile-up on a highway. I need help, I need a therapist, an assistant, a hug.
"Against all odds, the stodgy old National Portrait Gallery has recently become one of the most interesting, daring institutions in Washington. Its 2009 show on Marcel Duchamp's self-portrayal was important, strange and brave. "Hide/Seek," the show about gay love that it opened in October, was crucial - a first of its kind - and courageous, as well as being full of wonderful art. My review of it was a rave.
Now the NPG, and the Smithsonian Institution it is part of, look set to come off as cowards. Today, after a few hours of pressure from the Catholic League and various conservatives, it decided to remove a video by David Wojnarowicz, a gay artist who died from AIDS-related illness in 1992. As part of "Hide/Seek," the gallery was showing a four-minute excerpt from a 1987 piece titled "A Fire in My Belly," made in honor of Peter Hujar, an artist-colleague and lover of Wojnarowicz who had died of AIDS complications in 1987. And for 11 seconds of that meandering, stream-of-consciousness work (the full version is 30 minutes long) a crucifix appears onscreen with ants crawling on it. It seems such an inconsequential part of the total video that neither I nor anyone I've spoken to who saw the work remembered it at all.
But that is the portion of the video that the Catholic League has decried as "designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians," and described as "hate speech" - despite the artist's own hopes that the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead friend. The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.
Until Tuesday afternoon, museum staff, under Director Martin E. Sullivan, believed that "Fire" was interesting art that made important points. And now it looks as though they're somehow saying that they were wrong about that, and that it really was unfit to be seen or shown, after all.
If every piece of art that offended some person or some group was removed from a museum, our museums might start looking empty - or would contain nothing more than pabulum. Goya's great nudes? Gone. The Inquisition called them porn.
Norman Rockwell would get the boot, too, if I believed in pulling everything that I'm offended by: I can't stand the view of America that he presents, which I feel insults a huge number of us non-mainstream folks. But I didn't call for the Smithsonian American Art Museum to pull the Rockwell show that runs through Jan. 2, just down the hall from "Hide/Seek." Rockwell and his admirers got to have their say, and his detractors, including me, got to rant about how much they hated his art. Censorship would have prevented that discussion, and that's why we don't allow it.
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has said that taxpayer-funded museums should uphold "common standards of decency." But such "standards" don't exist, and shouldn't, in a pluralist society. My decency is your disgust, and one point of museums, and of contemporary art in general, is to test where lines get drawn and how we might want to rethink them. A great museum is a laboratory where ideas get tested, not a mausoleum full of dead thoughts and bromides.
In America no one group - and certainly no single religion - gets to declare what the rest of us should see and hear and think about. Aren't those kinds of declarations just what extremist imams get up to, in countries with less freedom?
Of course, it's pretty clear that this has almost nothing to do with religion. Eleven seconds of an ant-covered crucifix? Come on.
This fuss is about the larger topic of the show: Gay love, and images of it. The headline that ran over coverage of the matter on the right-wing Web site CNSnews.com mentioned the crucifix - but as only one item in a list of the exhibition's "shockers" that included "naked brothers kissing, genitalia and Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts." (Through a bra, one might note, in an image that's less shocking than many moves by Lady Gaga.) The same site decries "a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show's catalog as 'homoerotic'. "
The attack is on gayness, and images of it, more than on sacrilege - even though, last I checked, many states are sanctioning gay love in marriage, and none continue to ban homosexuality.
And the Portrait Gallery has given into this attack.
Twenty-one years ago in Washington, the Corcoran Gallery of Art took a huge hit to its prestige and credibility - a hit it has yet to fully recover from - when it canceled a show of images by the gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, under similar puritanical pressures. The Washington Project for the Arts, which this year celebrates its 35th anniversary, had its finest moment when it embraced the show instead.
So here's a gauntlet thrown down to test the courage of Washington's art institutions: Will the Hirshhorn Museum, the Katzen Arts Center, tiny Transformer, Flashpoint, or even the Phillips or National Gallery - or maybe the Corcoran, in a rare redemptive moment - have the guts to mount the video the Portrait Gallery has taken down?
Artists have the right to express themselves. Curators have the right to choose the expression they think matters most. And the rest of us have the right to see that expression, and judge those choices for ourselves.
If anyone's offended by any work in any museum, they have the easiest redress: They can vote with their feet, and avoid the art they don't like."
This article is a great example of a researched work that doesn't come across as strict research. There are many examples that uphold the authors point, such as different museums that bent to pressures and censored art.
(Note: I felt, since I am overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information on this topic, that it would be better to address all of the questions/prompts individually rather than in paragraph form, so I could better organize my thoughts.)
What do I already know about this topic?
I cannot possibly answer this in one go. I have been interested in, and a part of, black metal culture (kvltvre?) since I was about 17yrs old. Let's just say I know a fucking lot.
What draws me to this topic?
Part of why I'm doing my research paper on this topic is because I don't entirely understand why I am so drawn to this genre of music and the lifestyle. Emotionally, black metal music is a great release. Anger management, if you will. Intellectually, I am interested in the fact that this is (technically) still a very young culture, though it has roots that reach as far as Viking history, for example. Creatively, I am in love with the whole aesthetic of black metal- frosty, grim, lo-fi.
How would this project benefit me (or others)?
I am viewing this project as a chance to reconcile many issues and questions I have about the culture I am so immersed in, and when has a quest for knowledge NOT been beneficial to someone?
What questions/concerns/excitement do I have about this project?
In this culture, there are a lot of hot-button issues to address: anti-religion/satanism/paganism, racism, misogyny, rape, murder, church-burnings... it's quite a spicy topic. Controversy makes for an interesting read!
The Google search of "black metal" yielded expected results- the first thing was, of course, the Black Metal Wikipedia page. I took some screen captures of the results.
So after the publicly-edited info portal that is a wiki, we have blackmetal.com, a mail-order music and merch site. Then there are some image and video results of one of the typical heavy-hitters of the genre, Venom. A bit of Satanic imagery, a link to black metal radio (free/streaming mix)... some stuff about Norwegian bm, and NSBM (aka fucking racist metal)... not a very cheerful quick look for the casual browser.
5 potential guiding questions regarding research: I'll come back to this one...
