Re: [A-List] UK state: fascism

["Anyutka" <annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

New York Press

Black Metal Nation
Norwegian dirtheads and the Frum/Perle "End of the World" tour.

Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground
By Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind
Feral House, 405 pages, $18.95

An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror
By David Frum and Richard Perle
Random House, 304 pages, $29.95


My idea of a Norwegian was always some cheerless Social Democrat in a knit
sweater whose greatest joy in life was comparing the price of beer in Prague
(cheap) to the price of beer in Krakow (even cheaper). Then I read the
just-released new edition of Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic
Metal Underground, a cult classic that first appeared in 1998.

Dude. No, seriously. Du-hu-hude. All I can say is that Norway fuckiiin'
rocks!

Lords of Chaos chronicles the rise of Black Metal, Norway's extremist
contribution to the underground metal scene in the late 80s and early 90s.
What made Black Metal so exceptional wasn't just the speed and thrash of the
music, the violence of the lyrics or the amount of corpse-paint that its
death-obsessed members wore, but rather the number of real corpses and
smoldering churches that the movement left behind.

The rise of the Black Metal movement in Norway is a case of humorless
dirtheads taking a joke way too seriously. The joke was Satanic rock, which
Lords of Chaos skillfully traces from its early origins in Led Zeppelin,
Black Sabbath and Coven (who transformed from performing black masses on
stage to perpetrating the weepy hippie hit "One Tin Soldier") to metal's
second big wave in the early 80s and the rise of kitsch Satan-rockers Venom.
To our modern eyes, Venom looks the spitting image of Spinal Tap during
their Smell the Glove phase, but to dirtheads who didn't know any better,
Venom was the long-sought embodiment of evil. It was from the Venom branch
of evil-metal that all of metal's more violent, "evil" forms descended,
including Black Metal.

The point of Satanic rock was to scare the Normals while fucking with the
minds of its pimple-faced, predominantly male (nerdoid) audience, who needed
to create a counter-world, with counter-morals and counter-aesthetics, to
empower the nerdoids against the cooler, more successful jocks. But metal
had its rivals for the hopelessly angry nerdoid: punk, hardcore and metal's
own competing mutations. The competition forced metal's leading edge to
metamorphose into harder, faster and more violent forms, reaching its apex
with the rise of Death Metal in the mid-80s. Death Metal was as violent,
Satanic and musically inaccessible as metal could go, or so it seemed.

And here is where Norway, the comic straight-man character in this dumb,
bloody saga, comes in. Norway is not only a completely humorless society (it
banned Monty Python's The Life of Brian for being too offensive, leading to
ads in rival Sweden boasting that the movie was "so funny it was banned in
Norway!"), but worse, a deeply oppressive society, in a recognizably bland,
caring, pious, Social Democratic way. Which raises an interesting question:
Do boredom and blandness "count" as real suffering, and if so, do they
justify murder the way other forms of oppression make murder seem a likely,
even understandable response? The Black Metalists of Norway think so.

The humor and empty boasts inherent in Death Metal were lost on Norway's
youth. They took Death Metal literally, and quickly discovered that it wasn'
t "evil" or "authentic" enough. There were too many "poseurs." And more
important, too few genuine corpses for a scene that claimed to be so
obsessed with death and violence. So Black Metal offered up one of its own
as its first sacrificial corpse: the lead singer of Mayhem, who ingeniously
had changed his name to "Dead," offed himself with a shotgun. His friend and
lead guitarist, Euronymous, discovered Dead's brains splattered all over
their apartment. So the first thing Euronymous does is run down to the
village store to buy film, run back, snap a whole bunch of photos of Dead's
corpse, boast to all his friends about it, then call the cops. Now that is
fuckin' cool, dude.

You've really got to hand it to the Norse for keeping it real. I for one
will be scratching them off the "Eurofag" list.

Euronymous eventually got offed himself by a rival Black Metaler, the
surprisingly interesting neo-Nazi Varg Vikernes of Burzum, in large part
because Varg thought Euronymous wasn't "evil" enough. Vikernes' own account
of how he killed Euronymous, chasing him around an apartment building
knifing him while the Black Metal victim screamed for help, is truly one of
the great slapstick moments in murder history: "I hit him directly into his
skull and his eyes went boing! and he was dead." (I particularly like Varg's
Looney Tunes "boing!")

The book, particularly the first half, is often laugh-out-loud funny, in a
metal sort of way. For one thing, Black Metalists are incredibly pedantic-as
laughably pedantic as the worst jerks you knew in the college
rock/punk/hardcore scene, and pedantic about the very same stupid things:
who is more "genuine," "authentic," "extreme," "on-the-edge" and in metal's
case, "evil." It's almost painful to read about the various figures'
internecine pedantry wars because they're so similar to battles that
were/are waged by pedants in the "alternative" subculture, which had always
considered itself far superior to "lowly" metalhead culture.

And frankly, who's to say that metalheads were lower or lamer than punks?
One thing that's hard to argue with the Black Metalists about is why many of
them chose metal over punk: For them, punk copped out. Punk started off
going for the throat of Normal Society, but in the game of chicken it didn't
have the nerve to go all the way, snagglepussing safely leftward or
detouring into kitsch just when it had to lay its last cards on the table.
Punk copped out almost at its inception, with The Clash quickly abandoning
"White Riot" for pastafarian hippie politics, or the Sex Pistols devolving
overnight from terrifying chaos to self-parody, a depressing degradation
chronicled in The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle.

The Black Metalists understood this copout quite consciously, opposed it (as
they opposed Death Metal's cringe in the face of real extremism) and
therefore pushed their war with the Normals to its logical conclusion: They
went for paganism, National Socialism, church-torching and murder.

And why not go all the way for murder and arson, considering what the
"consequences" of murder are in Northern Europe. Oo, a Northern European
jail. Oo, I'm so scared! The sentences, when they're even given out, are
laughably light, while the jail conditions were described as a "holiday" by
one of the victims' mothers, or "time flies when you're having fun" by one
of the perps.

One lesson of Lords of Chaos is that it pays to murder in Northern Europe.
Literally. Going to prison there is like getting comped at a Comfort Inn.
You can't possibly get locked away for long, and even if they give you 10 or
20 years-and that's if you're lucky-you can still get off on weekends for
unaccompanied home visits, enough time to participate in another murder.
Prisons there are so comfy that even the metalists complained about getting
treated too well. As Varg Vikernes sneered, "It's much too nice here. It's
completely ridiculous. I asked the police to throw me in a real dungeon, and
also encouraged them to use violence." Naturally, they didn't.

Which got me thinking: If and when my own fledgling writing career dives for
good, I know what I'm going to do. Put on some corpse paint, get myself an
axe, go on a Scandinavian murder spree, then call the cops and demand that
they jail me in the nearest Comfort Inn for life.

Where as the nerdoids in Lords of Chaos were vainly trying to recapture the
lost, centuries-old glory of their Viking ancestors in a diminished modern
Norway, uber-nerdoids Richard Perle and David Frum seem hell bent on
destroying contemporary America's glorious imperial war machine right at the
very peak of its power. Their plan for leading America, lemming-like, over
the cliff of self-destruction is laid out in their sparsely-worded
manifesto, An End to Evil. The title alone shows how very Black Metal these
grown-up war nerds are.

Let me just say here that I had always thought that draft-dodgers like Perle
(who snagglepussed from the Vietnam War, exit stage left) and Frum (who, as
a Canadian, was born a draft-dodger) were just your run-of-the-mill
corporate fags, but after reading An End to Evil.dude. No seriously,
du-hu-hude. Dude, I'm telling you, these chickenhawks fuckiiiiiiiiiin' rock!

Seriously. They rock as hard as Burzum and Mayhem. The proof? First, both
the Black Metalists and the Republican authors are obsessed with evil, as
the title alone shows. Indeed, Frum is the author of the famous "axis of
evil" line that has crippled Bush's room for diplomatic maneuver. And Frum,
like the metalists, got in trouble for boasting about how he'd made that
line up-the same way that all the Black Metalists eventually got jailed for
boasting about their murders. For their boasts, Frum got fired while the
Black Metalists got rooms at the Comfort Inn. Gnarly.

Then there's Perle, who, like Dead or Euronymous, has his own infamous Black
Metal nom de roque: The Prince of Darkness. Arrrggghhh! Launch fireworks and
pyrotechnics from front of stage, set off explosions, lower giant skull as
The Prince of Darkness and David "Axis of Evil" Frum take to the stage in
their End to Evil monsters of hardline ideology tour!

The similarities don't stop there. Whereas Vikernes and other Black
Metalists saw heathen Norway in a life-or-death struggle for existence with
the Semitic tribes' Judeo-Christianity, Perle and Frum see Judeo-Christian
America under threat from Islam. And both have the same solution: War, dude!

To be fair, Vikernes and another Black Metalist murderer, Hendrik Mobus,
come off as far more interesting, intellectual and complex with their
second-rate Nietzschean ideas mixed up with D&D mythology, whereas Perle and
Frum's war manifesto is surprisingly dull and sparse. Indeed, on each page
the words are spaced so far apart you could drive a fertilizer-packed white
van between each line. I read it in one sitting and came away with only one
memorable line, in which they disparagingly called Belgium "France's pilot
fish." On the other hand, Perle and Frum have used their influence over Bush
to rack up a far, far higher corpse-count than the hapless Norwegian
dirtheads, so they more than make up for their lack of aesthetic flair or
stylized corpse paint with genuine blood on their hands.

Indeed, every sad word of An End to Evil oozes Perle's and Frum's pained,
wasted 60s youths: wasted in yellow sheet stains, wasted studying maps
color-coded with spheres-of-influence, wasted memorizing German armaments,
and college years wasted playing Risk in their dorms while the socially
successful hippies frolicked and fucked all around them. Perle and Frum will
never forgive America for this humiliation and therefore they want to egg it
on to its suicide by prodding it into a multi-front apocalyptic world war.

Their Black Metal plan is simple: Push North Korea to the brink and China
right along with it; set the path for war against Iran; foment a Shiite
independence movement in oil-rich eastern Saudi Arabia; kick Russia out of
the G-8; invade Syria and Lebanon, while pushing Israel to turn the heat up
even further on the Palestinians; and lastly, openly declare our hostility
to the European Union, even if it means making enemies of France and
Germany.

This raises another interesting question: Should Black Metalists cut their
hair and vote Bush-Cheney '04? Dude, I think the answer's pretty fuckin'
obvious. In fact, thanks to these guys, America has become the world's first
Black Metal Nation.

Volume 17, Issue 5