Help: Should this black-metal thread be posted in a christian or atheist thread?
Which thread should this be posted in?
Professor Erik Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about black-metal music — in its second-wave, largely Norwegian form — as a cryptic expression of Roman Catholicism. He started with the 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”
You can imagine several orders of hostility toward “Hideous Gnosis,” a six-hour theory symposium on black-metal music that commenced on Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Black metal, which has been a self-conscious genre since the early 1990s — with a prehistory in some ’80s metal bands — remains metal’s most underground subspecies. (Black refers to a bleak outlook on life.) Musically it’s all scoured howls, nonsyncopated blast-beat drums, and cold, trebly guitars. It sounds like it’s rotting, and that’s the point: black metal represents decay, radical individualism, misanthropy, negativity about all systems, and awe of the natural world. (Death metal, on the other hand, is more proactive, body-centered and psyched about gore.)
“The purest black-metal artist is one who’s unknown and inaccessible,” said Nicola Masciandaro, a professor of medieval literature at Brooklyn College who organized the six-hour event.
In a way, black metal runs on a very old cultural motor: loss of faith, and the hysterical fear and sadness that come with it. …It has inspired a new American wave of bands, including Nachtmystium, Krallice, Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy.
Like black-metal unicyclists, some Norwegian black-metal musicians became notorious for murder and church burnings)
But perhaps the day’s most profound lecture came from Mr. Scott, who spoke in priestly cadences about black metal as part of the ritual of confession. “The black metal event is a confession without need of absolution, without need of redemption,” he said. It is, he added, “a cleaning up of the mess of others.” He invoked the old English tradition of sin eating by means of burial cakes, in which a loaf of bread was put on a funeral bier or a corpse, and a paid member of the community would eat the bread, representing sin, to absolve and comfort the deceased.
“Black metal has become the sin eater,” he intoned. “It is engaged in transgressive behavior to be rid of it.”