ABSTRACT

For many people in different parts of the world the concept of Black Metal evokes images of long-haired, corpse-painted young males dressed in spikes and black clothing, churches on fire and vandalized graveyards, disharmonious and noisy music and Satanic symbols like inverted crosses and pentagrams – at least if we look back to the time when the Black Metal movement figured most strongly in the mass media, i.e. from 1993 and a few years onwards. Now it has obtained a reputation as quite acceptable quality music made by serious and hard-working musicians that most of all – or solely – are into this for the sake of the music, and where the aggression, the dark image and the sinister symbols mainly are part of a larger artistic totality. Nonetheless, there are still some musicians and bands that in part pass on old-school Black Metal, whose development and peak can be put approximately to the period 1990-1994 and is connected with Norway in particular.2 It is the indistinct “Satanism” of this kind of Black Metal that I propose to analyze in the following.