ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the Black Metal Second Wave, emerging from Norway in the early 1990s. In this chapter, the author maintains that the far-right politics and Neo-Nazism embedded in the Scene is understood from a myopic, simplistic viewpoint, arguing an atavist mindset is far more central to the shared ideology of the subculture. The idea that a far-right, Satanic metal underground arose from anything less than a complex web of glocalisation and bricolage is a fallacy. The chapter will elucidate that rather than members all proscribing to Nazism and Satanism, the politics of the scene was born from a desire to present themselves as the most ‘evil’, which in this case was alignment with Nazism. This is more recognisable as the Nazi-as shock iconography of late 1970s punk scenes. What the Second Wave represents is a space for performative politics, where the morality is carnivalesque(). This performative space becomes exploited by those who had genuine sympathies with Nazism, such as Varg Vikernes. This created a difficulty, comparable to leaven in bread, where an invasive polity became a dominant narrative for the scene, and its influence became inexplicably associated to further iterations of the subculture.
