I read with interest a review of Lords of Chaos (a book about the Norwegian Black Metal underground) by the immensely talented blogger and my very good friend Paul Debraski. That last sentence is a link to his review, which you should read first. I was going to write a note on it but I’ve always written as if I’m paid by the word and the note got longer than the review. I was interested, not least because I recently read up to date on Mr. Vikernes, as you’ll see. But I’d also read Lords of Chaos a few years back and was familiar with the Euronymous killing from the music papers of the day.

There was a show called The Word on British television in the ‘90s that got into a great deal of trouble for a regular item known as The Hopefuls. Kids desperate for their 15 minutes would be dared to do horrible things in the name of fame, such as bathing in cowshit or French kissing an octogenarian. People were perhaps unsurprised that the kids would do it, but appalled that it became poplular television. I think of this when I lament at the dreadful events depicted in Lords of Chaos.

Burzum's Filosofem.

First things first: Burzum are not that bad. There are two albums I’ve heard you may like: Filosofem is a concepty piece, featuring otherworldly vocals and guitars but also some dark ambient stuff which works very well as a ur-Sunn 0))) for the young at heart. The other, Anthology, is a compilation which is mixed a little better and features a range of work including tracks from Filosofem. He kept his sound deliberately lo-fi, but while many other bands were fast but not particularly talented, Varg Vikernes seems to have some chops. Both of these (the albums, not the chops)  are, I understand, quite widely available.

Varg apparently continued to work on his music in prison, moving further into electronica because of the limited instrumentation available to him. And there’s been some new material in March this year (might I say I have yet to hear it). Varg was released in May 2009, you see, after 17 years in jail. He’s unrepentant, not surprising to anyone who reads his website (burzum.org) which he ran from jail (Sweden is not about stifling one’s creativity while incarcerated, apparently), claiming still that Euronymous had planned to torture him to death and that his killing was in self-defence. There seems to be quite a little flirtation with white supremacy in his last few years, too. He lives on a farm in Telemark with his family. The September 2010 Mojo has a feature on the whole thing, including interviews with three surviving members of the Norwegian underground and an Email from Varg which adds little to any claim for Nobel glory.

Varg Vikernes, following his relase last year.

Varg before he did the whole church/murdering thing.

But back to Lords of Chaos. There seem to be quite the number of contradictions in the story. Paul contends that they seem eloquent, even smart young men, and that certainly rings through the narrative; it’s particularly chilling to see how level-headed and logical much of their bullshit seems (as Paul, again, observes). But at the bottom of it all is that these are nineteen-year-old kids who were desperate to make a name for themselves and young enough to be blinkered to quite a lot of the implications of their actions. Venom and the Black Metal bands, from Black Sabbath on, traded on the whole Satanist thing as a marketing move, but the Norwegians carried the dare through and it’s in Euronymous’ treatment of Dead I really begin to be nauseous.

Dead (the original singer with Mayhem, you may remember) was a clearly troubled kid; when he may have got help in some other circle, Euronymous and his little underground record shop cultivated this damaged kid, getting headlines from his dysfunction and trading off a mind sick enough to keep a bag of roadkill to inhale before going onstage. When Dead (his stage name might have clued someone in somewhere) killed himself he did so in a theatrical way (cutting his wrists before shooting himself) commensurate with someone who sought a particular kind of fame; Euronymous took the next step in marketing death, and his use of Dead’s bones in jewellery and the rumour of his having eaten part of the dead man’s brain speak of a nasty determination (not to mention a distinct lack of humanity). So the first contradiction is that this group of people was disaffected and chaotic, while their behaviour seems to have been led by Euronymous’ management of the situation. It’s as if New Order put a shot of Ian Curtis in his kitchen on the cover of their live album[1].

Euronymous, pictured recently.

The second contradiction is Varg’s assertion that Euronymous was a fat, inept laughing stock: if so then there’s no real reason to fear, let alone launch a pre-emptive strike against his plot to kill Varg. In all the other versions Euronymous seems much more level-headed (relatively speaking) and ruthless, as you can read from his sensitive treatment of Dead, above. You can’t have it both ways, Varg, even from jail. Remember, he stabbed the guy while he was running away, sixteen times in the back.

The next contradiction is in the intelligence and talent of Varg. Here was a bloke who came to represent the whole genre, gave great copy as part of the Norwegian underground and who made pretty much the only music of the scene anyone gives a toss about, yet balance this against his having been arrested with camo gear, a few gallons of gas and a map to the churches he was going to burn, all sitting there in the back of his car, following escape from his low-security prison in 2003. Not the brightest move. His defence in court was another doozy, blaming his situation on “the Jews who killed my father Odin”. And there’s all that Nordic white supremacy to deal with. Sad that someone who seems to be so bright turns out to be such a twat.

Paul may be right about the authors of Lords of Chaos getting more moral as the book concludes, but not before this whole scene gets an analysis by fans of the music, rather than journalists slowing down to eyeball the tabloid story. More accurate, perhaps, is the observation that things got so screwed up that even fans had to hold up their hands and say just how bad things became.

So you have a bunch of kids who had no real boundaries and the courage of conviction only insofar as it fed into self-mythologising. Really sad. Like X-Factor or America’s Got Talent with a body count. What would you do, I mean what would you be prepared to do, really, to get famous? That?

Eh, okay.

Thanks to Paul Debraski, an inspiration as always.

[1] To be accurate New Order played it a little more for laughs, telling an American journo who asked where the lead singer was that he was “hanging around in the kitchen somewhere” and putting a reference to Herzog’s Stroszek, the film Curtis watched the night he died, on the run-off groove from the posthumous Joy Division album Still.