A teenager followed an admired friend's shifting musical tastes into black metal, adopting its aesthetic, collecting posters, CDs, and rare bootlegs. The music's hypnotic, raw atmosphere provided a form for rebellion despite limited understanding of lyrics or context. A friend revealed that Varg Vikernes had killed a bandmate and served time for murder, prompting a casual decision to avoid that music. A cousin researched bands, translated lyrics, and traced connections, revealing coded fascist imagery, explicit Nazi sympathies, antisemitic allusions, odes to racial purity, and links to real-world hate groups, which provoked nausea and moral reevaluation.
When he discovered black metal, I followed him there too. Soon, my bedroom began to resemble a mausoleum: there were band posters featuring men made up to look like corpses glowering into Nordic fog, and CDs with tracklists that looked more like incantations than music. I began dressing the part black on black on black. I scoured forums for rare pressings and live bootlegs.
And yet, I didn't really know what I was listening to. The music itself was hypnotic: raw, relentless, thick with atmosphere. It sounded like alienation and angst and misanthropy which, to a teenager, was more or less the point. It gave form to rebellion. But I didn't take a look behind the scenes. I just savoured the vibes. At a certain point, my friend told me that Varg Vikernes, the man behind the Norwegian music project Burzum, had killed his bandmate
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