Norwegian diplomats brush up on black metal Wannabe Norwegian diplomats are to be trained in the dark arts of black metal - the local flavour of heavy metal which might be described as KISS with added Satanism, murder, suicide, church burnings and National Socialism. The improbable move comes in response to increased international interest in black metal, with the …
I fear you miss the point - Norway has no cultural equivalent of Abba, which I suppose is why they're exporting music to burn churches to.
Would you prefer Celine Dion covers? As a French Canadian who represented Switzerland in Eurovision, I'm sure she could be persuaded to become an easy-listening Norwegian for a bit.
I don't like Alice Cooper much but he had the Black Metal lad's number when he said, "Black metal is not satanism, it's pantomime! It's modern day vaudeville and damn funny too!".
Some of it's OK and I must admit there's nothing like a good blast of Immortal and Dimmu Borgir on the 5:20pm train home of an evening. Having listened to metal racket for nigh on 30 years now I have to admit that the BM lads are a tad silly with the corpse paint and the feux Satanism codswallop though. For the real thing, give me a blast of good honest thrash any day and no not Metallica, I mean real metal not that mindless tosh ( a lot of sub-genres in the metal camp! ). Slayer, Onslaught, Havok and Dearly Beheaded, a mix that's certain to get you motivated! Much to the annoyance of my wife, my 8 year old loves a bit of thrash and death metal even a little bit of black once in a while, then again kids don't really need an excuse to make a noise and act like nutters do they!
Varg Vikernes is the biggest clown out there, so I guess he already knows :p
Sure, he was scary to the elderly churcgoers once, but that was back when MC Hammer still had money. After that, he's had failure after failure, possibly crowned with his ridiculously half-brained jailbreak :p
(Paris, because even she'd be better as a fugitive than he ever could be)
I doubt more than a handful of kids will have heard of any EBM acts (or whatever sub-genre they may dub themselves). Every EBM gig I get dragged to by my other half - who loves the stuff unfortunately - seems to be mostly attended by fat, bald middle aged blokes. That includes recent-ish gigs in London and festivals on mainland Europe that included Combichrist on the line up.
(I used to love EBM, but that was when it consisted of bands like Front 242 who actually did something interesting with all that technology rather than banging out the same techno drum beat and one note sub-bass pattern).
The roots of the music are, more than anything, probably in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, which was by no means about setting churches on fire. In fact, the name "black metal" itself comes from a Venom song by the same name. Perhaps you recall what country they're from.
Whilst not being Black Metal, there is an album out there with an Eclectic mix of Metal bands doing Covers of Abba songs. Its well worth Checking out.
Therion do a great Version of "Summer Night City", and Metaliums "Thankyou for the music" is rather good too.
But my Personal Favourite is "Eagle" by Sgt. Fury.
Enjoy!
I can't stand Black Metal, but a mate has played in a number of the leading lights of that genre so I'm quite familiar with it. It's not confined to Norway, and it doesn't appear to have originated there, being more of a Scandinavian wide phenomenon. It's now very common in Scandinavia, most of Eastern Europe and also Italy. Thankfully, for every right wing, church burning wingnut, there are many more proponents of the genre who just love the music and for whom the wilder lyrical indulgences are decidedly tongue in cheek. Sadly, the common view of Black Metal is a result of a book called "Lords of Chaos", which focused on the wingnuts, and was really a thinly veiled attempt to co-opt the scene entirely by the books main author Michael Moynihan (a veteran of the far more sinister Death Folk scene).
The posting is clearly retailing the same tendentious garbage that a certain section of the European and US right wing have been peddling for the last twenty years or so. Hitler called his party "National Socialist" and combining that with some circular logic based on the existence of dictatorships which arose from left-wing political systems and the resemblances that *all* dictatorships have to each other these political geniuses argue that the Third Reich was a left-wing regime! Their basic argument is that *any* dictatorship of any real size is by definition left-wing. They are attempting to argue that their political model has nothing to apologise for in the historical context since it was (according to them) lefties that produced *both* Stalin *and* Hitler (they tend to go a bit quieter if you mention Mussolini and Franco).
Thank god for Norway, Finland and the rest of Scandanavia (add The Netherlands as well for good measure) for keeping rock and decent music alive.
Shame the yoof innit of this country couldn't widen their selection from the usual [c]rap dross that's still infecting the commercial radio stations here - every other song is either by some pretentiously/rediculously self styled and self named bling covered twat or some previous act that has toed the line and had to include a solo by or duet with a forementioned bling twat in order to appeal to the droopy trouser brigade out there...
For example, consider what Amon Amarth's vocalist had to say about the band being labeled as 'Viking metal':
"We play death metal. We write about Vikings so, therefore, some refer us to Viking metal, but I have no idea what that is. I can't imagine the Vikings were into metal at all except on the swords and stuff. And musically, I guess they only played these strange lip instruments and some bongos or whatever."
Now, would you have gotten an explanation like that from any of the newspaper articles complaining about how Scandinavian metal is destroying teenage minds? Always start with the primary sources!
If you want to do Norwegian music, do it right. Metalheads could probably do something reasonable with In The Hall of the Mountain King.
And then there's the Vegan Black Metal Chef on Youtube. "CUT the Tofu! Turn The Plate! You don't need to use a knife as Awesome as Mine".
Here in Finland if we want any more seriously metal than the ones we make here, we look to Norway. They've got the black metal scene down to pat. They own it, they live it, they love it. At least that's how it seems to me. But for personal tastes, i don't fancy it. It just sounds like a screaming gorilla tearing apart a band's practice room to me. But hey, beauty of music, something for all right?
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