So You Think You Can Dance with the Stars of Norwegian Black Metal

                                
       If you're familiar with Norwegian Black Metal and some of its most lovable misfits then you knew it was only a matter of time before they all got together and starred in a screwball comedy or reality show of some sort, and if you're like me you were hoping against hope that they would somehow find a way of reanimating the dead ones so that they could truly all be united as one happy, incorrigible family again. Well I am proud to announce that that day has finally come.
       I understand that some of you may doubt my ability to raise the dead. I'm going to have to ask those individuals to a) try a little thing called suspension of belief and b) not be such insufferable little twats. Think you can manage? Good. Now if you are at all NBM savvy then you have heard of Euronymous. You've seen him on the cover of Tiger Beat and you've wanted to be just like him and wished you had his hair. But if you don't know about him and are too lazy to click on the link then you can just go and shit the bed because I'm not here to write a biography. In fact do me a favor and don't read the rest of this because you are completely unworthy and Euronymous would agree. So would Dead and Count Grishnackh, or anyone else from the seminal NBM band Mayhem. Euronymous started Mayhem in 1984, and had another dubious distinction of being the owner of Helvete (Norwegian for "Hell"), a record store that became the focal point of the scene. He also had a label called Deathlike Silence Productions which recorded mostly chillwave.

      Euronymous was not a very nice guy. His mother has reported that even in his early teens he would deliberately pee in the tub while she was bathing him. He was also a practitioner of theistic Satanism and a proponent of communism, not in the idealistic, theoretical sense, but in the sense of Stalinist communism, state terrorism and totalitarian rule, you get the idea. It is thought that he believed in these things because he was clinically fucktarded. Dead, on the other hand, was a more complicated figure. He was not so much mad as he was sad--so much so, in fact, that on April 8, 1991 at the ripe old age of twenty-two he killed himself by both slitting his wrists and blowing his brains out for good measure. Unfortunately for Dead's corpse it was discovered by Euronymous, who proceeded to do fucked up shit with it and took pictures, one of which would later become the cover of a Mayhem record. Euronymous also made necklaces out of fragments from Dead's skull and sent them to people he thought were cool. Pol Pot never received his, though.

 Interviewer: "What is so solid with evilness?"

Euronymous: "What is so solid about goodness then? It's just the way it is. I neither can nor will define it. It is basically a hate to humankind. I have no friends, just the guys I am allied with. If my girlfriend dies I won't cry, I will misuse the corpse."

- - - - - - - - - - 

Dead: "I am not a human being. This is just a dream, and soon I will awake. It was too cold and the blood kept coagulating all the time."

       But the most complicated of the three was probably Count Grishnackh. I would characterize Count Grishnackh as both mad and sad, and unlike the other two he was not so much into evil as he was into Germanic neopaganism and being racist. He was sad (and mad) because the Christians had beat his pagan ancestors in a game of tug of war several centuries ago, adding insult to injury by pulling them right into some mud, and they were all wearing white because it was after Easter. And also the Christians may have desecrated some of their graves, though let's keep in mind that this was hundreds of years ago, but the Count was still ripshit pissed about it so he decided to burn some churches, some very old churches that were considered national treasures, and then everyone thought he was hardcore like when Fonzie jumped the shark.

       The problem was that he was now considered to be even more hardcore than Euronymous, who had previously been considered the most hardcore kid on the block. Now there was this new kid on the block who was stealing his thunder. It didn't sit very well. And what was more, this new kid didn't even love Satan, and he didn't even have the decency to espouse Stalinist communism. At the same time the Count and his friends were getting fed up with Euronymous, because every time they burned a church he would try to act like he was all in on it and stuff, even though he so completely wasn't. Then one day it got back to the Count that Euronymous was going to kill him. So the Count decided to pay Euronymous a visit and killed him instead.

"I waited to see if he would attack me again, but he just went past me and tried to kick me, and then I just stabbed him in the head."

       Before meeting his end, Euronymous ran down the halls ringing his neighbors' doorbells, and the neighbors reported high-pitched screams which they believed to be a woman's. Not a very metal way to go. If you're going to go ahead and name yourself after a demon, you might want to go ahead and not die like a little titty-baby, especially when your opponent has decided to name himself after a goddamned orc. I think even the most casual Dungeons & Dragons player could tell you that a demon beats an orc. You have pretty much failed your whole species on this one, Euro.

Son, I am disappoint

       Well it turned out that the orc was actually named Varg Vikernes, and Varg was put on trial for the murder of Oystein Aarseth, which was the actual name of the demon. It turned out they were just two misguided young men, as in earthlings of Earth with no Middle- in front of it. And Varg was sentenced to 21 years, for the murder and a few of the church burnings, but he was released after 15.
       And Dead, despite his statement to the contrary, was an earthling as well. He was Per Yngve Ohlin, and he was just as human as any of us. He just didn't want to be, and on some level I understand. I'm not sure his explanation that the world was not evil enough for him was actually the truth, and I'm not suggesting that he was not evil enough for the world or something gay like that. I just think that in his twenty-two years he never got a chance to look at the world rightly, and I think that's a tragedy, because I believe that he could have.

Not so racist when it's Chad Ochocinco, are you, Varg?

       I've never believed heavy metal was scourge, in the United States or elsewhere, and after learning about Norwegian Black Metal I am even more convinced that it isn't a scourge, because it is nothing more than an allergic reaction to societal norms which can seem pretty oppressive, and often times really are. And I also don't think it's a scourge because it provides a vital catharsis to a large number of people, and yes a few people have killed themselves and others while listening to it, but it has probably saved more lives than it has taken. I seriously might not have made it through middle school without Alice in Chains, and I know that's anecdotal evidence, but I know there are plenty of other people out there who had a band like that, a band which was considered to be unsavory at the time but may have literally saved their lives. Another was Guns N' Roses. Now these bands are almost considered classic rock. I have actually heard Guns N' Roses on the classic rock station here. That's fucking crazy. But it also makes sense.
      Tweet

Your Band Sucks

        A long time ago, when the internet was little more than four or five nerds exchanging hentai and yelling at eachother in leetspeak, there was a site called Something Awful. There is still a site called that but I am talking about long ago, back when myspace was the shit, back when Goatse was shocking, back when I had a soul patch, you get the idea. It was around that time that a great man named Dr. David Thorpe embarked on a mission to be the biggest dickhead in all of music criticism, a maneuver roughly equivalent in difficulty to pogoing on a frozen corpse to the top of Mount Everest. So he began writing a column for Something Awful called Your Band Sucks--and by God, he pulled it off.

        Today I am going to attempt to write a Your Band Sucks article, because the world hasn't seen one since 2007, and I think we're long overdue. Thorpe seems to have been busy doing markedly less amusing work for the Boston Phoenix, but I can forgive him for that. I presume he's getting paid, and I presume he's getting laid, and he certainly wasn't doing either of those when he was writing for Something Awful. Anyway, I appreciate the opportunity I have given myself and I will do my best.

        I think I'll start with Linkin Park, because I just saw an article about them that was totally surreal. In it, the author compares their new album to Radiohead's Kid A. I haven't heard the new Linkin Park album, of course, but guess what, it isn't comparable. It's comparable to a lot of things, I'm sure. Ulcerative colitis comes to mind. And I don't need to hear it to know that because it's fucking Linkin Park, and they suck with the force of one hundred Paris Hiltons. They could suck the oceans dry and just keep right on sucking. Ironically their suckiness is shimmering and eternal.
        Some of you probably hold the belief that they do not suck and are in fact good. If that is the case, then it is of the utmost importance that you read the rest of this and take it to heart, because the future of our civilization might hang in the balance. I have good reason to believe that the continued popularity of bands such as Linkin Park could very well cause God to pwn us all with an asteroid the size of Delaware. So please take heed of this.

       Let me give you a play by play of a typical Linkin Park song. The one dipshit begins singing in this soft, ghostly voice, sounding all melancholy and distant, and then the other dipshit begins screaming the chorus, sounding like Daffy Duck being castrated. And there are probably some shitty Casio bleep-beep-boops in there somewhere. Their music is targeted at inarticulate, angst-ridden 13-year-olds who are dumb enough to believe that intentional misspelling = cleverness, and primitive histrionics = depth of emotion.

        If Linkin Park would in some way wink at rest of us, if they would concede to us using words adolescents don't know that they are basically the Degrassi: The Next Generation of bands, then I might believe they had one iota of intelligence. But since they so clearly take themselves seriously and believe they have actual merit, I am forced to conclude that they suffer from severe fucktardation, also known as buttersnap shitfuckery of the mind. And I suspect that the Asian one also has Down's.

        Wow, that was easy, but then again that band is so terrible that their suckiness is practically scientific fact. I need a little more of a challenge now. I think my next move will be to go after those darlings of pseudo-intellectuals, quasi-hipsters, people who would like to be "artsy" but have no artistic talent, yuppie twats, and members of the cast of Friends, who obviously encompass all of those qualities. I am talking of course about the Counting Crows. Let me start off by confessing that for two weeks when I was thirteen I thought they were the shit. Perhaps it was because Adam Duritz looks exactly like Junior Gorg from Fraggle Rock, and I used to love that show, but I think it had more to do with the fact that I was a stupid little faggot.

        The biggest problem with Adam Duritz is that he tries way too fucking hard. Ok dude, we get that you are a hopeless romantic. We get that you have wanted to be famous really badly. Stop caterwauling and flailing about like you're at fucking Jesus Camp. And take off that weave while you're at it you fake ass motherfucker. I honestly think that the band was just a plot hatched by Duritz for the cynical purpose of fucking actresses. Well it worked you asshole. And the entire Western World is a little bit dumber for it.

        Well that shit was even easier than the last one. I was supposed to be challenging myself but it seems that's going to be harder than I thought. Maybe next time I'll go after a band I like. On second thought that would make me as lacking in integrity as Adam fucking Duritz. Peace I'm out. 

"You are the pineapple of my head, you are my artificial dreads"

 
               
           

Tweet