A few posts back, I received a comment from Martin, posing the question whether Black Metal is fueled by a certain ideology, or rather by the appeal of a certain imagery/aesthetics.Almost having finished his "Available Light. Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics", I'd like to use Clifford Geertz's definition of culture for a reply to that question:
"The concept of culture I espouse. . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after. . . . " (Geertz in "The Interpretation of Cultures").
Black Metal is a culture, a spider's web of significance where ideological and aesthetic strands are closely interwoven and mutually dependent on each other. Take away either the ideological (i.e. politico-moral) strands or the aesthetic strands and the whole web will shift, destabilize, maybe even threaten to collapse or in any case reform into a completely different shape.
However, Black Metal culture is not woven as neatly as spider's webs usually are... Perhaps they're more like the webs of spiders on drugs: chaotic, tangled ... it is an eccentric, centrifugal genre after all.
1 comment:
The term "black metal" was coined by the English band Venom with their second album Black Metal .I know it because I play in a band called "juju" and we are so good!!
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