Secos E Molhados

As an anonymous commentator to yesterdays post pointed out, Arthur "I Am The God Of Hellfire" Brown is a possible antecedent to "Secos E Molhados" - and of course, to KISS. I deliberately avoided mentioning more likely forerunners of Black Metal's corpse-paint than "Secos E Molhados": Arthur Brown, KISS, Alice Cooper, the Misfits, King Diamond. After all, reading Black Metal against the grain is much more fun!

In 'The Pleasure of Text', Roland Barthes wrote: "The more decent, well-spoken, innocent and saccharine a story is told, the easier it is to invert it, the easier it is to blacken it, the easier it is to read it against the grain". The same goes the other way around: the more indecent, offensive, evil and foul-tasting a story is told, the easier it is to invert it, the easier it is to white-wash it. Thus, it is easy to invert the stories Black Metal tells - and it is fun too!

To read Secos E Molhados's influence into Black Metal's discourse is to inject a little bit of sensual, vitalistic, tropical, mixed-descent queerness into Black Metal's necro, frostbitten, all-too-often racist and homophobic veins and thereby drug the genre with some sweet poison.

Here is a little more of that poison... Enjoy!