Euronymous as Kafka

In many interviews, Euronymous - the mastermind behind Black Metal band Mayhem - expressed admiration for repressive communist regimes:

"I know you’re interested in communism. Have you been to any communist countries, if yes, what have been your emotions about it?

I’ve been very interested in communism for a while, especially the extreme countries like Albania, Kampuchea, North Korea and so on. I have to say that I have studied so much that I know that real communism would be the best possible system, BUT as I HATE people I don’t want them to have a good time, I’d like to see them rot under communist dictatorship. Ceausescu was great, we need more people like him, Stalin, Pol Pot too. I’ve been to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the (good) old days, and was about to go to Albania, although it didn’t turn out. Poland was quite all right, but it could have been even MORE gray and depressing. I like secret police, cold war and worshiping of dictators. I like bugging and spying on people, torture chambers in police stations and that people suddenly “disappear”."

From another interview:

"Another personal question here: now that a lot of things have changed in this world of ours, have you stuck to your principles, I mean politically? Euronymous: "As Mayhem is NOT a political band, I don't really like to mix topics like this into band interviews, but anyway I'm still keeping the faith. I openly admit that I am a Stalinist and I'm very fascinated by extreme countries like Albania and Romania in the good old days. I have thought about quitting from the Communist Party though, but this is just because they are not brutal enough any more. It was much better in the '70s, when they were very Albania-inspired and the leader even visited Cambodia during the Red Khmer period and had dinner with Pol Pot!! Those were the days!""

And yet another interview:

"WHY THIS EXTREME PULL TO BOTH MUSIC AND POLITICS (STALINISM)?
People know we are sick, and we give a fuck. Thats what we live (die) for... Stalinism. We hate does 'PEACE, LOVE and DEMOCRACY'-ideas. WAR, SODOMY and DICTATION! We support all extreme and oppressed states like the old ALBANIA, IRAN , KAMPUCHEA under the RED KHMERS and so on. People who are dying and suffering!

DO YOU STILL BELIEVE IN COMMUNISM AFTER THE FALL OF IT NEARLY ALL OVER THE WORLD?
We have studied so much politics/theory/economy (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin , Mao, Hoxha) that we know that the world will sooner or later become communistic. Its the marketing economy and capitalisms ideas that will be forced forward sooner or later. Maybe in 30 years, maybe in 300 years. The problem is that communism is fucking good for the people, it's total freedom. Thats why we never wish that it happens. The world can go to hell. We want back the old Stalinist dictatorship, there its was gray, misery and evil. THE BERLIN WALL SHALL RISE AGAIN!!

ARE YOU YOURSELF POLITICALLY ACTIVE?
We were member of a party who was very extreme, they supported the old Albania and their former leader who even was in Kampuchea under the Red Khmers and ate dinner with Pol Pot! Incredibly good! But the party turned humanitarian, so we shall leave it."


Euronymous' statements, crude and childish as they may be, reminded me strongly of Denis Hollier's 1993 book "Absent Without Leave. French Literature under the Threat of War". In this highly interesting work, Hollier analyzes Georges Bataille's paradoxical political position in the nineteenthirties. Hollier's analysis is based on the contrast between Bataille's position and that of Sartre.

Sartre's 1947 book "Qu'est ce que la littérature" ("What is literature?") centers on the crucial Existentialist idea of commitment. Hollier summarizes Sartre's argument: "To want literature to exist is first of all to want a world in which literature is possible, a world which acknowledges its right to exist. The writer must work towards the existence of a world that can give him the means to write and to be read. Committed literature is thus simply literature taking the responsibility for its own conditions of possibility. But this analysis implies that literature insists on being possible."

Bataille's position couldn't be more different: he insists on literature being impossible. For Bataille, literature could only have meaning if it was transgressive, that is if it crossed moral boundaries while affirming them. Literature would only be meaningful if it were forbidden.

In Communist societies, bourgeois tastes - aesthetic art - would be impossible to defend as long the class struggle is not overcome. For this reason, literature is transgressive in Communist societies, and it has a meaning there it does not have in liberal democracies. In the chapter on Kafka in his 1957 book 'Literature and Evil', Bataille wrote: "If the adult gives a major sense of childishness, if he writes with the feeling that he is touching a sovereign value, he has no place in Communist society." Hollier: "According to Bataille, this exclusion is the perverse and paradoxical reason why Communist society corresponds better than any other to the secret wishes of a writer like Kafka - who always harbored a desire for a society that denied him the right to exist".

In the repressive Stalinist and Maoist societies that Euronymous lauded in the above interviews, not only were there prescriptions for artistic work; the regime also attempted to regulate the lifestyle of artists. "Socialist realism" was the only acceptable aesthetic, an aesthetic which was characterized by a militant communist partisanship, an idealistic world view, and optimism. Art was denied the right to exist, supplanted by party propaganda. Writers, artists and performers who did not conform to the prescriptions of party propaganda, suffered censorship, prosecution and - certainly in Cambodia - death.

The very societies Euronymous said to admire, would have denied Black Metal and Black Metal musicians the right to exist. In two earlier posts (here and here), I've written that Black Metal may well be the most playful genre of Metal, and that its playfulness attests to its childlike vitality. Realism, idealism and optimism are as far removed from the Black Metal aesthetic as can be. There is little doubt that if Euronymous had made in a Communist society the music he made with Mayhem, he would have ended his life in a psychiatric ward, prison, Gulag, torture center, death camp.

One might counter that Euronymous' wish for a repressive Communist society was purely based on a straightforward sadist impulse, or on a power-mad desire to become a totalitarian ruler. However, an interview with Euronymous on Swedish radio, probably from February or March 1993, provides further documentation of his position. In the interview, of which you can find the YouTube videos in the 'post scriptum', Euronymous states:

"From what we have heard there are extreme, fundamentalist Christians planning actions against us, which we think is great. We want to see Christians become militant. We hate to see the born again Christians going around being nice to the whole world. That's extremely annoying. We want so see Christians with weapons coming here to kill us. That's what we want."

Like Kafka, Euronymous had a perverse and paradoxical desire for a society (Christian or Stalinist) that denied him the right to exist.

However, Euronymous had a practical problem: he lived in a European social democracy, a society which was very unlikely to deny him the right to exist. Much of Euronymous' extremism can be understood as an impossible rebellion against a social democrat utopia, as the result of a desire to provoke this utopia into denying him the right to exist. Isn't expressing admiration for brutally repressive totalitarian regimes a transgression of the values of social democracy? In fact, the crudeness with which Euronymous expresses his ideas may in itself be a form of rebellion.

Ironically, Euronymous met his end at the hands not of the social democrat society he provoked but at the hands of one of his erstwhile companions in evil: Kristian 'Varg' Vikernes, the man behind one-man Black Metal band Burzum. Ironically? In fact, Vikernes had started to subscribe to a totalitarian (Fascist, not Communist) ideology, the ideology which would stamp out Black Metal if it came to power. Vikernes subscribed (and still subscribes) to Fascism in a straightforward manner, having ironed out all the ambiguities, perversities and paradoxes that characterized Euronymous' position with regards to totalitarianism. Because of this straightforwardness, Vikernes' ideological writings do no evoke exuberance; on the contrary, the life it evokes is unremittingly dreary.

Nevertheless, there is an important difference between the totalitarianism evoked by Euronymous and that evoked by Vikernes. Where Vikernes' vjsual aesthetic recalls the gaudy and nostalgic pseudo-folklore kitsch of National-Socialism, the anti-aesthetic of Euronymous revels in the gray and the miserable. It is in fact the gray of the colorless and arid world of the bureaucracies of the pseudo-justice of Kafka's The Castle and The Trial. Furthermore, where Vikernes' aesthetic evokes a triumphant totalitarianism, the totalitarianism Euronymous evokes is in a sense a failed totalitarianism, a totalitarianism which is provoked into brutal repression because it encounters something irreducible to its ideology. And what is it, that is irreducible? It is childishness, the perfect puerility of Kafka and Euronymous.

"It is by childishness that humanity, in its nascent state, shows its essential nature."



Post scriptum

The interview with Euronymous from Mayhem on Swedish radio, probably from February or March 1993:

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Here is a link to an interesting review of Hollier's book.

My post on Dead Raven Choir's album 'My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind" also explores Euronymous' fascination for Eastern Bloc dictatorships.

Euronymous as Kafka, Hitler as Kalki.

Decentred Acquisition Strategy

Quality control through a decentered acquisition strategy: buying Metal releases from Boomkat, and buying Electronica and Dancee releases from Aquarius.

Exotica - Carmen Miranda

"With her arrival in New York, she found her speech, accent and mannerisms turned into idiocies by the American media. The American public (and Wittgenstein) loved her for her fractured accent and odd expressions, the inter-language of her songs ans high-speed repartee, part-English, part-Portuguese, part-monkey cries and sound poetry. Men, of course, lusted after her exotic exuberance or, lusting after other men, they dressed in Carmen Miranda outfits." From "Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world", by David Toop (Serpent's Tail, 1999)

*






"In the 1930s, whenever he felt exhausted and drained from his classes at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein would go to the cinema with a friend or some student. Ray Monk tells us that he would always sit in the front row, where he could probably immerse himself more completely in the stream of images and sound, and he preferred either westerns or musicals starring
the Portuguese-Brazilian Carmen Miranda." From "Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir", by Norman Malcolm (Oxford University Press, 1958).


Wittgenstein, Directed by Derek Jarman, Britain 1993, color, 35mm, 76 min.

Buried Melodies

Melodies 'buried' beneath chaos, noise, buzz - the funerary metaphor is a staple, if not a cliché of Black Metal reviews:

"Leichenbergen (corps mountains) plods along dissonantly and onevenly with orchestral stabs and bass wails to reveal some deaden melody's buried beneath the chaos (...)" (here)

"Watain build walls of noise with melodies buried deep within (...)" (here)

"(...) there's even some pretty melodies - buried way in the mix, but still there, like the glistening droplets of synth around the beginning of 'Wandering the Wilderness...'., and the quite lovely but also devastatingly morose melody in the title track that Xasthur would kill for." (here)

"Loping mid-tempo buzz over buried angelic choruses, like Morricone's The Mission performed by Graveland." (here)

The 'burial' metaphor points towards a way of listening to Black Metal that is teleological - like an archeologist, the listener excavates the melodies, removing the soil, chaos, noise and buzz until the musical truth is revealed. This way of listening to Black Metal can be likened to watching a strip tease (seeing clothes stripped away, in the hope of the revelation of the sexual organ) or reading a suspense novel (the obfuscations of the plot being stripped away to reveal 'whodunnit'). Listening to Black Metal this way is primarily an intellectual pleasure: one learns to discern, one learns to know, to understand the melodic origin or destiny of the music. The melody would serve as a transcendent signifier, as the source of the whole song, as the source of Black Metal signification.

However, I feel the situation of Black Metal is a little more complicated. After all, Black Metal is a necro(-philiac) genre - the melody is only excavated because it is cold and dead. And how did melody die? It died because it was buried alive. Melody asphyxiated, dehydrated, starved in a tomb of chaos, noise and buzz. Why was it buried alive? Only to dig it up again. For Black Metal, love smells like death.



Post scriptum

Of course, this post is deeply indebted to "The Pleasure of the Text' by Roland Barthes.

Current 93 - Live at the Roadburn Festival

Last Sunday - April 20th 2008 - I saw Current 93 (David Tibet supported by no less than eleven musicians) live at 013 venue in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

Tibet's performance and its psychological effect on myself, reminded me strongly of the 1958 ethnography 'Voodoo In Haiti' by Alfred Métraux:

"The explanation of mystical trance given by disciples of Voodoo is simple: a loa moves into the head of an individual having first driven out the 'big good angel' (gros bon ange) - one of the two souls that everyone carries within himself. This eviction of the soul is responsible for the tremblings and convulsions which characterize the opening stages of trance. Once the good angel has gone the person possessed experiences a feeling of total emptiness as though he were fainting. His head whirls, the calves of his legs tremble; he now becomes not only the vessel but also the instrument of the god. From now on it is the god's personality and not his own which is expressed in his bearing and words. The play of his features, his gestures and even the tone of his voice all reflect the temperament and the character of the god who has descended upon him.

(...)

The preliminary crisis has a contagious effect, particularly upon people who are nervous or unstable. That is why the sight of a possession often has the effect of provoking others, not only among the hunsi who are ready to be ridden by the gods but also among the spectators who have come as visitors or out of curiosity.

(...)

Unlike an hysteric who shows his own misery and desires by means of a symptom - which is an entirely personal form of expression - the man who is ritually possessed must correspond to the traditional conception of some mythical personage."

And by which mythical personage is the man ritually possessed? By Walter Benjamin's angel of history:

"A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

Post scriptum

I also met these very nice people (not familiar with their music, though).

Exotica - Yma Sumac

From 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"Yma Sumac's origins are still in doubt, muddied by claims she was an Incan princess, a descendant of Atahualpa, who was killed by the Spanish in 1527. This dubious legend was matched by counterclaims that she was Amy Camus from Brooklyn. (...)

Only few singers possess the freakish, octave quality of Sumac's voice. (...) A generic jungle landscape is conjured, interspersed with magisterial orchestral climaxes, presumably suggestive of pyramids, citadels and sun temples rising out of forests." (...)

Sumac, like the parabola of her voice - its low moans and masculine gutteral, the musical saw of her upper registers - floats between identities, wrapped in the image manufacturing of Hollywood and her self-created ambiguities."

Below are YouTube videos to the 1954 film 'Secret of the Incas' which stars Sumac.