Black metal

Black metal is a subgenre of metal possibly invented in Norway in the 1980s. It is characterised by shrieked/snarled vocals, tremolo picking, fast tempos, blast beat drumming, unconventional song structures, and satanists in corpse paint begging to be taken seriously with their lyrics about forests and wintermoons.

Some trve fans regard black metal as the ultimate pinnacle of metal; however, these fans are idiots, as it's fairly obvious all black metal musicians are mainstream sellouts. Just look at that corpse paint! They're like evil versions of KISS. And since KISS are mainstream sellouts, it only makes sense that bands with near-identical dress sense are also mainstream sellouts.

Black metal's history is long, and riddled with the corpses of many, many people, both trve and false. Nowadays, it is far more tame, and has much less deaths per year (in 2009, only 16 people died of black metal), but it is still feared by the mainstream poseurs who cannot grasp the almightiness of men jumping around in spiked armour shrieking about cold northern forests. It has been speculated by some that black metal shall soon return to form; when this so-called "return to form" will happen is unknown, however.

The First Wave, aka The Stuff that Isn't Black Metal
According to many hack journalists seeking a quick buck, black metal was started in the very early eighties by a group of bands pioneering extreme metal. The most popular - and therefore the worst - bands of this "First Wave of Black Metal" were Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost and Mercyful Fate.

The frontman of the last band, King Diamond, wore corpse paint like a faggot in the style of KISS, his idols; of course, he was smart enough not to take himself seriously. The same can not be said for Sarcofago, who wore corpse paint in a serious manner and expected to be taken more seriously than the hair metal bands prancing around mainstream stages like twats. Whatever their motivations, both King Diamond and the members of Sarcofago significantly influenced the not-actually-existing-at-the-time genre of black metal with their wearing of makeup.

Oh yeah, also, the genre was also apparently named by Venom, with their semenal seminal album Black Metal; however, this is likely to be untrue, as the trve kvlt black metal musicians never listened to Venom. Just as Mayhem and Gorgoroth were like evil versions of KISS, they regarded Venom to be an evil version of Motorhead, forgetting that Motorhead were always the more evil of the two bands.

The Second Wave, "The Call of the Wintermoon", Formation of the Council
In the early 1990s, a "second wave" of black metal bands rose up. Why it's referred to as a "second wave" nobody knows, because this was when black metal was actually created as a genre. The wave was largely focused on the scene in Norway, where a group of pretentious wankers in corpse paint wrote songs about Satan, nazis and cold forests in an attempt to gain respect from art critics. The most prominent of the Norwegian bands included Mayhem, Burzum, Gorgoroth, Emperor, Immortal, Darkthrone, and the sellouts Satyricon. There were also a few Swedish bands, like Marduk, Enslaved, Dissection and Dark Funeral, but Sweden can't make trve metal, so the black metal bands of Sweden don't count.

All of these bands lacked the sense of humour and tongue-in-cheek attitude that Venom and King Diamond possessed, and they were obsessed with staying "trve" to the code of metal; they would never perform live shows, they would always wear corpse paint, and their albums would have really shitty recording quality. Since making these essential tenets of black metal, the bands found it difficult to stick to them, and all of the rules were broken by the end of the month they were created in. The only band that didn't realise they had sold out were Immortal, who continued to make black metal popular and even made a music video.

Once this video got out to the public, the face of black metal changed forever. The public had heard terrifying stories of large Norwegian men in armour and makeup sitting at tables in the great northern forests, drinking tea with wolves. Then they saw this video, and laughed their fucking asses off. Now, black metal was the most ridiculous subgenre ever - because nu metal didn't exist back then - and the musicians realised they had been ruined. Not that they, you know, cared, or anything. They were still not caring about their reputations, even when sending their moronic fan assassins to covertly eliminate several journalists who reported on the video for "The Call of the Wintermoon". These assassins were going to be sent after the members of Immortal too, but Immortal were too awesome to kill, even with that video, so they were kept alive... as long as they disconnected from the other black metal bands.

Following Immortal's exile, a black metal high council was formed, consisting of Euronymous of Mayhem, Varg Vikernes of Burzum, Ihsahn, Faust and Samoth of Emperor, Gaahl (who was not in any band at the time, and just hung around eating biscuits), and the two guys from Darkthrone. This council wrote material for the other bands and dictated everything that those bands did, making sure the new material spread the word of the black metal scene and converted more people to satanism. Not that the council wanted black metal exposed, mind you. No, they never wanted it to become more popular. That's for mallcore sellouts.

Dead Lives Up to His Namesake, Faust Murders a Gay Guy
On April 8 1991, Mayhem's vocalist, Per Yngve "Pelle" Ohlin (also known rather imaginatively as "Dead") was found, uh... dead in a house shared by the band. He committed suicide, because that's the black metal way out of life. Many people who met him while he was not dead described him as quiet, introverted, and totally fucked up - he slit his wrists at (forbidden) concerts, carried around a dead crow and sniffed it to "smell the stench of death", and wore clothes that had been buried weeks prior to concerts. See, we don't even need to come up with jokes - this shit speaks for itself.

Dead's corpse was found by Euronymous, council member and guitarist of Mayhem. Dead was found with slit wrists and a shotgun wound to the head; obviously he wanted to make sure of his deadness. A suicide note was left by Dead reading "Excuse all the blood", and included an apology for firing the weapon indoors. "Also, Euro, man, I'm really sorry I'm dead, it must be a real bummer losing your singer. Considering the rest of you can't do vocals for shit, it looks like you're boned."

Euronymous was going to call the police, but decided he'd show off his photography skills first, and took pictures of Dead's corpse, one of which was later used as the cover for a bootleg live album called Dawn of the Black Hearts. This album greatly increased the band's fanbase - after all, who wouldn't want to buy an album with a legitimate dead guy on the cover?

It was also rumoured that Euronymous had made a stew out of Dead's brain, which is blatantly untrue - I mean, you can see Dead's brain right there in the photo, right? Well, what's left of his brain, but still, see any bitemarks? In an interview in 2002, Euronymous said that the cannibalism aspect was "Slanderous misinformation", and confirmed something else, that he had made jewelry of Dead's skull fragments. He announced that he was going to release a whole fashion line made of the various parts of Dead's body, though considering he'd died ten years before there probably wasn't much left unless Euronymous had frozen the parts. See, freezers can be useful sometimes.

Over a year later, Faust, drummer of Emperor, killed a gay guy called Magne Andreassen by stabbing him. Faust got convicted of murder for this. This particular event is usually overlooked, because Dead's suicide, the church arsons and Euronymous's death seemed a lot more interesting to journalists than the killing of a homosexual. Anyway, Faust got arrested, Emperor needed a new drummer. It would also need a new Samoth, because he had also been arrested.

Church Arsons and Euronymous's Murder
Ihsahn had hoped that he'd be able to continue Emperor as a two-man studio project, akin to Darkthrone, alongside Samoth; however, Samoth was just as stupid as Faust was, and got himself imprisoned for burning down a church with his best friend, council member Varg Vikernes. This was not the only incident of church arson; between 1992 and 1996, over 50 arson attacks had been committed against churches, many of these churches being really, really fucking old and widely regarded as important historical landmarks. All the more reason to set them on fire, then.

Despite the common knowledge that Varg had burned down churches, he wasn't arrested, because nobody dared go up against the guy, as Euronymous would soon find out. One cold, dark, wintery, northern night, Euronymous went to a recording studio to talk with Varg about contracts and boring shit. Nobody knows how this meeting went, but everyone knows how it ended: with Varg taking a chance by destroying his business rivals, starting with Euronymous, whom he stabbed over 30 times. Needless to say, Euronymous was dead, because he wasn't enough of a badass to survive getting stabbed by Varg Vikernes.

After cooking and eating Euronymous's corpse, Varg and the two guys from Darkthrone went off to burn down another church - but the police, tipped off earlier by Ihsahn (about the arson, not the murder), were waiting, and they had machineguns. During the ensuing battle, three police officers were killed by wolves, and the two guys from Darkthrone ended up shot in the face and dumped in a burning ditch - by Varg, who fled from the scene after killing two more council members. Hearing about Ihsahn's betrayal, Varg decided to put his plan into motion and remove the rest of the council members, making himself the ruler of black metal.

You've got to love Varg sometimes.

Varg's Disappearance, The End of the Council, Everyone Stops Caring
Shortly after Varg disappeared to conduct his plan, the corpses of Euronymous and the guys from Darkthrone were discovered by the remaining members of the council - in other words, just Ihsahn and Gaahl. With three dead, two in jail and one a psychopath on the run, the two men decided to end all this madness by dissolving the council. After all, unlike Euronymous and Varg, Ihsahn and Gaahl actually had reasoning skills, as well as slightly more intellect than the former two. In September 1995, Ihsahn and Gaahl made official statements to the press stating that the council had been dissolved, and that the surviving members would just focus on their music. Ihsahn reformed Emperor with two guys who weren't Samoth and Faust, and the band moved away from black metal to play "extreme symphonic metal"; Gaahl became the new vocalist of Gorgoroth after that band's previous singer accidentally shot himself in the throat while performing acrobatic feats in his "black metal circus".

Varg was officially reported as missing 20 days after his shootout with the Norwegian police, and his shitty dark ambient project Burzum was disbanded, a good thing for all trve metalheads who hate that techno shit. However, being figures of authority, the police didn't know anything about Varg's real intentions, so they decided to stop caring, which shows that they're not real metalheads because real metalheads never stop caring about awful black metal musicians.

Although it was anticlimactic, the drama over the Norwegian black metal scene had ended; the mainstream media's brief focus on Varg and Euronymous and all that stuff was soon replaced by adoring admiration for Cradle of Filth, a terrible band that wasn't black metal in any way. They're not even metal, which proves that the mainstream media isn't able to tell their Marilyn Manson from their Arghoslent. Eventually, however, the Norwegian troubles would resurface.