Art, in our contemporary setting, has come to mean either an “absolute art” supposedly without link to anything outside itself, or the “all art is political” of mentally incapacitated Marxists. However, in its highest expression, art, including and above all music, should be something that expresses and encompasses yet is beyond both of these. Art and culture surface as expressions of civilization, or of factions and mentalities within those civilizations. That is not to say that idea is wholly above craft. The holistic vision is that craft matters as much as idea, and that the result of an art work should be powerful in every sense of the word: sturdy construction that connects to emotions and evokes ideals. All political, social and aesthetic specification must ultimately dissolve and bow down to the living entity that should be the art work as expressing a higher dimension of their creators within time and place, yet connected to all times and places.
When it comes to black metal, it has become a trend to refer to much of it as ‘ritualistic’, and whatever that means for each particular person is a completely different topic. In most cases, this refers to the attitude of performers and their religious or spiritual convictions, rather than any concrete characteristic in the music, except for the trend in almost all such music having the tendency towards relatively vacuous noise. Any kind of music that limits itself to attitudes but disregards scrutiny of craft itself can rightly be called a joke or a fraud. What differentiates good metal as a conduit from empty academicism or ‘ritualistic’ religio-spiritual satano-nu-agisms, is its the immediacy of its contact along with the permanence of that feeling that first penetrates our ears and conscience, making us tremble.
On the other hand, metal has the potential of being the voice of Hessians from within our present civilization. It can, and in the best cases has been, a transcendental voice reaching from within the confines of this rotten society towards immanent peaks and immortal ideals beyond good and evil. Needless to say, this works exclusively in conjunction with a listener that is able to understand the words, the feelings evoked, and the organized structures and specific noises in the context of a different type of man that rises above and against modern attitudes. Metal is an instrument, an act of sorcery, that allows us to connect to dark forces that permeate reality, melting down or at least making transparent the deception of modernity and its comforts. Metal should be comforting to the alienated and extremist side of Hessians, rather than a ‘safe space’ for those seeking self-assurance and personal introspection for the average metalhead. In fact, the rejection of a work of solid, real Hessian metal, or at least its conditioning, by the average metalhead as too extreme, too ‘ignorant’, too ‘alienated’ could be taken as a sign that there is something more to the music than just ‘music’ as a source of pleasure.
A person like Varg Vikernes, who during his metal phase could be said to have produced works that signaled this way, eventually chose to escape and rise above modernity. His disavowal of metal can be understood in this context as the understanding that in his path, this kind of music is no longer necessary. Having the opportunity and the ability to set oneself outside this context, even if not completely, gives one the liberty to choose a more appropriate conduit. The instrumental music of Vikernes produced through modern technology, despite its means, is an expression of the context of his personal life at the transcendental level. It is not an illusion. The error might be to think that one can ‘go back’ to what once was, when in truth the only way is forward.
Metal at its most advanced (that is, black metal) must then inevitably be linked to the symbol that in our current civilization-cycle corresponds to a force of rebellion and dissolution —all else is delusion and fantasy role-playing. Metal about knights, about kings and castles, and even pagan-larping, is the domain of the infantile and the ultimately irrelevant. To make of metal more than a diversion or a ‘pretty’ symbol, a pleasure to stroke egos or accompany drinking sessions with friends, it must be expressed as black metal and in a serious antagonism. One should not be surprised that all best underground metal, that is the best of the best, has been labelled ‘satanic’ as seen from one angle or another. For those clinging to moralistic religions, nationalistic ideals or anything that seeks to “heal the sickness”, there is no place in the deepest, darkest —the only ‘real’ side of metal.