There's a community I'm in online, "Black Metal Anarchists," for those of us who like some black metal but don't want to inadvertently end up supporting the lots of neo-fascist stuff that is in the genre. A lot of times, yeah, a band labeled "NSBM" is just some idiots opening their stupid mouths during interviews. But sometimes the liner notes and lyrics do promote Nazism -- it's a real phenomenon, unfortunately. Can't imagine Hitler dancing to the stuff, but it is there. It's not as high on my list of concerns as the Bush administration, militarism, American foreign policy, etc., but culturally it's pretty odious to see kids get into it.
There are a few anti-capitalist, anti-racist-type black metal bands, but not many. Iskra from Canada, for example. Black metal is generally either NSBM or it's "traditional" and just about demons and the occult all that stuff. "Metal" with leftist overtones tends to really be not so much metal as affiliated with punk in some way -- arguably not metal but metallic hardcore or thrash. Amebix were an anarchist metal band in the 80s sometimes seen as proto-black metal, but also anti-capitalist, left-anarchist, etc.
But that NSBM stuff is real and out there and has its own fanzines and int'l connections and touring networks. I've seen French NSBM zines. And the folks who try to go back to ye olde timey Nordic religions, I believe that's known as Asatru: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asatru -- and that does seem to be interwoven a lot with the NSBM thing, though not by definition.
-B.
Jason wrote:
> Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind wrote a book,
'Lords of Chaos', about the so-called National
Socialist Black Metal phenomenon, basically a bunch of
idiot teenage Hitler- and Odin-worshipers who burnt a
few historic chuches in Norway in the early 1990s. One
the key members (a neo-Nazi called Vikernes) of this
minisucle scene murdered another (Euronymous - a
putative communist, according to Moynihan anyway) and,
as a result, its notoriety spread, originally through
tabloidy a feature article in the hillariously
entitled British heavy metal magazine 'Kerrang'.
>
> What all of the reports fail(ed) to mention is quite
how small, irrelevant and pointless the whole thing
is/was - just a bunch of alienated angst-ridden kids.
It reminds me a bit of Morrissey's alleged racism -
remember that? - in that the music press probably
isn't the place to look for serious investigate
journalism. (They probably should have confined
themselves to saying he was an annoying git.)