A Quote by Varg Vikernes
I am no friend of the modern so-called 'black metal' culture. It is a tasteless, lowbrow parody of Norwegian black metal circa 1991-92, and if it was up to me, it would meet its dishonorable end as soon as possible.
Related Quotes
I was listening to a lot of Norwegian black metal and death metal. There's a great history to Norwegian black metal. That music is very dark and violent, but it's also beautiful.
I buy some black metal records kind of blindly, and I end up really liking maybe 30% of them. There's a lot of duds, for me at least, in black metal. I have kind of picky tastes about it.
I hardly follow the Finnish metal scene at all at the moment. I'm more interested in traditional '80s heavy metal, and I'm still a little scared of black metal and death metal and their provocative imagery.
I wore a 'Black Metal' Venom T-shirt once, in January 1993, to promote black metal, and I regret having done that ever since.
Out of pure spite we pretty much always said the opposite of what the other said, no matter what they said, only to mark distance. That's how we ended up calling ourselves Satanists, despite the fact that we absolutely were not. There was not a single Satanist in the whole Black Metal scene in Norway in 1991-92.
There's real potency in metal. Metal fans love metal as if it's a nation they would fight for. It's not diluted by pop culture.
There are a good number of people creating black metal and black metal inspired music in the northwest. Much of this music is radically noncommercial and exists only on a very local, private level.
As for complicating the black metal aesthetic, I don't care about that since it was never a goal of mine to lay out any particular preconceived aesthetic, let alone one of traditional black metal where pseudonyms are adopted.
My main problem with Norwegian Black Metal is that almost all the bands from 1992-1993 are made up of rats, who ratted each other out and blamed me for everything that went wrong in the scene. I really don't want to be associated with them in any way.
Bands like Metallica never sat around and said, 'We're speed metal,' or 'We're thrash metal.' If it feels good at the end of the day, to me, that's metal.
Starting in junior high school, through high school, I was very into metal or black metal and death metal specifically.
Adults who loved and knew me, on many occasions sat me down and told me that I was black. As you could imagine, this had a profound impact on me and soon became my truth. Every friend I had was black; my girlfriends were black. I was seen as black, treated as black, and endured constant overt racism as a young black teenager.
Metal isn't necessarily aggressive. There's metal that's contemplative, there's metal that's sad, and there's metal that's exuberant. No genre is limited in what it can express.
Black metal - especially from the '90s - contains a certain production aesthetic that keys you into the emotive content. You feel it more intimately than, say, technical death metal, where everything is produced super-precisely.
There's a lot of music out there that's like, 'I'm so mad! I'm sad! I'm into skulls and crossbones and the color black,' and that's just meaningless and shallow. So much of metal is about that and it's hard to find metal that is substantial and meaningful in terms of its content.
Everything I do is autobiographical in some way. 'Wayne's World' was me growing up in the suburbs of Toronto and listening to heavy metal, and 'Austin Powers' was every bit of British culture that my father, who passed away in 1991, had forced me to watch and taught me to love.
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