TRUE NORWEGIAN BLACK METAL PETER BESTE (VICE)
Ironically, though, the same traits that work as popularity repellents also make black metal very attractive to certain people. Musical avant-gardists find it fascinating, especially the juxtaposition of brutal ugliness and Wagnerian ambition in the subgenre called symphonic black metal. Visual artists go for the illegibly ornate logos that are de rigueur for black-metal bands and the grainy photos of forbidding Norwegian landscapes that frequently show up on album covers. And lots of pop-culture junkies with a taste for irony love black metal because the sheer ridiculousness of a bunch of scowling Scandinavians putting on makeup and waving broadswords around is too much to pass up.
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For the more dedicated, though, the artifice of black metal appears to have become part of their “real” personalities. Kvitrafn of Wardruna is shot standing on a narrow cobblestone street in a quaint neighborhood of Bergen, shirtless and defiant in his smeared corpsepaint while an older woman walks by giving him the evil eye. He looks like he’d stand around all day soaking up hatred from normals if he could.
I know I’m not the first to ask questions like this, and I doubt I’ll get closer to a definitive answer than anybody else. I suppose I could take a point of view closer to Beste’s, and just try to appreciate the paradox that the opposite of beauty can itself be beautiful.v
