Euronymous - the myth and its roots

by Rex Sacriticulus

(I realized after posting that for some weird reason blogspot messed up the posting date; this article was actually published on the 10th of August, 3.20 PM, Central European time.)

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As of today - 10/08/2010 - 17 years have passed since the murder of Euronymous.

Those of you who followed this blog know that it is dedicated to exposing and debunking the negative myths spread all over the web about this highly influential underground musician and ideologue. Hopefully this dedicated work has somewhat disrupted the ongoing character assassination campaign directed against the memory of Euronymous by the very man who assassinated him physically and who is still considered for some reason a reliable source about this matter by too many braindead idiots.

Today we shall try to approach the subject from a different angle and analyze the life work of Euronymous and its origins as objectively as possible. As we have seen, the man was surrounded by myths from the very beginning. The negative myths spread by Vikernes and his followers were meant to counter the positive myths (by Black Metal standard) that were common before and right after his death.

One thing remains the same: an underground Metal musician surrounded by myths - something we have not seen in the last 15 years regarding anyone in the Metal scene despite the flux of impressive albums released since then. A culture incapable of producing new myths indicates its incapability to produce or reproduce the great cultural phenomenae of its past which generated the myths in the first place.

Just think about the absence of new cosmogonical myths since the last 2500 years anywhere in the world. Newer doctrines like, for example, Christianity and Buddhism simply recycled older myths into their own philosophy. This is a clear indication that colossal natural and celestial events of the prehistoric past no longer happen in later times, and that the "myth making epoch" has come to an end as a result.

The same process is shown to happen in cultural spheres like underground Black Metal. It has since then been downgraded to just another socially acceptable form of entertainment, much like the rest of the Metal scene. It is now just another music genre like Folk and Jazz.

What was it about the second wave of Black Metal that generated such myths and reactions? What part did Euronymous play in this arena?
The proper place to start answering these questions is of course the first phase of his career in the mid 1980´s, when the first wave of Black Metal was still at its peak.

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Euronymous made his first move in the extreme Metal underground during its earliest heyday in the mid 1980´s through the legendary "Deathcrush" demo. It has been already reviewed by many others so we won´t go into too many details here.

Suffice to say it gained people´s respect for its primitive and brutal treatment of Bathory & Hellhammer, and as such can only be compared to very few demos of that era.
Sarcofago´s "The Black Vomit", Necrovore´s "Divus de Mortuus" and Salem´s "Destruction till Death" obviously come to mind, yet there was an "extra" dimension to Euronymous´ work already then: who else could have convinced Conrad Schnitzler - of 1970s Electro Prog band Tangerine Dream and respected film soundtrack composer - to create the infamous "Silvester Anfang" intro? Who else could have come up with such an idea as early as 1986?

(Read what Conrad Schnitzler has to say about his encounter with Euronymous here.)

This early interest in Electronic and Avantgarde music - a very unusual interest for an extreme Metal musician back then - is the key to understanding the inspirational sources that shaped the later musical works of Euronymous and his later emulators.

A wide spectrum of influences other than extreme Metal and the ability to synchronize diversified elements into a coherent structure has proven to be crucial to the creative process of the more original Metal bands, and Mayhem was one of the most original bands during its heyday of 1986 - 1993; its atmospheric achievements are unmatched to this day.

Another crucial factor was the ability to compose instinctively rather than technically. This is the essence of the second wave of Black Metal, created by musicians who formerly played technical Death Metal and were inspired by Euronymous to abandon this style in favor of minimalistic atmospheric tunes. While technically easier, it is mentally much more difficult to come up with such tunes unless the musician has very strong instincts, so the most minimalistic riffs turn out to be the most enduring ones.

To sum it up - the genious of Euronymous as a musician comes from amalgamating the raw aggression of early Black Metal with the dark ambiance of early Electronic and Avantgarde music, without falling into the trap of synth-based extreme Metal that plagues the genre since the mid 1990´s. In short, Euronymous reshaped the 1990´s underground Metal on the foundation of seemingly unrelated 1980´s separate musical movements.

Of course, this is only part of the picture, and as we said in the first part of this article, music alone does not create the mythology around the musician.

The second ingredient in the Euronymous-myth would be his effort to turn Black Metal into a lifestyle, rather than just music - something that has been completely absent since his demise.
In the third part of this article we shall see how the ideas and actions of this man shaped the second wave of Black Metal in its early stages.

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The classic Mayhem line-up was formed in 1988 when Dead joined the band and the whole bunch relocated to a secluded cabin in Kråkstad outside of Oslo. A relocation of a whole band to such premises has previously been done by the biggest bands at the peak of their careers - Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and even Celtic Frost. It has never been done by a little known underground band as Mayhem was at the time.

Although it is unknown yet how exactly they managed to fund the whole thing - interviews from that era reveal a gloomy picture of several young men in poor living conditions, nearly starving sometimes. Yet they have chosen this lifestyle for the sake of devoting everything to the band and its yet to become classic album "De Mysteriis Dom. Sathanas".

Could something similar happen today? Could modern Metal kids devote their life to the goal of creating underground music in a dying genre as Black Metal was in the 1980´s? I seriously doubt it.
But back then extreme Metal was more than just a music genre. If you were into it, by definition there was something different about you than the average guy on the street. You were drawn to this music and the related lifestyle precisely for this reason. Not so today, when even Black Metal has become a socially acceptable form of entertainment that is even promoted by certain Scandinavian governments as a form of "cultural export".

While the promising Death Metal scene of the late 1980´s slowly degraded into the cartoonish garbage of countless Cannibal Corpse clones, the natural way to turn your back on it was going back to the basics of Bathory and Celtic Frost and taking it from there. Parallel movements emerged in Sweden, Finland and Greece, but Euronymous has been there long before that regardless of the trend d´jour.

The emergent second wave of Black Metal presented blatant hostility towards the Death Metal trend and sought to separate itself from it in every way imaginable. In nowadays "anything goes" scene, it is hard to imagine such a mentality but since the Black Metal explosion up until the late 1990´s there was a strong sentiment of hostility towards Death Metal from the imposing Black Metal audience, even though Black Metal itself later became a commercialized caricature of its former self.
This strong vibe against technical overproduced synthetic Metal meant that anyone who wanted to gain recognition had to work harder and come up with unique atmospheric music of his own making, and he had high standards to meet.

The man who set the standard, musically and ideologically was Euronymous.

Many reviewers have noted a watermark line between the Dead-era Mayhem and the post suicide-Mayhem. The suicide supposedly "pushed Euronymous over the line" and sparked the 1990´s Norwegian Black Metal movement.

One more aspect worthy of scrutiny is the fascination to Communism by Euronymous. During the 1980´s it seemed to have been rooted in the idealistic youth ideology so common within the Punk scene, and certain letters by Euronymous available today (view scans of some of his letters here) tend to support this hypothesis, as they demonstrate his similar mindset at the time.

Later on he seemed to have finally grasped the insidious nature of Communism, yet he showed it explicitly with brutal honesty. He often said he supported Communism because it is "evil" and he wanted to use it against humanity which he hated. This is very different from the average Communist ideologue who pretends to have humanity´s best interest in mind, while actually working to destroy society from within to fulfill his nihilistic goals.
It is no wonder that "Rød Ungdom" - the party Euronymous was a member of for a while had a lasting appeal for Norwegian radical intellectuals who always and everywhere promote Communism as a means to destroy the society they live in.

Apart from the escalating nihilism and misanthropy, Euronymous had developed a tendency to present strict behavioural codes such as aversion to humor or any other "positive" emotion, and constangly maintained "grim" moods and appearances. Anyone who knows the 1980´s Darkwave scene will notice the similarity between this particular genre and the second wave of Black Metal circa 1990 - 1994 as it has been shaped by Euronymous and his influence over the younger musicians surrounding him. Perhaps in this aspect it was indeed a psychological reaction to Dead´s suicide: embracing the emotional trauma as a lasting mental state and turning it to a mandatory social code.

Either way, all those processes converged exactly 17 years ago when a former protégé of Euronymous gone rogue has ended his life and ignited the media frenzy with its devastating results.
Black Metal has never been the same again, although the musical momentum for the very least carried on until 1996.

Perhaps today we can reflect back to how things were done back then to better understand why the music of that era was far superior to that of today, by any standard, and maybe someone, somewhere will be able to capture something of the old spirit.

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