This is by my friend Mark Ames in Moscow, as
published in the New York Press:

BLACK METAL NATION:
Norwegian dirtheads and the Frum/Perle "End of
the World" tour.



My idea of a Norwegian was always some cheerless
Social Democrat in a knit sweater whose greatest
joy in life was comparing the price of beer in
Prague (cheap) to the price of beer in Krakow
(even cheaper). Then I read the just-released new
edition of Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the
Satanic Metal Underground, a cult classic that
first appeared in 1998.

Dude. No, seriously. Du-hu-hude. All I can say is
that Norway f**kiiin’ rocks!

Lords of Chaos chronicles the rise of Black
Metal, Norway’s extremist contribution to the
underground metal scene in the late 80s and early
90s. What made Black Metal so exceptional wasn’t
just the speed and thrash of the music, the
violence of the lyrics or the amount of corpse-
paint that its death-obsessed members wore, but
rather the number of real corpses and smoldering
churches that the movement left behind.

The rise of the Black Metal movement in Norway is
a case of humorless dirtheads taking a joke way
too seriously. The joke was Satanic rock, which
Lords of Chaos skillfully traces from its early
origins in Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Coven
(who transformed from performing black masses on
stage to perpetrating the weepy hippie hit "One
Tin Soldier") to metal’s second big wave in the
early 80s and the rise of kitsch Satan-rockers
Venom. To our modern eyes, Venom looks the
spitting image of Spinal Tap during their Smell
the Glove phase, but to dirtheads who didn’t know
any better, Venom was the long-sought embodiment
of evil. It was from the Venom branch of evil-
metal that all of metal’s more violent, "evil"
forms descended, including Black Metal.

The point of Satanic rock was to scare the
Normals while f**king with the minds of its
pimple-faced, predominantly male (nerdoid)
audience, who needed to create a counter-world,
with counter-morals and counter-aesthetics, to
empower the nerdoids against the cooler, more
successful jocks. But metal had its rivals for
the hopelessly angry nerdoid: punk, hardcore and
metal’s own competing mutations. The competition
forced metal’s leading edge to metamorphose into
harder, faster and more violent forms, reaching
its apex with the rise of Death Metal in the mid-
80s. Death Metal was as violent, Satanic and
musically inaccessible as metal could go, or so
it seemed.

And here is where Norway, the comic straight-man
character in this dumb, bloody saga, comes in.
Norway is not only a completely humorless society
(it banned Monty Python’s The Life of Brian for
being too offensive, leading to ads in rival
Sweden boasting that the movie was "so funny it
was banned in Norway!"), but worse, a deeply
oppressive society, in a recognizably bland,
caring, pious, Social Democratic way. Which
raises an interesting question: Do boredom and
blandness "count" as real suffering, and if so,
do they justify murder the way other forms of
oppression make murder seem a likely, even
understandable response? The Black Metalists of
Norway think so.

The humor and empty boasts inherent in Death
Metal were lost on Norway’s youth. They took
Death Metal literally, and quickly discovered
that it wasn’t "evil" or "authentic" enough.
There were too many "poseurs." And more
important, too few genuine corpses for a scene
that claimed to be so obsessed with death and
violence. So Black Metal offered up one of its
own as its first sacrificial corpse: the lead
singer of Mayhem, who ingeniously had changed his
name to "Dead," offed himself with a shotgun. His
friend and lead guitarist, Euronymous, discovered
Dead’s brains splattered all over their
apartment. So the first thing Euronymous does is
run down to the village store to buy film, run
back, snap a whole bunch of photos of Dead’s
corpse, boast to all his friends about it, then
call the cops. Now that is f**kin’ cool, dude.

You’ve really got to hand it to the Norse for
keeping it real. I for one will be scratching
them off the "Eurofag" list.

Euronymous eventually got offed himself by a
rival Black Metaler, the surprisingly interesting
neo-Nazi Varg Vikernes of Burzum, in large part
because Varg thought Euronymous wasn’t "evil"
enough. Vikernes’ own account of how he killed
Euronymous, chasing him around an apartment
building knifing him while the Black Metal victim
screamed for help, is truly one of the great
slapstick moments in murder history: "I hit him
directly into his skull and his eyes went boing!
and he was dead." (I particularly like Varg’s
Looney Tunes "boing!")

The book, particularly the first half, is often
laugh-out-loud funny, in a metal sort of way. For
one thing, Black Metalists are incredibly
pedantic–as laughably pedantic as the worst jerks
you knew in the college rock/punk/hardcore scene,
and pedantic about the very same stupid things:
who is
more "genuine," "authentic," "extreme," "on-the-
edge" and in metal’s case, "evil." It’s almost
painful to read about the various figures’
internecine pedantry wars because they’re so
similar to battles that were/are waged by pedants
in the "alternative" subculture, which had always
considered itself far superior to "lowly"
metalhead culture.

And frankly, who’s to say that metalheads were
lower or lamer than punks? One thing that’s hard
to argue with the Black Metalists about is why
many of them chose metal over punk: For them,
punk copped out. Punk started off going for the
throat of Normal Society, but in the game of
chicken it didn’t have the nerve to go all the
way, snagglepussing safely leftward or detouring
into kitsch just when it had to lay its last
cards on the table. Punk copped out almost at its
inception, with The Clash quickly
abandoning "White Riot" for pastafarian hippie
politics, or the Sex Pistols devolving overnight
from terrifying chaos to self-parody, a
depressing degradation chronicled in The Great
Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle.

The Black Metalists understood this copout quite
consciously, opposed it (as they opposed Death
Metal’s cringe in the face of real extremism) and
therefore pushed their war with the Normals to
its logical conclusion: They went for paganism,
National Socialism, church-torching and murder.

And why not go all the way for murder and arson,
considering what the "consequences" of murder are
in Northern Europe. Oo, a Northern European jail.
Oo, I’m so scared! The sentences, when they’re
even given out, are laughably light, while the
jail conditions were described as a "holiday" by
one of the victims’ mothers, or "time flies when
you’re having fun" by one of the perps.

One lesson of Lords of Chaos is that it pays to
murder in Northern Europe. Literally. Going to
prison there is like getting comped at a Comfort
Inn. You can’t possibly get locked away for long,
and even if they give you 10 or 20 years–and
that’s if you’re lucky–you can still get off on
weekends for unaccompanied home visits, enough
time to participate in another murder. Prisons
there are so comfy that even the metalists
complained about getting treated too well. As
Varg Vikernes sneered, "It’s much too nice here.
It’s completely ridiculous. I asked the police to
throw me in a real dungeon, and also encouraged
them to use violence." Naturally, they didn’t.

Which got me thinking: If and when my own
fledgling writing career dives for good, I know
what I’m going to do. Put on some corpse paint,
get myself an axe, go on a Scandinavian murder
spree, then call the cops and demand that they
jail me in the nearest Comfort Inn for life.

Where as the nerdoids in Lords of Chaos were
vainly trying to recapture the lost, centuries-
old glory of their Viking ancestors in a
diminished modern Norway, uber-nerdoids Richard
Perle and David Frum seem hell bent on destroying
contemporary America’s glorious imperial war
machine right at the very peak of its power.
Their plan for leading America, lemming-like,
over the cliff of self-destruction is laid out in
their sparsely-worded manifesto, An End to Evil.
The title alone shows how very Black Metal these
grown-up war nerds are.

Let me just say here that I had always thought
that draft-dodgers like Perle (who snagglepussed
from the Vietnam War, exit stage left) and Frum
(who, as a Canadian, was born a draft-dodger)
were just your run-of-the-mill corporate fags,
but after reading An End to Evil…dude. No
seriously, du-hu-hude. Dude, I’m telling you,
these chickenhawks f**kiiiiiiiiiin’ rock!

Seriously. They rock as hard as Burzum and
Mayhem. The proof? First, both the Black
Metalists and the Republican authors are obsessed
with evil, as the title alone shows. Indeed, Frum
is the author of the famous "axis of evil" line
that has crippled Bush’s room for diplomatic
maneuver. And Frum, like the metalists, got in
trouble for boasting about how he’d made that
line up–the same way that all the Black Metalists
eventually got jailed for boasting about their
murders. For their boasts, Frum got fired while
the Black Metalists got rooms at the Comfort Inn.
Gnarly.

Then there’s Perle, who, like Dead or Euronymous,
has his own infamous Black Metal nom de roque:
The Prince of Darkness. Arrrggghhh! Launch
fireworks and pyrotechnics from front of stage,
set off explosions, lower giant skull as The
Prince of Darkness and David "Axis of Evil" Frum
take to the stage in their End to Evil monsters
of hardline ideology tour!

The similarities don’t stop there. Whereas
Vikernes and other Black Metalists saw heathen
Norway in a life-or-death struggle for existence
with the Semitic tribes’ Judeo-Christianity,
Perle and Frum see Judeo-Christian America under
threat from Islam. And both have the same
solution: War, dude!

To be fair, Vikernes and another Black Metalist
murderer, Hendrik Mobus, come off as far more
interesting, intellectual and complex with their
second-rate Nietzschean ideas mixed up with D&D
mythology, whereas Perle and Frum’s war manifesto
is surprisingly dull and sparse. Indeed, on each
page the words are spaced so far apart you could
drive a fertilizer-packed white van between each
line. I read it in one sitting and came away with
only one memorable line, in which they
disparagingly called Belgium "France’s pilot
fish." On the other hand, Perle and Frum have
used their influence over Bush to rack up a far,
far higher corpse-count than the hapless
Norwegian dirtheads, so they more than make up
for their lack of aesthetic flair or stylized
corpse paint with genuine blood on their hands.

Indeed, every sad word of An End to Evil oozes
Perle’s and Frum’s pained, wasted 60s youths:
wasted in yellow sheet stains, wasted studying
maps color-coded with spheres-of-influence,
wasted memorizing German armaments, and college
years wasted playing Risk in their dorms while
the socially successful hippies frolicked and
f**ked all around them. Perle and Frum will never
forgive America for this humiliation and
therefore they want to egg it on to its suicide
by prodding it into a multi-front apocalyptic
world war.

Their Black Metal plan is simple: Push North
Korea to the brink and China right along with it;
set the path for war against Iran; foment a
Shiite independence movement in oil-rich eastern
Saudi Arabia; kick Russia out of the G-8; invade
Syria and Lebanon, while pushing Israel to turn
the heat up even further on the Palestinians; and
lastly, openly declare our hostility to the
European Union, even if it means making enemies
of France and Germany.

This raises another interesting question: Should
Black Metalists cut their hair and vote Bush-
Cheney ’04? Dude, I think the answer’s pretty
f**kin’ obvious. In fact, thanks to these guys,
America has become the world’s first Black Metal
Nation.