Reign in Blood: Youth and the Anarchic Ethics of Evil

• In Event: The Monstrous Other: Exploring the Intersections of Youth Culture and Critical Pedagogy in a Monster-Making World

Abstract

Objectives:
Drawing upon Zizek’s (1994a, 1994b, 2002a, 2002b) development of ‘evil’ through Lacan’s three registers, this essay attempts to tease out alternate readings of ‘evil’ through a detailed analysis of Black Metal music and practice. In this manner, I endeavor to rehabilitate the complex corridors of ‘evil’ against its conceptual collapse as merely the ontological ‘absence of good’. Further, via Zizek, I will offer a reconsideration of the seemingly anti-establishment terrorist activities enacted by some proponents of Black Metal ideology. Herein, I will attempt to deploy a reading of ‘ideological evil’ in order to interrogate the role of enjoyment and desire at work in the Black Metal musical subgenre.

Overview:
The Black Metal subgenre emerged in the early 1980’s, deviating from rhythmically aggressive thrash metal in lieu of more stylized (Wagnerian) Classical and pagan referents. Since its ‘Second Wave’ of stylistic development (1990 -), the Black Metal subgenre has garnered attention in the media for its ostensible negative impact upon contemporary youth. Beginning in the early 1990’s, proponents of the Black Metal movement have been associated with acts of church burning, satanic worship, murder, and ritual suicide. Such actions have circulated under the signifier of ‘evil,’ and have in numerous cases been associated with anti-Christian symbology and pagan practices. Contemporary media and moralizing political pundits have quickly positioned such acts of ‘evil’ beyond rational comprehension via the deployment of ‘a rhetorics of evil’ (Luebb, 2003). This enframement has evaded the psychoanalytic ‘question of evil’ and the significant role of an ‘anarchist ethics’ in theorizing the allure and potential impact of Black Metal music for contemporary youth. It is this latter area of analysis that constitutes the central focus of my essay.

Significance:
Contrary to the notion that youth Metalheads are nihilists, Walser (1993) forwards an ethnography of Heavy Metal culture which agues that Heavy Metal is a means of making meaning of the “fundamental contradictions of its historical moment” (1993, p. 162). For Norwegian Black Metal, the site/sight/cite of this contradiction lies in the very question Badiou (2001) sets out: ‘What is Good?’. Black Metal bands such as Gorgoroth have engaged in an ongoing and active renunciation of the Good, or rather, of a Good which has not upheld its promise. As Walser (1993) notes, “Many young people are frustrated at the hypocrisy they perceive around them, at the lack of history and genuine politics in their educations and in their lives” (p. 150). That the promises of modernity have failed, and yet the institutions which support them continue to lumber on has engendered a generalized mistrust, skepticism, and anger prevalent in Black Metal. The grotesque fantasmagoria deployed by the Black Metal youth subculture hence provide us a way of thinking the hubris of modernist dreams of transcendence over the living world, and further, an alternative to the rise of contemporary consumer culture and its universalization of the social sphere (Connoly, 2003).

Author

• Jason J. Wallin, University of Alberta