Ashes against the Grain: Black Metal and the Grim Rebirth of Romanticism

Abstract

“Black Metal is a werewolf culture, a werewolf romanticism … Black Metal is Oskorei romanticism.” In his essay “Oskorei,” the Austrian writer and musician Kadmon compellingly links the musical and subcultural phenomenon that is black metal with the Norse tradition of the “wild hunt” and notably describes this conjunction as a “Romantic” one. This chapter argues that black metal challenges and expands the current grasp of Romanticism by regarding it neither as wispy nostalgia nor as a distinct historical period within the nineteenth century, but rather as a radical hermeneutic that expressly elides distinctions among the aesthetic, the political, and the spiritual en route to an overarching rejection of normativized concepts of temporality and history.