Girls Against God

seven years later, it’s been cut up, jailed and convicted, become exalted and legendary.
But imagine what could have happened in ’91, ’93, ’98. Imagine if churches hadn’t needed to be burned down or gravestones toppled, but instead black metallers had reconsidered the craft and the traditions. Imagine if they had broken into churches and redecorated them to make spaceships, radical pirate radio studios and queer clubs … or maybe dropped a glitter bomb. Instead, the churches were set ablaze. A burning cross is a powerful cross. Crusading men have already planted them all over what we call history. Metal has become legendary; it gets press time and everyone is scared, it becomes tabloid and stripped of imagination. It becomes self-expression for insecure men who want to return to a time where they could have been strong. It concerns itself with mainstream values like dominance and control, it becomes monstrous, it simplifies, it’s a tour de force and a power demonstration; it doesn’t concern itself with critique. And no one questions the hate. Hatred is just an expression of strength. No one asks why the word hate actually has an audible h.
Black, we’re taught in school, isn’t a dynamic colour; it isn’t a colour at all. It’s just understood as the opposite of white. And it can’t go anywhere. We can’t hate. But I hate.
Can’t we move? Or do we just avoid going there?
Black metal hated too; it dug itself further in as the ’90s progressed, and opened up the underground to reveal something difficult and dangerous, but with the metallers’ blind, boyish mythological fascination it grew paler and paler, whiter and whiter. The epic drama, the hierarchy, the gender segregation, the authoritarianism, the xenophobia, the silence, became its defining elements – all the things that already define society. In college in 1997 black metallers don’t look different from neo- Nazis, and neo-Nazis don’t look different from black metallers, and no one knows exactly who to beat up. The only people who keep their heads on straight are the brightly coloured Jesus kids, who spend all their time praying for everyone, since upside-down crosses and Nazi violence are the same in their dramatic staging of the fight between God and hell. The battle unifies them, Nazism and black metal and Jesus Revolution, so that everyone is a player in the eternal battle between good and evil, in which individuals dominate thanks to their faith or their race, or their misanthropy, and look down on the sheeple who accept so-called secular social democracy. A fucking party banquet of Southern knights.
A few years later the neo-Nazis have grown up, and returned to the Free Church congregations during the Aryan surge to the right. Black metal is mainstream and America has awoken. Then the porridge is complete: metal knights are regular knights, copied from a subculture into the mainstream, from subversive recordings and misanthropy to big-budget cinema productions about Norwegian resistance during the Nazi occupation, or about postwar expeditions, films like Max Manus, The Battle for Heavy Water, and Kon-Tiki. We’re back where we started, outside Arendal, on Arne Myrdal’s lawn with the People’s Movement Against Immigration. We’re all Southerners now.
Why does resistance always end up just polishing the traditions? Terese asks.
Or making way for them.
Good question, I say, or maybe Venke says. None of us, not even Terese, has a good answer.
From the beginning black metal is just a blackened and dirty version of pre-existing society, its growling an attempt to express a long strain of spoken, silent HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHs, collected from endless appearances of the word white. Every battle is linguistic.
We’re able to see it differently now, twenty-five years after the golden era. We can say that early black metal is a modern version of Munch’s paintings, lo-fi visions of the Norwegian anxiety about death and art, a negative of ourselves that only shows us our reflection. My face in black-and-white death, constantly pointed out by people as I walk through the loathed streets of Grimstad and Arendal, is a modern Scream.
The comments are usually:
CLEAN THAT UP
Or
YOU’LL NEVER GET MARRIED WITH THAT MAKEUP / THOSE CLOTHES / THAT HAIR
or
GIVE US A SMILE, THEN, DON’T BE SO GRUMPY
The boys in the metal band I’m in, and the punk boys and the rave boys, all get beat up in turns by the steroid-fuelled body-builders at the Arendal bus station. They leave me alone, I’m not threatening anyone’s manhood, but I’m the one getting the predictions, the judgement, thrown at me. No one asks why I hate, no one uses that word, they call me grumpy, not even angry, but grumpy, six letters, something inconsequential and self- inflicted, something powerless, insignificant, something small in a small person, not something that’s about society, or about them, just something that means I’m ruining things for myself, something that’s in the way of my potential as an object.
We’re on our way to the concert venue now. It’s as if we have to open up the black again, and the music, to inject potential once more, and to add and?
Where is God?
In college I discover God in the mouth. He’s hidden between the lips of the Christian girls, and not just in the muted words and the silent h’s. God is a musical presence. He’s found in the heavy diphthongs and vowel sounds of the Southern accent, in their slow-paced speech and taciturn nature, in the vibrato that dominates the gospel choir’s hymns.
In the breaks between psalms I hear smiles and chewing. The entire choir is always chewing gum. Their chewing-gum breath is mild and sacred, clean and minty. It’s the corpse paint of the breath, I think. Something synthetic, white and clean to cover the human face. The little chemical wad of plastic and sorbitol that they chew is polished into a pearl in those soft and wet purgatories. They chew as if they’ve