Featured Book: Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground

Authored by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind

I believe I first heard about this number through Amazon.com when I was looking into purchasing a book of photographs called True Norwegian Black Metal. This read came up under one of those “you might also be interested in” sections, if I remember correctly. At any rate, I figured it might be interesting so I picked it up. Knowing that the history of Black Metal is pretty fucked up, I assumed it would score fairly high on the gnarliness scale. Instead, it scored extremely high on the “meh” scale.

This book is written in a way that seems to meld crime drama and investigative journalism. It’s also full of interviews with many of the prominent people within the Black Metal scene, as well as people completely outside of it. The problem is, sometimes things get too far outside of what I expected to be reading about. Some cases it seems warranted, and other times it just seems extraneous. In fact, this bad boy is almost 400 pages long, and I have a feeling I would have gotten the same amount of information even if it was cut down to 200. At times this read just wanders.

Moynihan and Soderlind start out with a basic history of the rise of Satanic metal in general, citing bands like Black Sabbath and Venom. Then they move into how Black Metal itself actually started, still keeping a close tie to the Satanic aspects. All of this is pretty interesting, even if you’ve heard it before. Obviously the book takes on the infamous church burnings and murders involved with Black Metal, thus giving it the crime drama feel, but after awhile things changed, and it began to get a bit boring.

A massive amount of this book is spent talking about Varg Vikernes from Burzum. It’s true the guy is batshit insane and had a lot to do with where Black Metal began to progress, and it’s also true the guy murdered Oystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous from Mayhem), who was probably the most important person in the scene, but I just didn’t want to read that much about him. The whole section just talks about how Varg moved from Satanism to Odinism and is now a Neo-Nazi. Basically, you spend about a quarter of the book reading about Vikernes’ view on Nordic legends and getting a taste of his hate speech.

Using Varg as a bridge, the book then takes a turn from covering the “bloody rise of the Satanic metal underground” to covering nothing but the right-wing politics of many metal bands. If you want to read about that, then you’ll get plenty of information, but that isn’t what I was looking for when I got this. The writers still include information about various crimes and murders committed by the people involved, but most of them are politically based. I don’t know, I just lost interest.

The writing isn’t bad, and the amount of information contained in these pages is pretty impressive, but I lost a lot of respect for the authors because they tend to get very preachy or have a heavy slant towards one person or another. The way Euronymous was described used loaded words that gave me the idea that the writers didn’t respect him. On the same token, when they talked about his murderer (Varg), they seemed to praise him. I later read somewhere that one of the authors is actually a huge supporter of Varg, and whether or not that’s true, I could easily see why someone would think that.

In all honesty, I would recommend the first half of this book as an interesting history on the development and background of Black Metal, but I’d leave all the rest behind. It’s too drawn out and not really worth the time invested.

Featured Book: Radio Silence: A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music

Ok, I just turned the last page on this little slice of gnarheaven, and seriously felt compelled to toss this one up here. If you faithful readers recall the last Featured Book post, on American Hardcore by Steven Blush, you might be thinking this column is developing into a one-trick pony. But bearfight with me here, kids, seriously... Though these two titles, on the surface, may seem like they're covering the exact same material, that statement gets a big, wet "yes and no". How quickly we forget that age-old cliche our elementary school teachers always tried to instill in us: "If you drop out now, you'll be dealing out H.J.'s like hurricane Katrina for a half-eaten eggroll and two broken cigarettes" .... err, i mean, "Don't judge a book by its cover." Right. That one.



What I'm getting at is this: sure, both books cover probably one of if not THE (Spleen's opinion) most important movement in rock music history, but they take two definitive approaches to the material. Where Blush's incredibly extensive interviewing, dissecting, and psuedo-mimicry of a tribal history lesson do their jobs very well, Silence instead focuses solely on the visual motifs, design, craftsmanship, and style of the movement. Furthermore, pumping the book chock full of incredible live shots and photography, album art and cassette sleeves, DIY tshirts and flyers, and accompanying notes and anecdotes to each one are the reasons to sink into this just as rabidly as you should Blush's book. But one giant difference between two two books is that Blush focuses solely on '80 - '86 American hardcore (most likely due to how detailed he approached the subject matter. If he would have continued in that manner, he woulda probably got to volume 12 before hitting the formation of Earth Crisis) and Silence instead, staying more with just style and visual history makes it all the way through late-80's metalcore, thrash-core, skate-core, post-hardcore, early-emo/screamo(?), and all the way to about Snapcase in '94, almost a decade after A.H. stops.


(Sample from the album art index in the back of the book)

Regardless, check it out, it's wonderful. It gave me an old-school-hardcore-in-book-form boner, and I like those. Cuz way too often any punk books on the shelves always seem to skip over it pretty blatantly, jumping from the dissolving of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, to New Wave, to what the fuck, who's this Kurt and the Nirvanas, and why is no one listening to hair metal anymore? ... Also, best line of the book: "There wasn't time to mold your liberty spikes or shine your Dr. Martens. It was jeans and T-shirts, shaved heads, and worn-out sneakers." Fucking rad... Also the photos I included in this post are from the book too... Fuckfightrage.

Sidenote, 10 points to anyone who thought "Wow, Spleen's elementary school teacher musta been a modern-day fuckin Nostradamus or something to drop a Katrina reference in their stay-in-school diatribe about avoiding handjobs for Asian cuisine" ... Cuz you're right. I thought the exact same thing.

Featured DVD and Book: American Hardcore

I apologize if this is old news to some of you out there... but I honestly feel compelled to throw this up and give it more screen time. I picked up the book ("American Hardcore: A Tribal History" by Steven Blush) almost three years ago and quite possibly have read it three or four times over in that span. The reason this book is so damn magically special, besides the fact that it's packed to the brim with information, is that it's pretty much the first to ever tackle this subject fully -- the American youth response to the dwindling of the 70's punk pioneers, and the surge of yuppie-ism gaining momentum. More specifically, it chronicles the '80 - '86 rise of the original "hardcore" within our fifty states.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a boring "this happened, then this happened" kind of retelling... the history is retold by the actual people who lived it. Sure there's Blush as a 'quasi-narrator' (nicely set in bold font, in case you forget which part is him talking) to keep to keep it cohesive, but the bulk of the content is everyone who meant something to the movement putting in their two cents on whichever topic the chapter was highlighting. And it definitely cuts deep, it covers everything from specific bands, to hotbed areas of the country, to the agenda, to the fashion, to the shows, etc...

Honestly, this combo means so much to me because early '80s hardcore has to be my all-time favorite genre or 'style' of music (ie. Black Flag, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, Misfits, Minor Threat, Minutemen, etc)... and frankly, the lack of attention paid to it in the realm of music history really pissed my shit off. Any book or documentary I picked up before these were all the same, "Iggy and Lou Reed were on to something, then New York birthed punk rock at CBGB's, then England exploded with the Pistols, Clash, Damned and such, then a post-punk movement grew out of the ashes, watering things down by "getting experimental" ... then according to them it seems the world stopped for a bit... and suddenly, oh no, here's Nirvana! And it's some mystery how that happened. Get it together assholes, quit skipping over one of the most pure, radical, and important movements in our short musical journey on this planet.

So, anyway... to my delight, this book spawned a documentary, made by the same people. I really really wanted this to be the end all be all of my favorite documentaries, but when i saw it opening night up here in NYC, I was slightly (and I emphasize 'slightly') disappointed. But in a good way of sorts, if that makes sense... I mean, what did I expect, if you really wanted to capture all of this info in a documentary, it would have to be 12 hours long or something. So long story short, I loved it to death, but I see how it could seem they tried to cram as much info as possible into two hours. Which leads me to the DVD, and why it's featured... Rabidly purchasing this as well, the day it came out, the special features totally revived everything I hoped the movie would be. Swelling with more content, I couldn't have been more pleased.... So If you missed it in theaters, pick up this DVD now, and bop on down to your local book sellers and get a major dose of powerviolence... in book form!

Here's the trailer, if you need more convincing: