The Dark Ecology of Black Metal

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Author(s): Jason J. Wallin (University of Alberta, Canada)
Copyright: 2014
Pages: 6
Source title: Educational, Psychological, and Behavioral Considerations in Niche Online Communities
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Vivek Venkatesh (Concordia University, Canada), Jason Wallin (University of Alberta, Canada), Juan Carlos Castro (Concordia University, Canada)and Jason Edward Lewis (Concordia University, Canada)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5206-4.ch022

Keywords: Information Science Reference / Media & Communications / Social Computing / Virtual Communities & Virtual Reality

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Abstract

For as much as an encyclopedic introduction to black metal might constitute a helpful orientation to its history or aesthetic character, what such an introduction fails to account for is the question of what black metal music does, or rather what it might do. This particular question is informed by a fundamental paradox that constitutes the core concern of this chapter. While black metal music has been linked to misanthropic tendencies and a general antipathy toward organized religion and bourgeois social mores (see Steinke, 1996) amongst its practitioners and listeners, it concomitantly functions as a highly particularized “therapeutic” vehicle for negotiating feelings of intense despair, depression, and nihilism. Hence, the question of this chapter attends not to what black metal is—a question that creators of black metal music largely reject—but rather the question of how black metal’s affective force works upon the body of the organism.

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