I have a friend who hates all the theorising going on in academia around black metal. She sees it as something like appropriation or colonisation and it “almost makes me puke” their “speak[ing] about us, not with us”. In reply to my friend, I said many of the writers are coming from within themselves, and think they have something useful to say, and is probably not so horrible.

The first in this collection edited by Scott Wilson is by Drew Daniel. I loved The Soft Pink Truth and the album, Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want … has been a long-time favourite. I hated the cover of Venom’s Black Metal on Why Do the Heathen Rage? It seemed to me to embody everything vacuous, appropriating, bullshit ‘ironic’ that has sprung up around black metal in the past couple of years. Even in ImPulsTanz there was a performance with ‘corpsepaint’. It’s like the safe blackface, which you can’t really even get away with in Germany anymore, but taking the piss out of too-serious metalheads by the cool kids is completely open season.

Seeing my own work has been soaking in metal of one kind or another since the beginning—almost a chronological progression: Yardbirds, Black Sabbath, Motörhead, Slayer, Sunn O))), Agoraphobic Nosebleed, then going off the temporal tracks: Throbbing Gristle, Mayhem, Gorgoroth … reading theory on the subject is probably one of the closest reading relationships I have with thinking on my work. It’s not quite an obligation to read it, but there is something like professional interest.

There’s also scepticism. I do like the idea of black metal theory, yet as a philosophical discipline or however you want to define it, I find it somewhat out of touch with where much of the rest of comparable fields are at. Metal is sadly far too full of white, hetero dudes, and the recent years of theorising on it has been likewise dominated by this one particular viewpoint. If I were to apply my normal criteria to buying an anthology, at least 30% and preferably 50% female authors, this book wouldn’t even get a look in, with only two of the fourteen essays, a bit over 14%. I’m aware I’m not even addressing the content of the book and essays, yet this imbalance directly shapes the thinking behind the content.

As my blogging about reading is more about why I decided to read a book rather than a review, it’s unlikely I’ll write anything on this book unless it turns out to be so good it makes it to my Best of list next year. Even then it would be with reservations: imbalance in representation in published works is part of pervasive structural imbalance across academia and culture generally, and I find it much easier to give my euros to people who recognise this and do something about it.

I’ve been reading Caroline Walker Bynum’s Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond for the past few weeks. It’s slow, heavy going, an absolute joy. I often think the subject matter—medieval Christian blood cults—is incredibly metal, and the writing, thinking, debates at the time and after on theology are highly applicable to a black metal theory, more so than more recent, post-enlightenment european religion. I doubt Bynum is a headbanger, so soliciting an essay for the next collection is probably unlikely. Maybe that’s just to say there is a far broader world already existing than I currently find in black metal theory.