#blackmetaltheorygate

Introduction to Coloring the Black: A Black Metal Theory Symposium

I want to focus on some of the responses to the framing of Coloring the Black, many

of which were predictable but some of which were unforeseen and disappointing. There

was, of course, the usual anti-intellectualism which attends any theoretical or

artistic/aesthetic incursions into the space of black metal. This “dimming” response which

could also be interpreted as a “dimming” of the colourful range of approaches to black

metal included the usual boundary-marking. “If you don’t understand it, stay away from it”.

“Why do these feminists want to destroy Black Metal?” “Quorthon would be turning in his

grave”. What is most puzzling about these remarks is that they completely invert the

rationale for the symposium and mischaracterize us as people who know nothing about

black metal (they can’t be fans!) who are waging a war of political correctness on their

sacred turf. As perceived outsiders we are told, repeatedly, on social media “fuck off and

die”.

A second type of response we received is what I would call “autoimmunitary”. It is

not unrelated to the idea that we are some sort of foreign body trying to enter into Black

Metal in a quasi-ruinous fashion. So, in the language of self-protection commenters say we

are “the worst kind of cancer” and that we are AIDS, that we literally embody the disease

and therefore we must be “eradicated”. This is not unrelated to the (again determined or

wilful) misreading of the project as only about color (or rather only about one colour, pink,

which despite its unreadability and latency on the color spectrum itself these commentators

are sure must be coded as “gay”. “Color” then can only be seen, no matter what, as

“pathological” in a black metal world where grim black and frosty white are the only

legitimate and legible hues.

We can broadly label these responses to our project as “Chromophobic”. In his book

of that name the artist David Batchelor notes how color has been the object of extreme

prejudice in Western culture. “This loathing of color, this fear of corruption through color,

needs a name: chromophobia”. Color is ”rarely neutral” and it always polarizes.

Paradoxically, chromophobia and chromophilia, hatred and love of color are “both utterly

opposed and rather alike”. However, there is a certain poverty which is symptomatic of the

responses to us. They are only interested in one color and that’s pink. And pink doesn’t

matter in the world of black metal. Don’t they get it? There’s only one color and that’s black.

This impoverished notion of color as that which does not matter is a telling symptom though

insofar as it must matter to them because our chromophilia gets in the way, gets in their

way, then it must matter. Batchelor writes that: “It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that,

in the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled,

diminished and degraded. Generations of philosophers, artists, art historians and cultural

theorists of one stripe or another have kept this prejudice alive, warm, fed and groomed”.

The last word groomed is interesting because, among the more bizarre responses we

received was that the intense pinks we were talking about are associated with pedophilia,

with grooming kids on the internet. There was, naturally enough, a whole welter of racist

responses which bear on the same issues of purity and marginalization. But, “as with all

prejudice, its manifest form, its loathing masks a fear” and that is a fear of contamination

and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable. Ironically, it is a

similarly pathological fear of extreme metal which pervades culture.

And chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from

culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More

specifically, this purging of color is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first,

colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body—usually the feminine, the

primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. This first type of

chromophobic response saw the Coloring the Black rationale getting embroiled in a debate

about Andy Curtis Brignell’s critiques of misogyny and unsafe spaces in metal culture. Both

Caina and our project got branded as “girlfriend metal”, our unapologetic feminist stance

proving to be destabilizing of the dominant masculinist narrative of black metal culture (and

we should note the prevailing bro-culture of Black Metal Theory which we are also putting

into question). More worryingly, a record label owner issued death threats as well as

glorifying images of violence against women on our Facebook page. He also went on to set

up a “pink” black metal page devoted to the denunciation of the trend of pinking black

metal by sissies, punks and pussies like us, Caina, Deafheaven, Zweiss.

In the second type of purgation “color is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the

supplementary, the inessential, or cosmetic” and is therefore, by the same logic,

threatening. Color is often dismissed as mere make-up. Even Roland Barthes felt that color

was “a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black and white photograph. For

me, color is an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses”). What worried

Barthes is what interests the chromophile. In corpse paint there might, inversely be a denial

of death or affirmation of life in corpse-paint (Janet Silk reads suicidal black metal in

precisely this way).

Lack of seriousness was, however, a more than common response to the

announcement of the symposium. Is this a piss take? It has to be a joke? And, indeed, color

is very often treated as being unworthy of serious consideration, artificial, trivial, excluded

from the “higher concerns of the mind”, a corruption or fall from seriousness. It was just

one line in our proposal about the risk black metal theory runs in taking itself too seriously

which really wrankled. But, for us, so much of Black Metal Theory is ponderous, hermeticist,

obscurantist and there is a severe narrowing of the palette of color (the same names over

and over, the same canon of theorists over and over again). There is, we argued a

humourlessness and colourlessness which pervades black metal theory and it is that

monochromaticism which we set out to corrupt. But as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it “it us

not easy being viridescent”. A colourful Black Metal Theory would be risky and unsafe (in a

good way). And it must, of necessity, be “anti-disciplinary” to counter the disciplinarity of

current black metal theorizing.

We learned a whole new lexicon of hate speech in the last couple of months as we

read responses to the publicization of the event. One of the first tweets I saw referred to us

as “SJWs” and had the hashtag #Metal Gate. I discovered that #metal gate refers to

#gamergate which was an aggressive masculinist response to women designers in gaming

culture which began on social media. Several prominent female game designers were

subjected to rape and death threats as well as wikileaks style disclosure of their personal

details placing them in great physical danger. #metalgate is a similar eruption of social

media invective against women (and feminist men) in metal. SJW refers to social justice

warriors who call attention to racism, sexism, ableism and all manner of prejudice in gaming

and metal cultures. Shortly after learning of all this I watched an episode of the always

timely Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in which several male gamers targeted and

ultimately raped and tortured a female game designer. It was sobering for both of us to see

how the handful of tweets directed at us pales alongside the thousands directed at women

with the #gamergate and #metalgate hashtags every day.

What we weren’t prepared for is what could only be called #blackmetaltheorygate in

which the orthodoxy of black metal theory lived up to our concern that there was every

danger of black metal theory developing into a KVLT or TROO BMT (the crossover between

orthodox BMT and the fetishization of the HBO television show True Detective which gets

off on violence against women already sounded a warning note).

In the book from the first Black Metal Theory symposium which was held in Brooklyn

and titled (with a nod to Caina) Hideous Gnosis Erik Butler speaks about this dichotomy

between orthodoxy and heresy but in the case of responses by the BMT orthodoxy “the

enemy (us) was not only to be found outside of the metal community, but also within”. In

response to a black metal musician writing “is this a fucking joke” on our FB event page

Nicola Masciandaro, the founder of BMT, clicked “like”. To the following comment

completely caricaturing the aims of the symposium he again clicked “like”. He has also

censored all mention of the symposium on the FB page for “Mors Mystica” a symposium

which will be held next month in Brooklyn. Evidently, Masciandaro sees Coloring the Black

as a vulgarization of BMT (of the ORIGINAL BMT as his followers often insist) and he must

protect the “citadels of the black, monastic piety”; he must shield the “purity” of true BMT

from the threat of prismo-chromatic black metal theory. Butler writes on black metal album

art that it “is almost always devoid of colors other than the fundamental binary

black/white”. We argue that BMT is almost devoid of colors other than the fundamental

black and white.

More disturbingly, the politics of black metal theory runs the risk of being tainted by

“proximity” to the “crypto/quasi fascist politics” Ben Noys and Evan Calder Williams write

about in Hideous Gnosis. It is far from acephalic as it claims. It has a politics of hierarchy,

rank, policing and is non-democratic and believes in an incorruptible “essence” of BMT. It

has a clear territorial politics, an inside/outside, and “participation in degrees [ladder] of

darkness”. These totalitarian strains are compounded by its erection of a leader and slavish

disciples who strive to as Noys would say “reinstate a saving split of the ‘good’ [BMT] in

Black Metal from the ‘bad’ [BMT]”. In the words of Evan Calder Williams BMT “starts to

reek” as it is taken over by “the petulant bedroom shut-in, the dsyphoric who dwells in the

petty pleasures of feigning disinterest in the earthly sphere”. What is lost by this narrowing

of the purview of BMT is parody and fun. Noys is one of the few to discuss this: “in line with

the self-presentation of many black metal artists, self-parodic” he writes about Peste Noire.

Noys again: “it is not that there are no effects of irony, parody or humor at work… the

humor … is largely sardonic”.

Black Thorns in the White Cube, a black metal exhibition curated by Amelia Ishmael

(including works by Vincent Como and Christophe Szpajdel) did exhibit works in color by

Aaron Mette and Alexander Binder. In Mette’s work as Ishmael describes it “the four prints

included here pair concert snapshots of the infamous musician Dead beside digitally

rendered photographic images of butterflies …. In a type of ‘sympathetic magic’ the

butterfly has culled colors and textures from the hair and clothes of Mayhem’s original

frontman, blurring the extremities between interior and exterior, individual and milieu …

rationality and chaos … necessity and excess”. Coloring the Black in a type of “sympathetic

magic” culls from the BMT of the original front man Nicola Masciandaro and seeks to extend

rather than break with his work. And, again in Ishmael’s words, this time about the art of

Alexander Binder we deviate from the “syntax of high fidelity in favour of the gritty, the lo-

fi” to create “iridescent episodes, spectral color rainbows, light ray diffusions and indirect

optical imperfections”.