"You know the way pitbulls bite something and then their jaw locks and they can't let go?" asks Drew Daniel. "That's kind of the way my mind works with things. I just get obsessed."
Daniel, an assistant professor of English at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has spent 12 years writing a book on Renaissance melancholy and has made a series of rigorously conceptual albums as half of the electronic duo Matmos, but his new album was meant to be different. He had originally planned to include a single cover version from the forbidding world of black metal, Beherit's Sadomatic Rites, on the new LP by his dance music project, the Soft Pink Truth. But he enjoyed the process so much he ended up filling the whole record with repurposed black metal. The result, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, is one of the most thought-provokingly ambivalent covers albums ever.
When Daniel became interested in black metal in the 90s, it was still abrasively cultish music, actively hostile towards the unitiated. Now it is a vast and varied genre with scenes everywhere from Poland to Malaysia to Iraq. Most surprisingly (and, to veteran purists, irritatingly), it's acquired hipster cachet, with fans including Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, Portlandia's Fred Armisen and the New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones, who hails new American bands such as Liturgy and Wolves in the Throne Room as "verifiably remarkable". Liturgy have even performed at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
"There's a universality at the heart of black metal which explains why it's getting bigger and bigger," says Dayal Patterson, the author of Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult. "It takes a while to get into but once you do it provides a feeling that transcends everything. Back in the 90s you had to wear corpsepaint and spikes but now you have bands who look like Radiohead who make music that taps into the same spiritual or psychological place."
Nevertheless, non-fans still tend to associate black metal with the corpsepainted second wave that took off in Norway in the early 90s, and not because bands such as Burzum, Mayhem, Emperor and Darkthrone cemented the genre's key musical tropes, which Patterson summarises in his book as "high-paced percussion, high-pitched 'screamed' vocals, fast tremolo picking on the guitars, an emphasis on atmosphere and feeling, and an unholy aesthetic".
No, the Norwegian scene owes its notoriety to its extreme satanist ideology and hair-raising violence. Fans were involved in dozens of arson attacks on churches. Mayhem vocalist Pelle Ohlin, who performed under the name Dead, put a shotgun to his head in 1991. His bandmate Øystein Aarseth, AKA Euronymous, who fashioned shards of Dead's skull into necklaces and even considered eating his brain, was brutally murdered two years later by Kristian "Varg" Vikernes, the sole member of Burzum. That came shortly after Emperor drummer Bård "Faust" Eithun stabbed to death a gay man, Magne Andreassen, to whom Why Do the Heathen Rage? is dedicated. Then, this week, a French court convicted Vikernes of inciting racial hatred.
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Inevitably, these events cast a long shadow, but you can understand why black-metal fans resent outsiders focusing on the scene's bloodiest period. The Rolling Stones are not judged on Altamont alone; hip-hop isn't defined by the murders of Biggie and Tupac. "Black metal used to feel more dangerous," says Patterson. "There's a whole generation of people who got into black metal in the 2000s, by which point a lot of that stuff was history. Some of the new bands are really trying to distance themselves from all the paraphernalia apart from the music."
Drew Daniel has always been attracted to musical extremity but as a "very angry, unhappy" teenager in Kentucky he preferred the righteous militancy of hardcore punk. "I basically regarded metal as stupid and rightwing and thought punk had better politics and smarter people. I think there's a lot of class prejudice about who the imagined metal fan is."
He only truly discovered black metal when a friend signed to Misanthropy Records and was given the label's back catalogue, including Burzum's 1996 album Filosofem.
"I couldn't believe the power of it," he says. "It's so single-minded and energising. But then she told me about the incredibly lurid, disturbing back story of murder, church-burning and Nazi politics. It was such a strange mixture of undeniably compelling music attached to deeply repugnant behaviour. That's bound to produce a strong reaction. To me, punk rock and heavy metal felt like the kind of art in which the gloves are off and you're facing what is ugly and dark about human beings. You can look at brutality and want an end to it or you can look at brutality and celebrate it. Putting on a Freudian hat, you could say [black-metal musicians] are embodying the death drive."
Burzum provides the most extreme case study in the eternal debate about whether you can separate the art from the artist. Varg isn't just a convicted murderer but an outspoken neo-Nazi currently facing trial in France for inciting racial hatred and glorifying war crimes. In his sleevenotes, titled "Confessions of a former Burzum T-shirt wearer", Drew Daniel argues that "aesthetics and politics are neither equivalent nor separable". He illustrates the point to me by referring to his day job. "I teach the writing of Thomas Browne, who's an incredible prose stylist, but he also presided over witch trials. I can't whitewash that fact. On the other hand, I don't think that fact means we shouldn't read him. It's not about making some choice between art and the real; it's about making the connections between the two as complicated as they need to be in order to keep thinking."
That necessitates a degree of what might seem like hair-splitting. Daniel still listens to Burzum's records (Varg's noxious views don't figure in his lyrics) but dropped a cover of Burzum's Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte from his album because he didn't want to put royalties in Varg's pocket. Instead he posted it online for free under the title Rundgang (Fuck Varg's Racist, Anti-Semitic Bullshit Politics Forever!).
John Darnielle of North Carolina-based indie band the Mountain Goats, a friend of Daniel and another committed metal lover, takes a harder line. "When I find out somebody's a Nazi I just stop listening," he says in an email. "I don't listen to Burzum. I don't care how good people think their records are. There's plenty of great music not written by Nazi murderers, so I'm cool without Burzum in my life. This isn't really provable, but I feel like a lot of people are attracted to that sheen of the forbidden: that the music for some people takes on more power if it seems to come from a place of real hate. This is an old phenomenon, related, I think, to fetishising 'authenticity'."
Twenty years after the crimes in Norway, black metal still attracts some disturbing individuals. There is a noxious far-right offshoot, especially strong in Poland and France, called National Socialist Black Metal. Only last January a Thai black-metal vocalist, Samong "Avaejee" Traisattha, was stabbed to death by a fan for "tarnishing satanism". But Dayal Patterson argues that the scene is too diverse to be judged by its worst adherents.
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"People who aren't involved in black metal often look at it and see all these extreme people with extreme views but it's a strangely tolerant scene," he says. "It covers a huge spectrum, from leftwing to rightwing, from atheist to satanist, and even Christian and Muslim. There's more to it than just the sensationalist aspects, because it's entered a demographic that would be turned off by a lot of those things. People don't need to buy into something completely in order to appreciate it. There is a greater separation between the art and the artist. I know people who were friends with Euronymous but they still listen to Burzum." Just as confusingly, the first black-metal star to come out as gay, Kristian "Gaahl" Espedal, is good friends with Magne Andreassen's killer.
Why Do the Heathen Rage? is a suitably complicated take on a complicated scene, made compelling by Daniel's determination to reconcile admiration and unease. The cover versions, which translate black metal into styles including rave, dubstep and house music, simultaneously mock, critique and celebrate their source material and the scene that produced it. Daniel's queer perspective is often irreverently humorous, with samples from gay porn films, sleeve art that depicts a necrophiliac gay orgy in lurid detail, and a version of parody band Impaled Northern Moonforest's Grim and Frostbitten Gay Bar. AN's genocidal Let There Be Ebola Frost and Sarcofago's priapic Ready to Fuck are subverted joyously by singer Jenn Wasner of Baltimore duo Wye Oak. But the sincerity of Daniel's fandom shines through and creates some powerfully dissonant moments. He struggled, for example, with Darkthrone's Beholding the Throne of Might, not just because it's a thinly veiled church-burning anthem, but because it required him to sing the line "burning slaves".
"That makes me ethically uncomfortable," he admits. "At what level am I identifying with this shit? I wanted that uncomfortable feeling of complicity to be a part of this music. I'm not here to say I'm the politically good person and those black-metal people over there are bad. I'm getting caught up in a fantasy world where it's not always clear who's doing what to whom and that's why I think the album has a darker resonance than people might notice. It's not like you cover something and you're in control. It's doing something to you even in the moment that you're doing something to it. I'm intrigued by that power."
Daniel expected hostility from some of black metal's true believers, and thinks it's entirely understandable, but he's been surprised by the amount of positive interest in his strange brainchild. "It was an incredibly fun record for me to make but the whole time I had this terrible fear, like: nobody in the universe wants to hear this shit," he says with a laugh. "It became this compulsion that got out of control and now here we are. It's like the Darkthrone line: 'When hell calls your name, there's no way back.'"
• The Soft Pink Truth's Why Do the Heathen Rage? is out now on Thrill Jockey Records. Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult is published by Feral House.
