Mayhem - DE MYSTERIIS POLL SATHANAS

I feel like we've had this debate countless times in the rolling metal threads, and we're bound to rehash it over and over again, but my stance is simple: I'm not going to pay for music made by fascists or fascist sympathizers, nor will I attend their concerts, but if they make amazing albums, I sure as hell will listen to them, especially when the lyrical material itself is unobjectionable (this is the case here, if memory serves, quite unlike, say, Transilvanian Hunger). Conversely, I'm not going to automatically praise art made by someone who shares my political views if it sucks.

'A work of art is more than the ideological sum of its parts' makers' is a non-negotiable statement as far as I'm concerned because art has never been a 1-to-1 translation of an artist's intended meaning (assuming they even have one in the first place) and never will be – it's a lot more obscure and chaotic and impersonal and enigmatic than that. So when I'm listening to De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, I don't give a fuck about the human beings behind it: they are officiants tuned into something greater than their dumb-ass would-be politics, and that vague, potentially sublime 'something' is what I'm listening for.

I totally get where you're coming from, though, and am not blaming your rejection of the music in the least. There are recent black metal albums by fash pieces of shit I just can't listen to anymore (Nécropole being case in point and, since I looked up their lyrics, Caverne) because the racism is inextricably embedded into the music, and that's just… fuck that.

Thanks much for that response, makes sense. No need to rehash further, I'll look at metal threads.

We talked about this a bit in the 2018 metal poll noms, if you're curious:

ILX Metal n' Heavy Rock Poll 2018: NOMINATIONS thread - open till Jan. 19th, 2019!

*poll noms thread

Thanks pomenitul.

I've thought about this issue a lot, and don't have much more to write about it at present, but during a lecture a few years ago, Fred Moten talked about how he couldn't disavow TS Eliot, even tho Eliot was a racist, anti-Semitic asshole. Eliot's cadences and rhythms helped Fred understand and inform his own.

I'm the same way with a few poets, too, as well as musicians.

"Funeral Fog" and "Freezing Moon" are timeless, but overall this record leaves me feeling empty. Which I guess is kind of the point of these boys' cornball nihilist play-acting? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

... i mean v little about the music strikes me like that one way or the other regardless of the fact that at the time this was a band of edgelords

i get why ppl wouldn’t want to listen to mayhem because i certainly can’t listen to dissection at all anymore but i think they have a much more complicated ideological legacy than say varg does on his own (of course a lot of this is due to the band’s shifting lineup). i think of it much on the same terms of how much i love darkthrone and transilvanian hunger and yet even with fenriz’s apology feel pretty profound disgust at the liner notes of that record!

i’m also even wary of the arguments i’m making right now, like just bc i do not hear nihilism in this particular mayhem record does not mean it isn’t there and didn’t fuel its making and that i’m not somehow unconsciously supporting it by ignoring it

it's something I have spent a lot of time thinking about, I personally have no issue at all separating art from artists in terms of whether I can listen to music made by bad people without being repulsed by it, but I do not want to support those bad people either. at the time I went to the Mayhem gig, I didn't really know anything about what their political opinions are, in fact I still don't actually. I probably would've thought that Anaal Nathrakh being on the bill was a sort-of endorsement that they were OK, with Anaal Nathrakh being friends with Napalm Death I assumed they wouldn't be politically objectionable anyway.

I also went to see Marduk around that time, which I wouldn't do now.

I don't buy music by people I know to be shit people or go to their gigs, but I probably haven't always done due diligence on that, especially when it comes to metal bands, I suppose because I am more into punk than metal I don't really take metal imagery very seriously and assume it's all just posturing, except sometimes it isn't.

The drum fills on this record sound like overdubs. Can anyone confirm or deny this? I'm not a drummer but this is how it sounds to me

good discussion upthread. to add my own 75 cents, like most people, I can't lie that the "mythos" of Mayhem didn't draw me to them, largely due to morbid curiosity. I started with Wolf's Lair Abyss, and loved it so much, I took a bus back to that indie record store later and bought Dawn of the Black Hearts (with...yes...*that* cover).

I was militantly anti-Varg, anti-Rob Darken, anti-any NSBM, and admittedly, knowing he played on DMDS at the time would have likely stopped me from hearing it. Problem was, I believed Hellhammer's lie about re-recording the bass, and being pre-Wikipedia, never learned until later that Hellhammer was lying and that this was Varg playing bass.

Hellhammer was always hard for me to swallow, with his disgusting homophobia, "Black metal is for white people", the latter of which he's recanted, but I'll never trust him. Like mentioned upthread, the music not having that present is how I excused it, plus Varg essentially being a hired gun who was in jail by the time I was listening to the band. it helped of course that Necrobutcher seems a relatively normal dude who actually hated Euronymous for the insensitivity he displayed after Dead's death, and that Attila and Maniac were really mostly just showmen (sheep's head aside).

Interestingly enough, the friend I treated to the Mayhem show, who is bisexual, was quite drunk and ran up and hugged Hellhammer afterwards. she didn't know much about him or even who he was other than he played drums that night. I told my friend "you know he's a piece of shit, right?", and told her about his homophobia. she was like "oh..well, then he got a freebie, he'll never get one again".

I, like many, have weirdly, probably inconsistent lines I draw in the sand as to what I buy/support. I'm pretty much done with Proscriptor and his new post-Absu project after his transphobia lead him to kicking Melissa Moore out of the band.

Really, though, my main efforts are directed at driving homophobia and racism out of the scene entirely. That does include speaking with the wallet, but it also includes calling out the fanbase for toxic shit like that. I had a metal friend I cut out immediately for making transphobic comments at a bar about one of the touring members of Repulsion, and using a racial slur, and got into a heated argument after the Phil Anselmo "White power" incident with someone defending Phil and claiming it was PCness gone wild. But I have fortunately found a community of concert-going friends who are free of that shit.

it was definitely hard getting into the scene due to that. remember in my teens and early 20s being constantly abused on the internet for speaking up about any of it, especially in the heyday of Anus.com, whose members actually seemed to be on every fucking message board. I remember being called "overly sensitive" as I called out someone for using a homophobic epithet in his review and basically everybody told me I needed to lighten up (granted, some were people who since have grown older and adopted much different views on the matter).

back to the music, uhh....."Cursed in Eternity" has that really simple, evil sounding riff with the tremolo picked lead up top that almost makes me consider that one.

Fred Moten talked about how he couldn't disavow TS Eliot, even tho Eliot was a racist, anti-Semitic asshole

I totally get that, and to me it points to the fact that the music of T.S. Eliot's poetry, to paraphrase the title of one of his essays, is not inherently racist, even as his words often were (see 'Gerontion', 'The Dry Salvages', etc.). I'm also reminded of Allen Ginsberg coming to grips with Pound's own anti-semitism, which in 1967, at the age of 82, he described to the younger poet as a 'stupid, suburban prejudice' (as though that had been the worst thing about it). Yet Pound was and will forever remain the guy who opened the field, way before Robert Duncan. To argue that the Cantos's fragmentary space of a form is inherently fascistic and thus best relegated to aesthetic oblivion would therefore be to close that field again, robbing others of its possibilities. Put differently (and this is my current mood speaking): fuck the author. (Sorry, getting a bit off-topic here.)

i certainly can’t listen to dissection at all anymore

I can't not listen to Dissection tbh, it's beyond my control.

well at least he's dead

It definitely helps!

he can be warming the seat in Hell for Faust as well when he dies

I started with Wolf's Lair Abyss, and loved it so much

― Lady Antibody (Neanderthal), Monday, July 27, 2020 3:09 AM (eight hours ago)

That record is amazing, I had absolutely no hope this would be any good after the whole media circus (and a pretty crappy reunion concert in Bischofswerda) but it's right up there with De Mysteriis in my book.

"Life Eternal" for me, although the opening riff to Pagan Fears is probably the best bit on the album.

The drum fills on this record sound like overdubs. Can anyone confirm or deny this? I'm not a drummer but this is how it sounds to me

― Paul Ponzi, Sunday, July 26, 2020 12:37 PM

Yes this has been noted before, some of the fills seem to go straight through cymbals patterns. The producer Eirik Hundvin was no stranger to messing with drums, cf the sped-up drums on his Immortal albums.

Attila said he was freaked out by the animal heads because he's vegan. Is Hellhammer the fascist in the band or is it more of them?

Hasn't Faust pretty thoroughly regretted his crime? Gaahl said Faust was the first person to contact him and say encouraging words about coming out.

I was thinking about some of this stuff recently because I saw this young black woman squeeing about Abbath kissing her hand and celebrating lots of black metal bands and some of her friends were a bit wary of getting into the stuff for obvious reasons.

I know it's not simple re: thinking about who you support, but I think it's also a danger to let bigots have anything that is genuinely good to themselves. I think there's maybe more hope for black metal than there is for neo-folk. I remember that neo-folk blog with someone saying don't let the nazis have neo-folk, black metal and oi punk; I agree thoroughly with that, don't let them have anything. Ideally everyone would flood 4chan and post nothing but "that's racist".

Attila is a truly lovely person! I voted Freezing Moon

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

went with "Freezing Moon" as well. it rules

Went with 'Buried by Time and Dust' as announced, 'cause I fear it won't get all the love it deserves.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.