Black Metal Blues

My recent detour through Norwegian Black Metal has finally yielded results in terms of You Tube’s suggested videos on my home page. After wading through numerous Mayhem, Immortal and Black Satans (amongst others) videos, I now have a healthy number of Black Metal videos turning up there, (although, for some reason it also turns up a Paul Weller video – about as far from Black Metal as you can get, even if he whines a lot during his songs – and some Judas Priest – who are just pussies in the metal stakes when compared to say, Mayhem). Which makes a nice change for all that random stuff – Guinea Pigs and birds, etc – which recently kept turning up for no discernible reason. The Black Metal is especially welcome as an alternative to all the right wing ‘news’ sites whose videos have been appearing near the bottom of my You Tube home page of late, (although, to be fair, there has always been a neo-Nazi element to the Norwegian Black Metal scene). Nevertheless, I really don’t understand their presence – I just don’t look at any other stuff which might be construed as showing an interest in their shit. Then again, for a while You Tube persisted in trying to get me to subscribe to Arsenal related channels – despite the fact that I never watch football videos on YouTube and I’m a Spurs supporter.

But, of course, it isn’t just You Tube that makes mysterious recommendations. The other day I made the mistake of checking in on my Facebook account (an increasingly rare occurrence) and was somewhat disturbed by what I found. Among the various tabs I rarely, if ever, check on the site is that one for Groups, because, well, I’m only a member of two Facebook groups, one of which has been inactive for quite some time. Despite that, Facebook insists upon sticking suggestions for groups your friends are members of and groups it ‘thinks’ that you might be interested in. I don’t know why, but I get a perverse pleasure from rejecting as ‘Not Relevant’ all those ‘latest posts from a group one of your friends has joined’, (just as I do when I delete all of those ‘Friend Suggestions’ of people you neither know nor want to know). Equally, dismissing all those suggested groups is fun as they are usually totally irrelevant. This time, however, I found that Facebook had started recommending groups about railways and railway modelling.

Now, anyone who knows me might say, what’s wrong with that, as I actually am interested in model railways? Well, the problem is that I never share anything about this interest on Facebook. I mean, never. I have never posted about the subject there, linked to anything about them or even looked at any groups about them. So how does Facebook know (or thinks that it knows) that I’m interested in this topic? Well, the only conclusion I can come to is that they are surreptitiously gathering data about my non-Facebook web browsing: I often look at videos of other people’s layouts on YouTube, buy model railway stuff on eBay and follow a couple of model railway forums. Which is seriously creepy. It really does make me feel uneasy, as if my privacy has been invaded. Obviously, I rejected all of the suggestions as ‘not relevant’ in an attempt to throw the bastards off the scent, but they’ve continued to push similar stuff. All pretty disturbing and the sort of thing that tempts me to delete my Facebook account altogether.

But back to the Norwegian Black Metal. Why? I hear you ask. Well, why not? Any musical genre which expresses a contempt for organised religion and moves some of its fans to burn down churches immediately has an appeal to me. Plus, the people who perform it don’t seem the usual poseurs you find on the music scene: they seem not just to believe the shit they sing about, but they live it too. I mean, let’s not forget that Mayhem’s original vocalist, ‘Dead’, blew his brains out with a shotgun. OK, I know what you are thinking, so what? That isn’t unique to Black Metal. Didn’t Kurt Cobain do the same thing? Yeah, sure he did – but did Courteney Love then gather up some of the skull fragments and make them into necklaces? Because that’s what Mayhem’s guitarist did. Oh, and I bet that Cobain didn’t leave a note apologising for the mess and for discharging a firearm in the house? You see, you can’t make this stuff up. But it gets better – a while later the bass player stabbed the aforementioned guitarist to death in a contract dispute. (He served time for the murder, burning down two churches and possession of illegal explosives).

Norwegian Black Metal is probably the most brutal and extreme form of music ever devised by man – lots of guys in corpse make up running around forests screaming and growling while drums and guitars thrash in the background, (sometimes, just for variety, they run along mountain tops with their guitars). It is, I suppose, the musical equivalent of those bottom-of-the-barrel schlock movies I watch. I can’t deny that listening to it can be a bit of an endurance test. But, you know, while I was going through my recent experience of extreme back pain, all that was brutal and extreme appealed to me. Besides, at base, Norwegian Black Metal is really an agonised scream of existential angst. Its rejection of all that is mundane, ordinary and established appeals to someone who has finally, after years of unhappiness, parted company with an employer that spent those years crushing the life and ambitions from its employees. Trust me, that was an experience that would drive anyone to embrace nihilism. But hey, as Matthias Backward of Witch Taint observed, ‘no man can go through life being grim and extreme – just try applying for a mortgage and you’ll see what I mean’. (Yes, I know that Witch Taint are a parody of a Norwegian Black Metal band, but coming across their videos was what got me interested in the real thing in the first place). So, my dalliance with Black Metal – the climax of which coincided with a weekend being spent in a state of physical exhaustion, apparently in reaction to my second Covid jab – is now winding down. Although I’ll still enjoy seeing those Mayhem and Immortal videos sitting shoulder to shoulder with model railway videos, schlock movie trailers and PG Wodehouse readings on my You Tube home page.

Doc Sleaze