This past week, our class read Partridge's chapter on romanticism in his book The Lyre of Orpheus. It's his longest, moving from topic to topic pretty quickly and covering a lot of ground. There's a lot to unpack, such as the influence of Eastern mysticism on the hippy movement and the tradition of the English folk song, but there were two passages that caught my eye the most, the sections on Bjork and black metal.
Without explicitly tying the two together, Partridge uses Bjork and black metal as discussion points for the idea of the romanticized Northern European landscape. Bjork is Icelandic, and much of the philosophy behind her music, particularly on albums like 2011's Biophilia, focus on re-capturing the grandeur and beauty of the primal countryside and reminding her audience of an untainted wild. And while black metal did not exclusively originate in Norway, much of the early classics have been made by Norwegian musicians who also sought to evoke a sense of the untainted Northern landscape. Where these two diverge quite strongly is the politics behind the music. I am not as familiar with black metal as I am with other sounds in the genre, like thrash or prog, but I have heard some of the classics, and I enjoy them. Venom, Bathory, and Emperor have all made records that I like, in spite of their low-fi recording. And it's weird to think that a band like Darkthrone can make an album as good as Transilvanian Hunger and explicitly label it as Norwegian Aryan Black Metal, effectively marking the art with the same neo-Nazi views the members themselves subscribe to (or at least subscribed to in the 90's). It taints the music in an uncomfortable way. Because as Partridge describes in Lyre, "[black metal] makes certain far right concerns matter to liminal minds, which then authorize bands to speak for them 'as a surrogate voice'". There is an intention in a lot of black, early and modern, to pass on a far-right ideology to the listeners, one that I find abhorrent. There is the concern in the picture of the romantic wilderness, though often bleak, yes, but there is also the baggage of Neo-Nazism. Can I still digest black metal without supporting the ideology? Bjork, on the other hand, espouses beliefs opposite from far-right black metal artists. Partridge identifies her stance as a "biocentric egalitarianism". Instead of attach the idea of a lost romantic wilderness to violent beliefs of the far right, Bjork's ideal world is all-inclusive, where every human is made equal before the vast wonder of the natural world. She isn't concerned with pushing people out; she cares about welcoming all. I'm a little familiar with Bjork's music. "Joga" is one of my favorite songs of the 90's at this point. And it's nice to see that her work is supported by an environmentally conscious all-inclusive worldview. I wanted to bring this up because out of everything Partridge covers in his chapter on romanticism, these two ideas stood out the most. The contrast between Bjork and black metal, of how romanticized nature can relate to a political idelogy, is uncomfortably stark. I want and hope to lift up Bjork's far above those of, say, Burzum. But I like the music of both. How to approach this problem? I'm sure I'll be mulling over this for a long time to come.
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April 2018
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