Thulean Archives

Do you know the original idea behind Black Metal? Let's find out. If you want the full story, you can read this book, and it is available from your local bookstore if you just ask them to order it for you from IngramSpark. Back in 1991, we played death metal, and we all identified as death metal bands. And the problem at the time was that some of these death metal bands, like Morbid Angel, became very successful, and all the other bands did their best to sound like Morbid Angel. What's the point? If you have all these death metal bands and they all sound the same, or they all try to sound the same? You know, what's the point of playing music to begin with? Everything sounds the same. So we decided to revolt against this death metal trend. And we decided that in order to play in a band, A) be original. B) have a theme of your own. For example, Immortal, they had their winter darkness landscape theme. Burzum had its fantasy theme. Darkthrone had its satanic theme. And each of these bands sounded distinct, and therefore they were original. And that was the purpose of the whole thing. And therefore, Immortal, Darkthrone, and Burzum became the new trend setters. This musical revolt was named by Euronymous as black metal. Was not one distinct style, didn't have to be one theme.^[1] In fact, it had to not be like any other band for it to be black metal. So what you think of as black metal today, that's just the result of the success of these bands, meaning that other bands started to copy their style, which, of course, is what people do when you are successful, and therefore people identify that as black metal. In short, black metal was supposed to be a revolt against the death metal trend, and it ended up as a black metal trend, which is a little bit ironic, isn't it? But, of course, that's how success work. If you become successful at something, others will do the same, or try to, and it will become a new trend. And some of them will probably do it better than you did originally. Right?

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1. Euro had other motivations, as explained in my book.