Black metal is a paradox. A noisy underground metal genre brimming with violence and virulence, it has captured the world's imagination for its harsh yet flamboyant style and infamous history involving arson, blasphemy, and murder. Today black metal is nothing less than a cultural battleground between those who claim it for nationalist and racist ends, and those who say: Nazi black metal fvck off!
Black Metal Rainbows is a radical collection of writers, artists, activists, and visionaries, including Drew Daniel, Kim Kelly, Laina Dawes, Espi Kvlt, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Svein Egil Hatlevik, Eugene S. Robinson, Margaret Killjoy, and many more. Across essays and theory-fictions, artworks and comics, we say out loud: Long live black metal's trve rainbow!
This unique volume envisions black metal as always already open, inclusive, and unlimited: a musical genre whose vital spirit of total antagonism rebels against the forces of political conservatism. Beyond its clichés of grimness, nihilism, reaction, and signature black/white corpse-paint sneer, black metal today is a vibrant and revolutionary paradigm. This book reveals its ludic, carnival worlds animated by spirits of joy and celebration, community and care, queerness and camp, LGBTQI+ identities and antifascist, antiracist, and left-wing politics, not to mention endless aesthetic experimentation and fabulousness. From the crypt to the cloud, Black Metal Rainbows unearths black metal's sparkling core and illuminates its prismatic spectrum: deep within the black, far beyond grimness, and over a darkly glittering rainbow!
Table of Contents:
Ritual for PO & KT by Jonathan Mayhew
Introduction: Somewhere Over a Black Metal Rainbow by Daniel Lukes and Stanimir Panayotov
Putting the Fag Back in Sarcófago by Drew Daniel
Sad Rainbows by Stanimir Panayotov
You Don't Win a Culture War by Giving Up Ground by Margaret Killjoy
Why Us? Why Now? Discussing the Rise of Anti-Fascist Black Metal by Stuart Wain
Black Metal under the Black Flag by Kim Kelly
Queer Kvlt Porn by Espi Kvlt
Malefica: The Witch as Restorative Feminism in Female Black Metal Performance by Jasmine Hazel Shadrack
"Righteous Violence" Zeal and Ardor's Application of African American Folk Music in Black Metal by Laina Dawes
Queer Rot by Joseph Russo
Doom Donkey: Mick Barr's Drone of Information and The Rainbow Supremacy by Aliza Shvarts
Flamboyant Atrocity: How to Enhance Dead's Death Depiction by Élodie Lesourd
Bizarre Black Metal by Daniel Lukes
Dødheimsgard's 666 International: An Oral History by Daniel Lukes
Svein Egil Hatlevik: Artist Profile by Daniel Lukes
iNfect (Artist Statement) by Andrew Zealley
A Biatch in the Northern Sky by Patrizia Pelgrift
When Evil Comes A'Calling by Eugene S. Robinson
"The Colossal and Abyssal Apathy of the Universe toward You" Black Metal and Male Depression by Nina Power
Vox Inferi: Fictionalizing Black Metal by Catherine Fearns
Extract from Sound by Catherine Fearns
Black Ambience: Where Do Ambient and Black Metal Meet? by Angel Simitchiev
Pretty in Black: The Temptation to Melody and Ambience in Black Metal by Steven Shakespeare
Black Metal Is Feminine by Avi Pitchon
Black Metal of the Americas Is Fucking Dead by Edward Blair
Queer Lady-Owned Heavy Music Label Tridroid Records: Interview with Christine Kelly by Daniel Lukes
The Dialectical Satan by Langdon Hickman
Rape Culture and Metal by George Parr
The Machine Mystique: Deep-Learning Metal by Bogna M. Konior
Black Metal Information: Cybernetic Resonance of the Gloom Series by Kenji Siratori
Theriomorphous and Infectus: Black Metal Disco(Creative Intervention Description) by Andrew Zealley
Queer Traditionalism by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix
Holy Unblack Metal: The White Horse of the Apocalypse by Benjamin Bianciotto
Devotion Has a Price by Vincent Como
Blink. 2.0 (For Pelle Ohlin & Kiriko Takemura) by Jonathan Mayhew
Credits
Index Eritque Arcus
Contributors
