So this is one of the rare cases (actually the first one) when I’m reblogging someone. I think it fits here perfectly, was written by a close friend of mine on ‘black metal’ and ‘hipsters’ - I won’t be commenting on this one (couldn’t really add more to it, really), will leave that up to you. Enjoy:

aaronhatesjacksonfive:

During the last summer, I was unfortunate enough to encounter the (up to this point) most irritating phenomenon that the so-called ‘hipster’ crowd decided adapt into it’s own cavalcade of out-of-context cultural references: Black Metal music.

At this point I’d like to make clear the key topic of my rant: when I say Black Metal music, the emphasis is on solely on the musicality.
Corpsepaint, church burnings and other scanadls, spiked bracelets, chainmails, and other elements often (and most of the cases falsely) credited to the 90s Scandinavian black metal scene have been active elements of pop-culture since their birth and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s flashy, over the top, and just like some late-70s disco outfits they are perfect marks of a certain era in time and space. You can just look at the classic list made by Ruthless Reviews (click here for part 1 and for part 2) and instantly get what I mean.

Music on the other hand is a completely different thing.
While most people look at black metal as an extremely high-speed music, it’s a total hit and miss. Blastbeats and fast strumming of guitars do not indicate fast music. If you see someone doing a guitar solo in blues music, you don’t start feeling the general tempo as the spaces between the notes the player picks either, otherwise you’ll end up with a delta-ballad on 400 BPM.
Black metal, unlike most of rock music is not melodic or rythmic, it’s plain textural. The washed-together wall off sound, the almost granular speed of playing, the barely recognizable vocals, the deliberate lo-fi aesthetics used in the recording process all add up to one general atmosphere, where individual instruments become insignificant and you are confronted with this sound, that makes black metal so distinguishable.
Black metal from Darkthrone to Wolves In The Throne room is explicitly textural, and extremely slow in pace. It’s totalist approach to a classic romantic atmosphere is completely unique in modern music, with the lack of spoilt tension/release games it’s competitor, the Dutch Arena Trance indulges in. This is also the reason why black metal goes so well together with post-rock, shoegaze or ambient.

The elements mentioned above are most of the time completely disregarded by the black metal crowd both now and then. Up to this day, people think of aggressive behavior on and outside of stage when it comes to the genre, but most importantly it’s ties to the occult. As a lot of obscure and mystical topics, such as secret societies, Dionysian rites, The Church of Satan, and genres of music such as dark ambient and apocalyptic folk, the black metal got thrown into the ‘hipster melting-pot’.

It seems like what the hipster crowd decided to do with it comes down to something like this:

• take the symbols and imagery of classic Norwegian black metal bands, such as Darkthrone, Burzum and for the really stupid: Immortal or Satyricon (I also saw a girl at my academy wearing and Ildjarn tee along with polka-dot leggings, faux wayfarers and a straw hat) including their typo and logos.
• take the occult and pagan symbols associated with black metal (strangely this doesn’t occur with the germanic symbolysm used by martial and neofolk artists, such as Death In June, even though a lot of current hip bands cite him as a major influence… wonder why)
• but not really listen to black metal at all (maybe some late-Satyricon, or more melodic bands like Liturgy or Alcest, but most of the cases the closest the ever get to black metal is through retarded Witch-House music).

It’s a bit like wearing and N.W.A. or Public Enemy shirt day and night, but in the meantime only listen to Akon and T-Pain.
The first time I experienced this sort of miss-contextualization was a couple of years ago, when nu-rave band Partyshank came out with the EP titled ‘Penis vs. Vagina’. The band’s logo for the album and for the tour that followed it is a one-to-one copy of the classic Darkthrone logo, even though the music itself was nu-rave dancefloor stuff, with some elements of chiptune.

Since then, there’s been dozens of hip-adaptations of black metal elements, most notably by Crystal Castles and Wavves, both infamous for getting their image together from subcultures way out of their reach. It really seems like the modern way of being a hipster is really, as someone said, will lead to the death of all subcultures, since sooner or later they will get exploited, without any form of creative reinterpretation and treated with a huge ammount of ignorant dumbness disguised as irony and constructive culture-mashing.

This whole thing turned out way longer than I intended it to be, so I’ll just leave you to it, without properly wrapping up, and to tell the truth I have no idea how to do it really.
If you have any nice closing thoughts, feel free to share them.

ps: I found this image of Wavves performing a show earlier this year and couldn’t find a proper place to post it in, so i’ll just leave it here.

(Source: faleristics)