Hey, relax, would ya? I'm just pointing out a fact that is, at this point, indisputable by my reckoning. Don't take it personally.
I heard my first black metal album, (Emperor's Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, in early 1998 when I was only 12, and after a few months had completely immersed myself in the stuff as much as was possible in the residual days of tape trading, fanzine, bedroom distros and minimal availability of online information. Growing up, I always thought of black metal as "mine". Maybe that's not fair, seeing how the Norwegians that I looked up to might easily tell me that it was never meant to belong to anyone but its creators and their close associates. They'd probably burn my house down. Still, I vividly recall a time when black metal was the only artistic medium I'd yet encountered that truly resonated with me on a spiritual level, and to an extent this is still true. Moreover, it was a time when nobody knew what this stuff was, at least as far as I was concerned. This may seem difficult to conceive today in 2026, but extreme, and especially black, metal in the mid-to-late '90s was still very much an underground affair.
All of that said, there's something you should know: I'm from Tennessee. I'm Southern, ok? Here, lemme tell you about it: about 35 minutes northeast of Nashville, the rim of the Nashville Basin starts to rise a bit as you make your way east toward Appalachia, and the first elevation you hit is called the Northern Highland Rim. That's where Sumner County is, right on the edge of that rise, and that's where I was born and raised. So that being said, I should tell you about my theory: I'm pretty sure that novel forms of expression in America tend to begin at the coasts and gradually migrate inward, with exceptions here and there. Now, this theory isn't as relevant today, what with the ubiquity of the internet and especially social media, but in 1998, as far as underground metal was concerned, it absolutely applied. In and around Nashville, which was the metropolitan area closest to me, most folks in the late '90s who were "in the know" barely knew who Megadeth or Anthrax were; the "black metal" gospel as it warbled forth in my barely pubescent voice was routinely met with either horror (my family) or general indifference (my friends). Bear in mind, though, that the Nashville-metro area at the time was not the hip, rapidly-growing place that it would become around 2015: it was an economically stagnating, decaying urban sprawl that was definitely not cool and definitely out-of-touch as far as the artistically-inclined went, and that extended all the way to extreme metal. I point this out to illustrate the fact that the likes of black metal simply had no forum in my formative years that I, still years off from being able to drive, could attend. As for me, I had stumbled across this music (somehwat) accidentally, via channels largely uninteresting or at best unavailable to others, and for the entirety of my youth before turning 18, it remained something that I and I alone loved and understood.
Those were such magical times. I have never since felt anything so powerful as the essence of the early Norwegian records, and even the Swedish and the Polish and the French ones, for that matter. I believed in it. It fucking spoke to me, understand? It was the lens I had been searching for through which I might at last view with some degree of clarity my then-hazy conception of life, of the world, above all of the human condition, and it was serendipitous that its prescription was such as it was. Frankly, it - all of extreme metal, all of extreme music, even, but still above all black metal - has been one of the single most important chisels in sculpting my adult weltanschauung. I wear that badge with pride even today, as a forty year-old man.
Times are different now. That era of my life was over 25 years ago, that explosion of crystalline realization wherein I discovered my aesthetic, my ideological, my spiritual home, and since then, black metal has, to the degree that an artform this uncompromising can, entered the mainstream. Whether I like it or not, it isn't mine anymore, or yours for that matter, and there's nothing that any of us could've done to stop it's slip from our skeletal grasps. Outsiders, the other, moved in and co-opted all of the genuine elements that once made it vital. Those same elements, those essential monads that gave the genre meaning and motion, were stolen and hollowed out and put on display on social media, in meaningles memes, and worst of all, in records masquerading has having some link to black metal's glorious past, thus rendering them suddenly meaningless in these new venues and incarnations. I suspect that my meaning is clear without the citation of specific examples, which in this case I won't do lest I bear the responsibility of disseminating them even further.
All of the above, in the end, in a process lasting 20 years as of today by my reckoning, has ultimately killed the genre. Black metal is dead. Dead and gone. Dead forever. Just like any lifeform, it can't be resuscitated by any means presently known to us. It's tragic that this artform, a veritable weltanschauung from which I drew so much during the formative years of my own, could become such a miserable shell of its former self.
Sorry :\ Definitely don't mean to be a miserable bastard, but I'm coming to something: all of this is why I've deicded to resurrect my old Blackened Relics blog and make it into something even better. See, despite black metal's de facto death, its spirit, the ethos of its zenith may yet be experienced as genuinely today here, and in other places like this, by us, we true believers. We remain here, in the shadows, refusing to drop the torch bearing the Black Flame. Though its vitality no longer exist, it's essence still inspires, still transports, still transforms those of us with the fortitude - mental, physical, spiritual - to handle it.The creators, your Tom Warriors and Quorthons and Euronymouses and Fenrizess and Vargs, belched forth something into the collective consciousness of those prepared and willing to receive it that was so powerful that it ceased to be theirs, that it transcended the limitations of sound and word and time and space and will always exist, ripe to be tapped and channeled through us in the present day. May this site remain ever a suitable tap.
The Black Flame burns eternal...