The One Thing That Still Holds True

Beyond the costumes and the corpse paint, black metal and hardcore have one shared obsession—and we're still both struggling with it.

King ov Hell, from Gorgoroth, being true. Photo by Peter Beste.

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I.

If you’re not familiar with Norwegian black metal, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Per “Pelle” Ohlin—the original singer of the band Mayhem, who also went by the name Dead. There are countless characters in Norwegian black metal lore, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Dead. As a young child in Sweden, he survived a serious illness that altered his perspective on life; he also claimed to have once been beaten so badly by bullies that his spleen ruptured and he arrived at the hospital with either no heartbeat or only the faintest pulse, depending on who tells the story. (Ergo, Dead.) His legend only grew from there, to the point where a recent tribute in Metal Injection contends that “it is already cliché to state that Pelle epitomized what it means to be true.” 

True. We hear that word a lot when it comes to black metal. As a culture, being true is the one thing prized above all other things. It is both a distinguishing mark and a badge of honor.

In Dead’s case, the stories of how “true” he was could arguably outnumber the songs he left us with before sadly taking his own life in 1991. We’ve heard about how he’d often bury his clothes in the dirt for days to get “the stench of rot” on them. We’ve heard about how he cut himself on stage and threw real pig heads into the audience as a way of rooting out “posers.” We’ve also heard that he coined the term “corpse paint,” which I will submit is very cool. “It wasn’t anything to do with the way KISS and Alice Cooper used make-up,” explains his former Mayhem bandmate Necrobutcher. “Dead actually wanted to look like a corpse.”

But my favorite story of all, for some reason, is the one where he found a dead crow and kept it inside of either a bag or a jar—again, depending on who tells the story—so that he could inhale the scent of its carcass before going on stage. As the legend goes, Dead wanted to “perform with the stench of death in his nostrils.” For many in black metal culture, such acts “epitomize what it means to be true.”

Admittedly, it’s easy to be dismissive of these extremes. Breathing in the stench of death as a performance of being “true” can seem outlandish from the outside. But not even five months ago—while trying to come up with some sort of unifying theory of Anti-Matter—I made the grand statement that “hardcore is about finding the realest version of yourself.” Which is to say that we, too, prize being “true” in our culture. And we, too, have struggled with what that means—so much so that it shouldn’t take too long for any of us to start trading stories of our own people doing extreme things, including murder, in a misguided quest to be “true.”

It’s no wonder, then, that when American Hardcore author Steven Blush attempted to create an etymology for the word “hardcore” in his book, the clearest thing he could say was that it refers to “an extreme: the absolute most punk.” Extremity is, for better or worse, baked into the very name by which we call ourselves.

Deafheaven’s George Clarke, live at the El Rey Theatre. Los Angeles, CA. April 25, 2014. Photo by Kiabad Meza.

II.

To be clear, I still believe that “hardcore is about finding the realest version of yourself.” What I don’t believe, however, is that being real is a limitation. Because if being real to you means being averse to change, then I reject that version of realness. And if being real to you means allowing yourself to be only one thing—if it denies your right to embrace the complexity of being human—then I reject that version of realness as well. Being “real,” to me, is not about an ideal; it’s about being messy. Purity is not real.

If any band has struggled with this friction, it’s Deafheaven. Having originally signed with Deathwish in 2011, the band’s immediate exposure to the hardcore community—while playing a style of extreme music that literally everyone except the band themselves called “black metal”—created a subtle pressure to take sides, in addition to a backlash that comprises some of guitarist Kerry McCoy’s earliest memories of the band. It’s one of the reasons why Deafheaven were hesitant to identify with either scene.

“We were not quite feeling the burn of ‘real’ black metal guys calling us ‘false’ yet, but that element, to a certain degree, was there from the very beginning,” he tells me, as part of a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “Our first couple of shows, I remember people calling us hipsters and cultural tourists and posers or whatever… So because we were on a hardcore label—at that time Deathwish had signed Touché Amoré and Hope Conspiracy and Blacklisted, all cool bands—I think we were trying to have it both ways: We were on a hardcore label and our booking agent at the time was a hardcore guy. We played Sound and Fury, and we’re doing these hardcore shows and hardcore tours. But I just remember feeling like we needed to emphasize our differences. I think we really wanted to be this mid-aughts Hydra Head kind of thinking-man’s heavy music. A band that did that really well was Converge; they could play the hardcore shows and do weird metal tours. I remember thinking we really needed to lean hard into that.”

Deafheaven’s unique position, situated between these two demanding cultures specifically, made me think of my friend Peter Beste—a hardcore kid from Houston, Texas, who rose to notoriety in the late 2000s with his seminal work as a documentary photographer of the Norwegian black metal scene. His photo book of that era, perhaps not coincidentally called True Norwegian Black Metal, is now canon for the genre. So as someone with a rare intimate knowledge of both hardcore and black metal, I reached out to Peter and asked him how he interprets the word “true” in the context of black metal, and if he thinks it differs from how we use “true” in hardcore.

“I’d say the term ‘true’ has pretty much the same meaning in both hardcore and black metal,” he told me, “but what you are being true to varies from culture to culture. My interpretation is that it means staying loyal to your beliefs, morals, and even your image to an extent—even when mainstream society pushes us in a different direction. This might take on some additional meaning when labeling a band ‘true hardcore’ or ‘true black metal,’ because you must also somewhat abide by the genre’s atmosphere and musical traditions. But if you add two or more different things together, do you still retain all of its components or do you become something different altogether?”

In retrospect, it was that demand for purity, to be one thing or another, that initially put Deafheaven in a spiral of constantly trying to justify its own existence. But being neither “true” enough for black metal purists nor “real” enough for hardcore traditionalists also allowed the band to exist in the fringes just long enough to create their own lane. Which means that Deafheaven were forced to let go of the fear that kept them from embracing their own contradictions—and in the process, they accidentally became the realest version of themselves.

The truest picture of Immortal, holding up Peter Beste, 2009.

III.

At some point before True Norwegian Black Metal came out, Peter gifted me with a print of my favorite image he’s ever made. The photo depicts King ov Hell, then the guitarist for Gorgoroth, leaving a more “serious” photo shoot while sitting in a white station wagon. Still wearing corpse paint, with an upside-down cross on his forehead, King gives Peter a playful smile and raises his hand to give devil horns before pulling out of the parking lot. The entire scene just captured my imagination.

Because typically, when you look at photos of black metal bands, they are scowling—not smiling. Typically, when you see men in corpse paint, they are holding swords or breathing fire or screaming at the moon; they are not driving a station wagon. The archetype of “true Norwegian black metal” does not account for the fact that King ov Hell probably went grocery shopping that week or that he may have watched a romantic comedy with his girlfriend. Much like purity, archetypes aren’t real either.

Recently, when Pitchfork interviewed me about Anti-Matter, I talked about how I considered one-dimensionality to be a scourge on hardcore. I explained that Anti-Matter partially came about because I was tired of seeing the people in our community reduced to the stories we told about them. I wanted to create a place where we could flesh ourselves out and be whole.

“As the zine evolved, one of the things that became more and more important to me was to start wrecking people’s assumptions,” I said. “I’d been in the scene for a long time at that point, so I personally knew a lot of these people I was interviewing. Someone like Richie Birkenhead from Into Another, he was [known as] ‘the dude who got stabbed at CBGB once and didn’t even realize it until he walked out.’ He had an extremely violent reputation and was somebody that people were afraid of. But I could talk to someone like him and show that he was a three-dimensional person who cared, had feelings, and cried. It’s almost like I had a project of killing the sacred cow of fucking machismo in hardcore. As far as I’m concerned, that was the best thing that could have happened to hardcore, because it allowed other people to be exactly who they were and not have to show up in the scene and pretend like I did.”

In other words, being “true” means being all of you, all the time.

I framed that picture of King ov Hell in a station wagon, and I have it hanging right outside my bedroom. I love it because the least extreme image we have of someone is almost always the most true.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Kerry McCoy of Deafheaven.

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