My friend Ayla notified me recently that the lead singer Gaahl of the black metal band Gorgoroth, can be counted among the ranks of the family. Which is to say he is a homo. Gaahl is perhaps one of the more clearly "evil" members of the black metal scene as he was convicted of torturing a man for six hours and was sentenced to 9 months in prison as a result.
In an issue of Rock Hard Magazine he claimed, “It doesn’t feel to me as if I’ve outed myself because up until now the whole thing was a non-issue for me. All this evolved very naturally. I feel how I feel and I’ve never made any secret about it.”
His outing is not only an amazing and heartwarmingly pleasant surprise, but also undermines elements of the black metal scene who want to push it out of the purity of satanism and toward the clearly objectionable Nazi elements.
I've included clips from the VBS TV episode on black metal, starting with the brief history of black metal.
Part 1:
Gorgoroth & the Black Metal Tradition
Part 5:
Involves Gaahl himself leading VBS interviewers up a mountain and staring blankly at an interview question for over a full minute.
2 comments:
While I think it's fair to say Satanism is better than Nazism, it doesn't really seem to me that Satanism is that great. I also feel there's an implicit claim that Nazism is homophobic while Satanism is not, whereas I think on both sides it's more ambiguous than that.
Certainly are more ambiguous, but one promotes homophobic propaganda, and in its national socialist form actively pursued the extermination of homos.
That said, my enthusiasm for satanism in the post above, was merely meant to reflect a sort of "pro-satanist" attitude that seems appropriate for a generally non-committal metal audience, where saying , "hail, satan!" is equivalent with indicating that Slayer's _Reign in Blood_ album is a decent album.
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