National Socialist black metal (also known as NSBM or Nazi black metal) is a movement within the black metal music genre that promotes neo-Nazism, neo-fascism, and white supremacist ideologies. NSBM artists typically combine neo-Nazi imagery and ideology with ethnic European paganism, Satanism, or Nazi occultism, and vehemently oppose Christianity, Islam and Judaism from a racialist viewpoint. According to Mattias Gardell, NSBM musicians see their ideology as "a logical extension of the political and spiritual dissidence inherent in black metal". While many black-metallers boycott NSBM artists, others are indifferent or say they appreciate the music without supporting the musicians. Like Nazi punk, Nazi black metal is not seen as a distinct genre, being "distinguished only by ideology, not musical character".
NSBM artists do not always convey their political beliefs in their music but may express their beliefs in interviews or imagery. Artists who hold far-right beliefs but do not express them in their music are not considered NSBM by many black-metallers, but they may be considered NSBM by outsiders. War and catastrophe are common themes in black metal, and some bands have made references to Nazi Germany for shock value, much like some punk rock and heavy metal bands.
The emergence of NSBM in the mid-1990s is linked with the prominent Norwegian black metal musician Varg Vikernes. After his imprisonment for church burning and murder, he developed his anti-Christian beliefs into an increasingly white nationalist and neo-Nazi form of Heathenry. The first black metal bands to have neo-Nazi lyrics and imagery were German band Absurd, and Polish bands Infernum and Graveland. In the United States, Grand Belial's Key and Judas Iscariot became involved in NSBM (the latter has since distanced themselves from the movement). As NSBM grew internationally, it started to overlap with existing white power music such as Rock Against Communism, hatecore, and the far-right faction of Oi!. The neo-Nazi record label Resistance Records, associated with the National Alliance, started releasing NSBM albums and even purchased Vikernes' label Cymophane Records. In 2012, the NSBM Asgardsrei festival was established in Moscow, Russia, and then in 2014 relocated to Kyiv, Ukraine.
Black metal
Black metal is generally not political music and the vast majority of bands do not express political views. Black metal originated in the 1980s from the work of thrash metal bands such as Venom (whose 1982 album Black Metal coined the term), Mercyful Fate, Bathory, Slayer, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and Sodom. These bands did not form a scene of their own, nor did they have a common musical style. A lyrical focus that is anti-Christian, Satanist, neopagan, or a combination thereof, is often considered a prerequisite for the genre, and originally the term "black metal" was synonymous with "Satanic metal". A stricter definition still requires Satanism for a band to be classified as black metal. Non-Satanic bands from the same surroundings originally used other terms for their own music, such as pagan metal or Viking metal. In the late-1980s and early-1990s, the early Norwegian black metal scene, developed by bands such as Mayhem, Thorns, Immortal, Darkthrone, Burzum, Emperor, Satyricon, and Ulver, established a more specific sonic template that came to define Norwegian black metal blast beats and double-bass drumming, a thin, shrieking vocal style, heavily distorted guitars played with tremolo picking and power chords,
History
Origins in the Norwegian black metal scene
In the early 1990s, the early Norwegian black metal scene developed black metal into a distinct genre. The scene members were fiercely anti-Christian—most generally presented themselves as misanthropic devil-worshipers who wanted to spread hatred, sorrow and evil, though some wrote about pre-Christian Scandinavia and its mythology. Among some members of the scene, the antagonism toward Christianity turned violent, and arson and attempted arson was perpetrated against a number of churches from 1992 through 1995. Among the perpetrators were Varg Vikernes of Burzum and Mayhem, Samoth of Thou Shalt Suffer and Emperor, Faust of Thorns and Jørn Inge Tunsberg of Old Funeral, Immortal, and Hades Almighty, some of whom are among the most prominent musicians in the scene. In January 1993, Vikernes spoke with a journalist from Bergens Tidende. The loft where the interview was conducted was filled with Satanist and Nazi paraphernalia, along with weapons, and Vikernes declared he was at war with Christianity, had already burned eight churches, and would continue his terrorism. Faust was not caught for a year, despite his actions being an open secret known to many in the scene. however, Gaahl, a vocalist from the band Gorgoroth, later came out as an openly gay man who was voted Gay Person of the Year in 2010 in Bergen, expressed belief that the killing of Andreassen by Faust had nothing to do with Andreassen's sexuality. In August 1993, Vikernes, with Snorre Ruch from Thorns and Mayhem as an accomplice, killed his bandmate Euronymous and was arrested shortly after. Vikernes was convicted in the spring of 1994 for arson, murder, and illegal possession of weapons. although while in prison, he claimed that it was also because Euronymous was gay and communist. and in the 1980s had participated in the Marxist–Leninist youth group Rød Ungdom, which he later disavowed, but there is no evidence that he was a gay man. and racism is not uncommon in the scene, even though most black metal and other extreme metal musicians disavow neo-Nazism and racist ideology. Within the Scandinavian scene, several musicians made racist statements and utilized Nazi language and paraphernalia—yet black metal is also highly performative, intentionally contradictory, and artistically transgressive, and some musicians cultivate an evil, ultra-right-wing image as an aesthetic. Many of the artists who flirted with fascism, totalitarianism, and violence in their artistic themes did not find a political connection with that imagery.
In 1994, Hellhammer, the drummer for the Norwegian band Mayhem, said of the genre's links with racism: "I'll put it this way, we don't like black people here. Black Metal is for white people". When Mayhem reformed after Euronymous's death, they began releasing merchandise bearing World War II-era Nazi symbols. However, in a later interview, Hellhammer said, "I don't give a crap if the fans are white, black, green, yellow, or blue. For me music and politics don't go hand in hand". In 1995, Gaahl described "niggers" and "mulattoes" as "subhuman" and stated his admiration for Vikernes and Adolf Hitler. However, he too has since distanced himself from these statements. Vikernes also wrote some lyrics for the album Transilvanian Hunger by Darkthrone, another key band in the Norwegian scene. It was released in 1994 with Norsk Arisk Black Metal ("Norwegian Aryan Black Metal") printed on the back cover, and issued a press release stating, "If any man should attempt to criticize this LP, he should be thoroughly patronized for his obviously Jewish behavior." After the ensuing controversy, Darkthrone claimed that "Jew" is simply a Norwegian word for "stupid" and that they were "not a Nazi band nor a political band". Scholar Keith Kahn-Harris argues that it is almost impossible to believe that Darkthrone did not know that a pejorative use of the word "Jew" was offensive, and the denials from Darkthrone that the members had racist or fascist sympathies was disingenuous, given the statements made.
Similar statements were also uttered by scene members from other countries. Michael W. Ford of the American band Black Funeral mentioned that Nazi occultism was very important to him, called his former band Sorath his "old SS Death squad" and claimed "you have to be white to play Black metal". He was the American leader of Cymophane, an organisation started by Vikernes. According to the authors of Lords of Chaos, in 1995, three Swedish black-metallers (including Mika "Belfagor" Hakola of the band Nefandus) went on a "niggerhunt" in Linköping. Wielding an axe and two machetes, they "terrorized" a Black man. Nefandus were later "considered to be Nazi sympathizers", though Belfagor explained: "This could not be further from the truth, but I guess this has to do with some of the controversial comments I made in various magazines in my youth, when I still aspired to play in the most hated band in the world. I used a lot of provocative language back then. But to sort things out: I associate with people of all creeds and colours. ... So to be labeled a Nazi or a racist is very offensive to me".
Vikernes and his project Burzum are generally seen as the main catalyst in the development of the NSBM movement, although Burzum was never explicitly political. According to an interview in Blood & Honour magazine, Vikernes contacted neo-Nazi organization Zorn 88 in 1992 and joined White Aryan Resistance before he killed Euronymous. While in prison, "Vikernes began to formulate his nationalist heathen ideology" and wrote a manifesto called Vargsmål. It became available on the Internet for a while in 1996, and in 1997, it was printed by a Norwegian publisher. Once imprisoned, Vikernes abandoned the black metal scene and started touting a neo-Nazi variety of Heathenry.
Development of National Socialist black metal
One of the first explicitly NSBM releases was the 1995 demo Thuringian Pagan Madness by German band Absurd. It was recorded while the members were imprisoned for murdering a boy from their school. On the demo cover is a photograph of his gravestone and the inlay contained pro-Nazi statements. Bandmember Hendrik Möbus stated that NSBM was the "logical conclusion" of the Norwegian black metal movement and interpreted the church burnings as a "cultural atavism". Rob Darken of Graveland in particular was a very central figure in the development of NSBM in Poland. Similar to what happened in Norway, the scene became increasingly violent, and three of the four members of the NSBM band Thunderbolt were imprisoned for arson and murder. According to Gunnar Sauermann, in the 1990s, some of the earliest American black metal bands—like Grand Belial's Key and Judas Iscariot—joined an international NSBM organization called the Pagan Front, although Judas Iscariot's sole member Akhenaten left the organization. Thelemnar, the drummer of German band Secrets of the Moon, said he got to know him "only as an intelligent person and never as a Nazi". NSBM came to dominate the black metal scenes in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.
In 2012, Alexey Levkin, frontman of the band , along with others, started the NSBM music festival Asgardsrei in Moscow. The event is named after the 1999 album of the same name by Absurd. The festival was relocated to Kyiv in 2014 when Levkin and the other organizers relocated to Ukraine to join the Azov Battalion (a brigade now).
Ideology
NSBM typically melds neo-Nazi beliefs (such as fascism, white supremacy, white separatism, white nationalism, right-wing extremism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and ethnic separatism, with some national-anarchist tendencies and admiration of Adolf Hitler) with hostility to "foreign" religions. Bands often promote ethnic European paganism, occultism, or Satanism. Hendrik Möbus of Absurd described Nazism as the "most perfect (and only realistic!) synthesis of Satanic/Luciferian will to power, elitist Social Darwinism, connected to Aryan Germanic paganism". Members of the band Der Stürmer (named after the antisemitic newspaper edited by Julius Streicher) subscribe to Esoteric Nazism, leaning on the works of Savitri Devi and Julius Evola. Famine of Peste Noire stated in an interview that he prefers Italian Fascism instead of Nazism as an ideology.
Anti-Christianity and antisemitism
Typically, NSBM musicians regard Christianity as a product of an alleged Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Aryan race by eliminating their Artglauben and their "original" culture. These musicians usually reject the legitimacy of Christian antisemitism as well as the German Christians movement, which celebrated and promoted Nazi ideology in the context of an unorthodox Christian theological framework. Hjarulv Henker of the band Der Stürmer said: