Icelandic E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies
Author Affiliation
Research Fellow
University of Oslo
Oslo, Østlandet, Norway
Black Metal, Literature and Mythology. The Case of Cornelius Jakhelln
by Giuliano D'Amico
2009
Nordicum-Mediterraneum 4(1) 25-33
University of Akureyri
Akureyri, Ísafjörður, Iceland
http://hdl.handle.net/1946/5971
Author Affiliation
Research Fellow
University of Oslo
Oslo, Østlandet, Norway
Popular culture is a category of the learned. […] The debates surrounding even the
definition of popular culture engage a concept that attempts to define, characterize
and name practices never designated by its actors as part of „popular culture‟. […]
One can reduce the innumerable definitions of popular culture to two great
descriptive models. The first […] conceives popular culture as a coherent and
autonomous symbolic system that functions according to a logic absolutely foreign to
those of literate culture. The second […] perceives popular culture in its dependencies
and deficiencies with respect to the dominant culture. On the one side, then, popular
culture constitutes a world apart, closed on itself, independent. On the other, popular
culture is completely defined by its distance from a cultural legitimacy of which it is
deprived.[1]
In the above statement book historian Roger Chartier stresses an impasse that has
long characterized the understanding of popular culture and popular music. Although
popular culture and music are widely researched and taught in scholarly institutions,
their very definition has not managed to shake off their dependency and inferiority to
„high‟ culture. The two traditional models, as suggested by Chartier, work well as long
as popular and high culture function as two impenetrable and separate systems.
Problems arise when popular culture starts dealing with discourses traditionally
belonging to high culture. Thus, Chartier introduces the concept of appropriation,
which „involves a social history of the various uses […] of discourses and models,
brought back to their fundamental social and institutional determinants and lodged
in the specific practices that produce them.‟[2] In this article I shall focus on black
metal‟s appropriation of literary and mythological discourses — and the other way
around. Following Chartier, I wish to show how the borders between „high‟ and
„popular‟ culture often become blurred, and to help raise a debate on black metal as
an art form, a debate which is „sorely needed.‟[3] In fact, unlike many other forms of
popular music, black metal has hardly been the object of scholarly interest: Cornelius
Jakhelln‟s activity as both writer and musician looks like a unique case in point for
raising attention.
Black metal is a sub-genre of heavy metal music and was invented in the early 1980s
by, among others, British band Venom (who released an album entitled Black Metal),
Sweden‟s Bathory and Norway‟s Mayhem. Black metal knew a flourishing period
(often named „the second wave of black metal‟) between 1990 and 1995, especially in
Norway. Bands and records from this period are probably the most known
worldwide, also because of the criminal offences perpetrated by some musicians
involved in the scene (among others, the murder of Øystein Aarseth, founder of
Mayhem and the burning of several churches).
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