Black metal: it’s not just for alienated, Norwegian-welfare-collecting neo-Nazis anymore. Thanks to Vice, plum-smuggling, ironic prep-school jerks now have a coffee table collection to thumb through next time they have a panic attack and need to laugh at men dressed sillier than themselves. Oh, the regions the ecosystem of cool now has to reach for these days to maintain itself.
Ostensibly not for that reason, photographer Peter Beste chronicles the architects and the inheritors of the worst music on the planet in True Norwegian Black Metal (Vice Books, 208 pages, $64). As the book copy has it, Beste gained the confidence of the likes of “Gaahl” of Gorgoroth and “Abbath” of Immortal. The confidence shows and Beste’s photos do bring a slick naturalism to a world more known for its dollar-store camp level of faux evil. Well, as much naturalism as possible for people still dripping in blood and “corpse paint.” Photo essays shouldn’t need excessive context, but the grim facts of Norwegian black metal’s early ’90s rise to micro-infamy — several sectarian murders, arson, virulent xenophobia, most of which the included essay scoots over — makes the book’s silent austerity come off as giddy anti-journalism.
What Beste does capture in several photos is a sense of the isolation of his subjects, both geographical and social. If extreme metal has long and proudly declared itself the soundtrack of loserdom, then these musicians — misanthropic small-town creeps far too into scythes and face paint — are lepers among lepers. In Beste’s photos of Gaahl alone in a glacial wilderness, we see not the heroic pose the subject desperately wants to convey, but an image of tragedy that fulfills Arthur Miller’s definition of the word: the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. In trying to be more metal than metal — bigger wristband spikes, “blast beat” drums and casually dropped elvish slang — this subculture has defined itself as caricature with a brutal lack of self-awareness. To anyone over the age of 14, or not Norwegian, the shtick comes off as somewhere between WWF and Cirque du Soleil.
Despite some powerful images and several startling juxtapositions (is that Abbath I see in a minivan?) the collection as a whole fails to give us enough grist to answer a photograph’s most basic precept: why are we looking?