Black Metal Rainbows

by Daniel Lukes (Editor), Stanimir Panayotov (Editor), Jaci Raia (Designed by)

Overview

Black metal is a paradox. A noisy underground metal genre brimming with violence and virulence, it has captured the world’s imagination for its harsh yet flamboyant style and infamous history involving arson, blasphemy, and murder. Today black metal is nothing less than a cultural battleground between those who claim it for nationalist and racist ends, and those who say: Nazi black metal fvck off!

Black Metal Rainbows is a radical collection of writers, artists, activists, and visionaries, including Drew Daniel, Kim Kelly, Laina Dawes, Espi Kvlt, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Svein Egil Hatlevik, Eugene S. Robinson, Margaret Killjoy, and many more. Across essays and theory-fictions, artworks and comics, we say out loud: Long live black metal’s trve rainbow!

This unique volume envisions black metal as always already open, inclusive, and unlimited: a musical genre whose vital spirit of total antagonism rebels against the forces of political conservatism. Beyond its clichés of grimness, nihilism, reaction, and signature black/white corpse-paint sneer, black metal today is a vibrant and revolutionary paradigm. This book reveals its ludic, carnival worlds animated by spirits of joy and celebration, community and care, queerness and camp, LGBTQI+ identities and antifascist, antiracist, and left-wing politics, not to mention endless aesthetic experimentation and fabulousness. From the crypt to the cloud, Black Metal Rainbows unearths black metal’s sparkling core and illuminates its prismatic spectrum: deep within the black, far beyond grimness, and over a darkly glittering rainbow!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629638829
Publisher:	PM Press
Publication date:	01/03/2023
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Daniel Lukes has written for metal and rock magazines Terrorizer, Kerrang!, Decibel, and Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory. He has a PhD in comparative literature from New York University, and is the coauthor of Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible (Repeater Books). He lives in Montreal, where he likes to disappear into the winter.

Stanimir Panayotov is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen, Russia, and holds a PhD in Comparative Gender Studies from Central European University, Budapest. He works at the intersections of continental and feminist philosophy, non-philosophy, and late antique philosophy and has published in Heathen Harvest, Metal Music Studies, the Minnesota Review, Aspasia, etc. He is the editorial manager of Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture.

Jaci Raia is an all-black-wearing art director currently living and working in New York City. She works in advertising, and uses her free time to take on a variety of both freelance and personal projects to fulfill herself creatively. After design and typography, metal music is her second love, and she spends a lot of time seeing shows in town and collecting records, tapes, and band shirts, much to the detriment of her wallet.

Table of Contents

• Ritual for PO & KT by Jonathan Mayhew

• Introduction: Somewhere Over a Black Metal Rainbow by Daniel Lukes and Stanimir Panayotov
• Putting the Fag Back in Sarcófago by Drew Daniel
• Sad Rainbows by Stanimir Panayotov
• You Don’t Win a Culture War by Giving Up Ground by Margaret Killjoy
• Why Us? Why Now? Discussing the Rise of Anti-Fascist Black Metal by Stuart Wain
• Black Metal under the Black Flag by Kim Kelly
• Queer Kvlt Porn by Espi Kvlt
• Malefica: The Witch as Restorative Feminism in Female Black Metal Performance by Jasmine Hazel Shadrack
• “Righteous Violence”: Zeal and Ardor’s Application of African American Folk Music in Black Metal by Laina Dawes
• Queer Rot by Joseph Russo
• Doom Donkey: Mick Barr’s Drone of Information and The Rainbow Supremacy by Aliza Shvarts
• Flamboyant Atrocity: How to Enhance Dead’s Death Depiction by Élodie Lesourd
• Bizarre Black Metal by Daniel Lukes
• Dødheimsgard’s 666 International: An Oral History by Daniel Lukes
• Svein Egil Hatlevik: Artist Profile by Daniel Lukes
• iNfect (Artist Statement) by Andrew Zealley
• A Biatch in the Northern Sky by Patrizia Pelgrift
• When Evil Comes A’Calling by Eugene S. Robinson
• “The Colossal and Abyssal Apathy of the Universe toward You”: Black Metal and Male Depression by Nina Power
• Vox Inferi: Fictionalizing Black Metal by Catherine Fearns
• Extract from Sound by Catherine Fearns
• Black Ambience: Where Do Ambient and Black Metal Meet? by Angel Simitchiev
• Pretty in Black: The Temptation to Melody and Ambience in Black Metal by Steven Shakespeare
• Black Metal Is Feminine by Avi Pitchon
• Black Metal of the Americas Is Fucking Dead by Edward Blair
• Queer Lady–Owned Heavy Music Label Tridroid Records: Interview with Christine Kelly by Daniel Lukes
• The Dialectical Satan by Langdon Hickman
• Rape Culture and Metal by George Parr
• The Machine Mystique: Deep-Learning Metal by Bogna M. Konior
• Black Metal Information: Cybernetic Resonance of the Gloom Series by Kenji Siratori
• Theriomorphous and Infectus: Black Metal Disco(Creative Intervention Description) by Andrew Zealley
• Queer Traditionalism by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix
• Holy Unblack Metal: The White Horse of the Apocalypse by Benjamin Bianciotto
• Devotion Has a Price by Vincent Como
• Blink. 2.0 (For Pelle Ohlin & Kiriko Takemura) by Jonathan Mayhew

• Credits
• Index Eritque Arcus
• Contributors

Editorial Reviews

This is a manifesto as much as a book: A grand declaration of war against those who would confine black metal to crude invocations of masculine, heteronormative nativism. Black Metal Rainbows is an untamed collection of art, memoir, essays, and interviews that explode black metal into an infinity of kaleidoscopic pieces. It celebrates the truly unruly, the revolutionary and the playful, and it refuses to turn its subversive gaze away from black metal itself. A not–so–subtle reproach to those who condemn ‘wokeness’ as a pacification of black metal’s vitality, Black Metal Rainbows demonstrates an awakening to black metal’s true destiny.”
—Keith Kahn–Harris, author of Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge

“Black metal is a fascinating genre—in part because of its complicated (and bloody) history but also because of the rigorous theory and deep thoughts buzzing around it. If you were to put together a perfect black metal book, one that captures that essential complexity while also providing historical and personal insights, it would be Black Metal Rainbows, a sprawling collection of essays, interviews, band and label profiles, and all kinds of art for both the true kvlt and the curious. It sets the new standard for how we should think about this music.”
—Brandon Stosuy, The Creative Independent

“Finally black metal is delivered from the tedious edgelords who have long diluted the decidedly queer heart of the desire for darkness, death, and despair as an effulgent world of creative infinity. This volume offers myriad trajectories, via art, philosophy, action, and music that black metal has created, perhaps because of, perhaps in spite of, its embrace of all things tenebrous. This delicious book is a beacon of black light that shows the wonders which occur when the atrophied figure of the dominant human undergoes putrefaction and emerges from the crypt in glittering cerecloth. An absolute joy to read.”
—Patricia MacCormack, author of The Ahuman Manifesto

“This wide–ranging compendium pushes past the conventional and conservative to explore black metal as a site of contest and transformative possibility—an act which is itself actually transgressive.”
—Jes Skolnik, senior editor, Bandcamp Daily

“Despite being there in the moment during the ascent of the Venoms, the Bathorys, and the Hellhammers, I’ve tended to fidget warily from afar since black metal partly curdled into a mess of homogenized inhumanity. So, I welcome this collective liberating howl beyond the stereotypes of icy forests and puerile hatred. Bravo!”
—Barney Greenway, Napalm Death

From the Publisher