Artists in Canada tend to align themselves, for some reason, with left-wing causes; it's just part of the culture. My social-media feeds are a constant demand from artists for active resistance to the new regime in the United States. The Lena Dunhams and the Samuel L. Jacksons will take the lead in anti-Trump invective. I wouldn't be surprised if Billy Bragg put a new album out soon. And with nationalist, traditionalist movements on the rise across Europe as well, we have expected art to become more clearly a part of anti-nationalist protest. One forgets that there is also fascist art, and that that art may enjoy renewed respectability, or at least a little breathing space, in the light of the new anti-immigrant mood of the West.
A little incident at a music festival in Montreal a couple of weeks ago, in which a possibly neo-Nazi rock band from Poland was banned from playing, after a small protest, serves to illuminate the underlying values of fascist cults in music. This underground – "black metal" of Northern European origin – has been around for decades, and whether it will be emboldened by the rise of the nationalist right remains to be seen. What it does illuminate is many of the values that have long informed disenchanted, anti-social white youth in Europe.
The band in question in Montreal is called Graveland. They had been invited to play at La Messe Des Morts, a dark-metal event that had gathered a dozen bands who like to spell their names in spiky fantasy-novel lettering. The other bands had names such as Blaze of Perdition and Mayhemic Truth; some were Canadian. Graveland were the headliners. They have been around since the 1990s and they indignantly deny that they are part of the National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM). Indeed, although the lyrics to their songs are fully in the service of apocalypse – lots of blood-dimmed tides and self-sacrifice and battles for the end of the world against darkness – they are not explicitly racist. (There are mentions of fighting against "foreign blood" in some songs, but the settings are vague and mystical.) Their leader, Rob Darken, was, however, photographed in 2001 with members of another band, giving Nazi salutes. Four Graveland albums are banned from sale in Germany as "unsafe for youth."
There are certain aesthetic tropes in black metal that are death-obsessed without being explicitly political. They are mostly just goofy. Death metal bands have a fixation with all things medieval, as with fans of The Lord of the Rings. Graveland wears neo-medieval tunics on stage, with "grim reaper" hoods. Although the music is a furious wall of noise and screaming, there are folk influences on the melodies. Common to most Northern European bands on this genre is a romanticizing of a supposedly simpler, purer past, a time of knights and peasants.
Every fascist party in history has had an obsession with death – death as sacrifice, death as ultimate beauty – and so have artists. We have a word for the strain of death-obsessed art: gothic. It is a vague term that sweeps up many genuinely beautiful works in its embrace, from Bram Stoker to Odilon Redon to Nine Inch Nails. The list of great artists in love with death and its machinery, and the glamour of actual fascist parties, is long – it includes the brilliant Italian futurists and an embarrassing number of British modernists. All were aesthetes.
European black metal bands frequently also claim to be either Satanists or pagans – worshipers of ancient rites rather than gods – and as pagans they are anti-Christian. Christianity is too modern for them. This is why Norwegian black metal bands were involved in a string of church burnings in the 1990s (and one of Graveland's songs is called In the Glare of Burning Churches). There is an environmentalist, back-to-the-land side to this nostalgia. And they are not skinheads – they have long hair like hippies.
So these are not conservatives in the way we usually understand the term in North America. They are aesthetes. They have no views on economics or the role of government (although most would probably answer that they are anarchists, the question of government is unaddressed in the suicidal rivers-of-blood fantasies of their songs).
This underground has been around for decades now, beloved of a kind of small-town teenage rebel one thinks of as basically nerdy. The question is whether their anti-immigrant values are being rediscovered. In Britain, chauvinist emotion has trumped economic rationalism in the form of Brexit; in France, politics has become a choice between the right of Jacques Fillon and the extreme right of Marine Le Pen; in Italy, the populist Five Star Movement has ridden anti-globalist sentiment to unseat a prime minister. And in the United States, unabashed white supremacism is on the rise since the election. All is a reaction to a perceived threat from Islam.
In Europe, right-wing movements composed largely of young people do not call themselves white supremacists but "identitarians": They, like the hippies of the black metal scene, idealize a national past in which everybody looked the same. They say it is quite harmless to celebrate one's identity. Pagan metal fans say they are just innocently celebrating their culture, too, with its lovely Celtic knot patterns and Viking ships. How exactly these things are threatened is not clear, but they certainly seem to feel threatened.
It's interesting the anti-Nazi metal fans who protested against Graveland in Montreal have almost exactly the same aesthetic as the supposed Nazis. They wear black bomber jackets, too, and also have black-and-red logos. They love pagan metal, just not the explicitly Nazi kind. "Hail Satan, not Heil Hitler," one placard read. This parallels observations that have been made about the recent U.S. election – that left and right appeal to the same disgruntled instinct for radical change. It will be interesting to see if xenophobic art continues to grow in popularity in this time of political polarization.