Euronymous: The black metal guitarist who made a necklace out of his frontman’s skull
See, this kind of shit is what happens when you take heavy metal too seriously.
This is what happens when people lose sight of the fact that heavy metal is inherently silly. Big, theatrical bands turning their woes into big, theatrical songs as loud as they are camp. Preferably performed while wearing leather and studded belts with riffs for days and lyrics that have as many dragons as pronouns. The silliness isn’t just the point, it’s what makes heavy metal art, the process of turning your darkest thoughts into cathartic joy.
Then you get the other side of metal. The camp where cathartic joy is the absolute opposite effect people want their music to have. To the more extreme end of metal, the genre exists to turn your darkest thoughts into even darker thoughts. The kind that bands everyone together in a form of collective trauma.
This isn’t even strictly speaking a bad thing. I’ve watched too many fucked up horror films and listened to too much Behemoth to feel that art is only art if it leaves you feeling better than you did before you took it in.
However, there’s a limit to all this. One that the moment you go past it, you can’t go back. The best example of this without a shadow of a doubt is the Norwegian black metal scene, where the pressure on everyone involved in the scene to outdo each other in terms of being legitimately evil led to some truly horrific acts. The kind so surreal that they wouldn’t be out of place in a jet-black comedy, but the fact that this happened to real people makes this horrifyingly serious.
Just the way its perpetrators want it to be.
Which Black metal band went too far?
Formed in Oslo, Norway in 1984, Mayhem are one of the most notorious heavy metal bands of all time to this day.
Though they were surrounded by controversy from the very beginning, what they’re really known for is the intensely horrible events they went through in 1991, which started out with their frontman’s suicide and only got more horrific from there. The signs that Per Yngve Ohlin (otherwise known as Death) was in a bad place were all there.
This was a guy with a history of self-harming, sometimes on stage, who made no secret of the fact that his crippling depression inspired the majority of the band’s music. On April 8th, 1991, he slit his wrists and finished the job by taking a shotgun to his own head. He was 22 years old. He was found by Mayhem’s guitarist Euronymous, who was so desensitised by his band’s commitment to evil that he did something truly foul. He took photos of his singer’s corpse and made them the cover art for one of their albums.
He didn’t stop there either. He took fragments of the poor kid’s skull and made several necklaces out of them, bestowing these necklaces on other black metal musicians that he deemed worthy. It was this act that made Varg Vikernes of rival band Burzum kill Euronymous himself in 1993, which we can’t even celebrate that much because Vikernes is an unrepentant Nazi.
Despite all this, metal can and should be a force for good and positivity in this world. These were just stupid kids who lost themselves in make-believe.