Now I know what some of you guys are thinking. “Why the fuck is Gio writing a positive piece on this trad fag?” The answer is simple. I have always liked Varg despite my differences in worldview with him, mostly because of the music itself, which often gets overshadowed due to Varg’s hot takes and the crimes he commited in the early 90’s. Burzum’s music is significant though, and deserves to be appreciated on it’s own terms without all the extra distractions, so that’s what I’m going to do here.
Still, I do have to make this clear from the beginning, I am basically Varg’s polar opposite in terms of worldview. Varg is a radical traditionalist and a primmie, I’m a Futurist. Varg is a neo-pagan, I’m an agnostic/lapsed Catholic. Varg is a Nordicist , I’m a Med Supremacist. I’ve never played an RPG in my life and Varg takes those things a little way too seriously. The closest I will come to defending Varg’s “political” views is that while he is racist, believes in a lot of the same things as nazi’s and oftentimes sounds like one, I wouldn’t actually say he is one. Simply because his end game isn’t establishing an authoritarian government thatwill punish all of Europes “undesirables” (what people usually mean when they call someone a nazi). Varg wants industrial civilization as a whole to collapse so we can return to Lord of the Rings times or something. I honestly think if Varg did a political compass test he would be in the libertarian right box, not authoritarian right. His racial and social views are far right, but he isn’t actually politically active and doesn’t believe in or care about political solutions that would only prolong industrial civilization. In a lot of ways he’s more like a right wing anarchist than a neo-nazi. Like he genuinely does hate people in government and law enforcement and mostly just wants to be left alone to grow vegetables, play Myfarog with his kids and troll Christians and Southern Europeans on Twitter, and what’s really wrong with that?
Just to be clear, the last time i interacted with Varg the conversation ended with him calling me a filthy arab and blocking me on twitter, so I’m not one of those Varg fanboys that just eats up everything he say’s. If he say’s something stupid on twitter and you want to call him a retard, have at it, I’ll probably be the last one to stand in your way, I’ve done so myself on quite a few occassions.
As for the crimes he commited (or has been accused of commiting) in the early 90’s (church burnings, murder of Euronymous) a lot of ink has been spilled over all of that already, so I’m just kind of going to step over it. All of you know the story by now, if you don’t, google it, there’s lots of documentaries and books that focus on that aspect of Black Metal. It’s kinda boring to me now and I just don’t care about it anymore. All I’m going to say on it is Varg was a rebellious teenager, did some wild shit back in the early 90’s, did his time, and now’s he’s a free man again. I don’t really expect him to go on a church burning rampage at this time in his life, for old times sake. He isn’t “dangerous” like that anymore, and there are reasons you don’t really see anyone mourning the loss of Euronymous.
Really, the main problem with Varg’s persona is that when he got out of prison he became an internet personality who put his entire life online and shares his thoughts on every subject under the sun constantly. When I got into Burzum in the early 00’s, Varg was still in prison, and he had a dark, mysterious, scary even persona around him, that is simply gone now. He’s basically a meme at this point. I do find his internet shenanigans amusing, and think he’s very self aware and just kind of enjoys being a pagan shitlord on twitter, but I think when younger people who never knew the old Varg find out about him, the vibe is different now than it was then. Like, they’ll never really get it. Also the rise of hipster Black Metal and the memification of the scene in general makes it hard to take this stuff seriously anymore at all, but I digress.
With that out of the way, onto Burzum.
So how I would describe the Burzum sound is it takes the form of metal but is punk in it’s simplicity and heavily focused on atmosphere. He’ll utilize lots of tremolo picking, blast beats and throaty screamed vocals that were common to his peers in the Norwegian black metal scene, but his songs will often be more repetitive, with just one or maybe two riffs that will be repeated with subtle progressions and layering often with synths. There are other non-metal genres that take this approach and comparisons could be made to shoegaze, darkwave, techno etc. Really Varg was an ambient artist first and formost, aside from his prison synth albums, his discography features ambient tracks throughout and even when he is in metal mode his approach to metal is much more focused on atmosphere than was really common in metal prior to Burzum. It is taken for granted today that this was always part of the Black Metal formula but seriously, nobody was even hinting at taking this approach back in the 80’s, and even in the Black Metal scene at the time this style was unique to Varg. Bands like Darkthrone and Mayhem put much more emphasis on projecting the evil image, on being brutal and trve, Varg’s music is a lot morre emotive, melancholic and reflective, like ambient music.
Burzums atmospheric approach to Black Metal is probably the most popular and influential and I would say did open the scene up to a much broader audience than it otherwise would have received. Case in point, Filosofem is both #1 Black Metal album on Rate Your Music and #2 for Ambient, behind only Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Really, all “hipster” black metal whether it be DBSM (depressive/suicidal black metal), blackgaze (black metal mixed with shoegaze) or anything atmospheric or ambient in BM really, is either directly or indirectly inspired by Varg. Varg cites The Cure’s Disintegration as a major influence on his sound, so he definently was drawing from outside of the ordinary stylistic trappings of heavy metal. His approach to metal was very left of field. This was forward thinking metal for cool people with good taste, not boring prog rock for nerds like Opeth. And let’s be honest without hipsters making BM acceptable to listen to outside of the traditional metalhead community, Red and Anarchist BM (which wants to cancel Varg and Burzum for his political views.) wouldn’t be possible. It is now possible to be influenced by Varg without even listening to his music, because so many people basically copied his style, including a lot of RABM bands.
I was originally going to make this article much more about RABM but honestly after listening to a couple of the bands associated with the label, I’m not going to bother. 10 years ago, we called this stuff “blackened crust” and I liked a lot of that stuff. Iskra, Remains of the Day, Martyrdod. All good bands, worth checking out. Not sure when these types of bands started calling themselves RABM and trying to police a scene they aren’t really a part of, but thats a thing now. It just screams “we’re transplants from Seattle doing our shitty crust punk alternative version of Burzum and Absurd.” It isn’t authentic, and the BM community seems too largely hate this stuff.
I will say that it’s a little late for trying to co-opt and redefine what BM is at this point. It’s an established genre with 30+ years of history overlapping with the right. That probably isn’t going to change. The Left should focus more on creating their own forms of expression, not trying to police the scenes of others. It can’t really be repurposed at this point, do your own thing. I do think Crust has some shared lineage with Black Metal, with bands taking inspiration from some of the same first wave BM bands like Hellhammer kinda sounds like Discharge sometimes and Sacrilege sound kinda like Venom at times, apparently Amebix once sent a demo of theirs to Cronos from Venom, who replied that he wanted to steal ideas from it lol. With that being said they are very different and distinct scenes with very different values and should probably remain so. Taking inspiration from both is fine, but neither can really infiltrate the other authentically and it’s pretty gay when they try to. When one oversteps too much into the others yard it can get messy. If it were black metal bands trying to present as crust and trying to push out the anarchists I would think that was lame too, but it’s always the other way around. If you like this stuff, you kind of just have to check your politics at the door, or not listen to it to be honest.
And honestly, with Burzum it should be pretty easy to do that, as his music isn’t screaming “this is political propaganda music” the way Starbucks-core bands do. And no, not just because you can’t understand the lyrics anyways. Even if you did pull up the lyric sheet, it’s mostly just about nerdy Lord of the Rings shit. I wouldn’t describe Burzums’s music as particularly political. There are actual NSBM bands, that are like that, but Burzum isn’t.
I’m not going to do the whole “seperate the art from the artist” thing because I do think that an artists worldview is integral to their art. But I also think art can be great, whether I 100% agree with it’s messaging or not. I do think Burzum’s music is great. I think Varg had a very unique voice in the Norwegian Black Metal scene, and made music that was very beautiful and authentic and trve. And that’s really all I give a fuck about really. And that is why he has had the broad influence that he has had, despite his “problematic” views.
Really, Varg doesn’t even give a shit about the Black Metal community and he wanted his music to appeal to different types of people, and not be this closed off, cultish thing that Euronymous wanted it be. This was one of the reasons he beefed with Euronymous.
In a lot of way’s I think Fenriz from Darkthrone would be a better figurehead for Black Metal than Varg, as he actually love’s Metal, and Varg doesn’t. Also he doesn’t run his mouth off about politics all day on Twitter, like Varg does. But you have to give the devil his due. Varg is that dude. He’s the first person you learn about when you’re getting into black metal, and Burzum is usually the first band you hear. Easily the most widely listened to from a scene whose aesthics are actually more famous than the music itself. I do feel Burzum’s music does get overlooked, particularly by younger people who think of Varg the Pagan shitlord rather than Varg the artist, and that’s a shame, because it’s really good music. In my opinion some of the best of the 90s. And that is why Varg will always be a great guy.
PS. Varg, if you’re reading this I’m sorry I called Odin a gay cum guzzler. Can you unban me on twitter?
I think he does not like state but he cannot get rid of some thoughts that imposed&concocted by the states and he is not aware of this.
I've always had a soft spot for the "back to nature" right cause at least its a more consistent belief system