THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ENSLAVED TO BLACK METAL
Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 10:45am by Axl Rosenberg
It’s not every day that I pick up the Arts section of The New York times and find a giant half-page photo of one of my favorite frontmen mid-growl – but there’s Enslaved’s Grutle Kjellson staring me right in the face. In a piece entitled “On the Road to Spread the Word of Good, Old-Fashioned Evil,” Kelefa Sanneh – whose work isn’t usually worth the paper it’s printed on – profiles the Norwegian black metallers, writing:
“They are rock stars, more or less, in Norway, but they are decidedly underground figures in most of the rest of the world. Still, that a hundred or so fans came out to see them at the Crocodile Rock Café, a cavernous Allentown club, says something about the tenacity of the genre and the band. The members hurtled through a typically eerie, riveting set, propelled by tricky rhythms, keyboard atmospherics, mutating guitar riffs and careful but cathartic explosions of noise and screaming.”
Since the piece comes just months after giving a favorable review to Behemoth’s The Apostasy, I’m starting to wonder if Sanneh isn’t just a massive black metal fan.
Read the entire article here.
Enslaved play B.B. King’s in Times Square tonight with Arsis and The Agonist as support. Get additional tour dates on their MySpace page.
-AR
I think it has less to do with Sanneh’s personal taste than it does with the fact that for some reason it is seen as acceptable within the rock snob/critic community to like black metal. I’m not sure why that is, but I’ve definitely noticed it before, and it does not apply to other metal sub-genres. I think it has do with the perceived underground-ness and artsiness of it that appeals to the Northeastern Liberal Arts College-educated set. You know, the typical listening with your mind instead of your ears tactic that this set of music journalists tends to employ.
Being a “rock star in Norway” is akin to being popular in British Columbia.
But seriously, it’s cool to see the NYT actually do a real piece on this genre.
Kelefa Sanneh has written about metal in the Times quite a bit, actually — but, for the reasons Vince outlined, it’s always controversial. I think he genuinely enjoys the stuff, though. For my money, I always prefered to read Ben Ratliff’s musings on metal, where he comes at it from a hesher-gone-jazz-enthusiast perspective. Wonderful writer.
Vince is right on the money–I live in Chicago, and there are two writers from the Chicago Tribune who have written about black metal–but not any other type of metal–in the last year or so. Greg Kot is one of those writers, and his top ten from last year included Nachtmystium’s “Instinct:Decay.”
For some weird reason, rock snobs are on this tangent where they think black metal is somehow more “authentic” than the rest of the metal genre. It just goes to show how stupid all those people are. Actually, it’s kind of sad.