By
Sebastian Bullhorn
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Euronymous ~
I’m pretty sure nobody in the DRS camp is related to this person. Even better, no one knew him personally! Hell, I’m not even sad he’s dead. But rebellious he sure was, so even if this article is not some beautiful eulogy making you cry for a change, it’s still legit, okay?
Perhaps it seems to you that Euronymous is not really in the same league as the other Rebels we have had. Not exactly the most famous person in the world, and who wants to compete with gods and their offspring after all? Well, he actually did in a way. That’s right, because this week’s Dead Rebel was satanic to the max. Worshipping the Devil, challenging the Heavens, doing evil deeds and all that other good stuff.
So, this guy was born as Øystein Aarseth somewhere in Norway. Although born in 1968 he was by no means one of the flower people. Far from it! This is the man who would later make headlines as the leader of Norway’s radical Black Metal scene in the early 90’s.
He took over a local band called Mayhem in the mid 80’s. They played a raw and fast variety of Heavy Metal music, using lyrical themes dealing with death cults and Satanism. Even though the lyrics were completely unintelligible due to the extreme vocals, they seemed to hit home just fine. To fit the role a little better, Øystein now changed his name to Euronymous, which was the name of a demon in some occult literature he had read. With him on guitar, Mayhem arguably became the first true Black Metal band, with releases such as “Deathcrush” or “De Mysteriis Dom Satanas” that are now considered classics by connoisseurs of the genre. And being “true” is one helluva hard task within that clusterfuck of a music scene, where everybody screams bloody murder if you stray into new territories. Being “true”, totally in tune with the essence of Black Metal, is the only thing that matters in these circles. Both musically and spiritually.
Anyway.
Soon the band had a nice little movement going on in Oslo, the capital of Norway, with several other bands also representing the more Satanic ideas of the Metal underground. Euronymous founded a small label called Deathlike Silence Productions, on which he wanted to release all the other bands that he considered to be “true” enough. He opened up a small record store called Helvete, which is Norwegian for “Hell”, and turned it into the main meeting point for everyone who wanted to be part of their scene. And they were rather picky. To the uneducated ear, all those extreme music styles might sound the same, not unlike a broken washing machine filled with gravel, but the people around Mayhem hated everything any other Metal bands represented. Only “true” Black Metal was good enough.
Take Death Metal, for instance. A layman could never distinguish between that and Black Metal. There are the extreme vocals, the drums being hit as fast and furious as possible, and they all dress in black, looking totally evil. Well, the difference, to our purist protagonists here, is that the Death Metal guys strived for technical proficiency on their instruments, and saw their evil image and lyrics as some kind of schtick. Not Euronymous. Not “true” Black Metal. The music had to be raw. Nobody outside their scene should like the band, ‘cause if they did there was something not “true” going on. Their motto was “No mosh, no fun, no trend, no core”, which meant you mustn’t have a good time under any circumstances, especially not at concerts. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
But Euronymous went a lot further than that. It wasn’t really about the music anymore. He lived the lyrics. He wanted to be evil, not only appear as if he was.
And thus, their corner of the scene turned into what became generally known as the “Svarte Sirkel” (The Black Circle); a radical group of musicians from prominent Black Metal bands, such as Emperor and Darkthrone, who wanted to act out on what their lyrics dealt with. This was, of course, first and foremost, the war against Christianity.
The Black Circle did everything in their power to make it resemble a real war, and not just in the figurative sense either. Smaller terrorist attacks were not unusual. Burning churches became some kind of morbid hobby for the hardcore members of the group, and they frequently made the news. Foreign Metal bands playing in Norway had to fear for their very lives since it wasn’t beyond the members of “Svarte Sirkel” to set the occasional tour bus on fire. Then there was Emperor’s Faust who stabbed a gay guy who hit on him. There are so many stories to tell about that time, but I’m too lazy right now, and if you really need to know everything, get a damn book about it. I think there’s one called “Lords Of Chaos”. Just take my word for it when I say that these guys were all over the place. I bet the prisons were a fun place in Norway around that time, since every other inmate probably wore black and white make-up and spiked armbands, which were mandatory among people playing Black Metal.
But unfortunately, despite all Mayhem’s commendable endeavours to fight the bad trends in music and life, they were without success in the end. At least that’s what their sensitive singer, "Dead", felt, and thus he slit his wrists and blew his brains out with a shotgun in 1991. But even in death he was quite useful for his now disbanded outfit. Euronymous, who found Dead’s corpse lounging in the back room of the record store, took his time before calling the police and took some photos of the scenery. These later appeared on a bootleg album cover. A dead “Dead” on a live album – you gotta love the irony. But taking pictures of your dead buddy is almost sane compared to Euro’s (I feel so familiar with the guy by now that I’ll just call him Euro from now on) next brilliant move: He collected little pieces of his friend’s skull that were lying around the room to make some kind of magic amulets out of them, and those were later sent to his extra-true friends all over the world. He also ate a bit of Dead’s brain, and then sat back to call the cops.
With such an outstandingly cool leader in the group there were naturally those in the inner circle who were envious of his status as well. Most of all there was one particular guy who wanted to have more say in their little organization; the man behind the one man Black Metal project Burzum, Varg Vikernes, a.k.a. Count Grishnackh.He was spitting mad that Euro occupied the leading role in the Circle, although he, Varg, had burned his fair share of churches all by himself. Some additional arguments about the conditions of the Burzum record deal with Euro’s label and the usual bullshit over some girl made for even more drama.
But there was more to it. Euro fancied communism. Remarkably, he wasn’t in it for the ideology behind it, the interesting theoretical system that has never been correctly applied to any society by any form of government, but because of the inhuman implementation of it by the communist dictatorship in Albania at the time. And that was the other part of the reason why he was eventually killed by Varg, an avid fan of the Third Reich and Nazism. Talk about a nice diversity of ideological positions. Polar opposites in such an isolated group of already extreme views.
So, Euro (you know what? That’s still too long - he’ll now step into Prince territory and just be referred to as "€" – cool, huh?) received about 23 stab wounds to his head, neck and back. Varg, Count Grishnackh to his friends, was sentenced to life imprisonment – 21 years- for the murder.
Ironically, these events just split their scene even wider apart, and soon enough every little Black Metal Head belonged to either the “Friends Of €” (FOE) or to the “Friends Of Grishnackh” (FOG). Evil and satanic warfare or ridiculous junior high school clique behavior, you decide. To their defense, they were all still pretty young at the time.
Well, that’s basically all you need to know to get started and have something to talk about at the next black mass. € ultimately died for his beliefs, as extreme and outrageous they might have been, which makes him fit in here as far as I’m concerned. He marched to his own blast beats and did things his way, without compromising his ideals.
You know, I’m not of the opinion that the life € lived was exemplary or anything. Actually, it was rather pointless when it all came down to it, but go ahead and tell me that the way people like Kurt fucking Cobain coped with their teenage angst was any cooler.
No?
That’s what I thought.
