Page:Black Metal, Literature and Mythology. The Case of Cornelius Jakhelln.pdf/1

Nordicum-Mediterraneum Icelandic E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies [[File:Black Metal, Literature and Mythology. The Case of Cornelius Jakhelln Image 25.png|center|Giuliano D'Amico 2009 Black Metal, Literature and Mythology. The Case of Cornelius Jakhelln Nordicum-Mediterraneum 4(1) 25-33 Akureyri, Ísafjörður, Iceland: University of Akureyri

Author Affiliation Research Fellow University of Oslo ]]

by Giuliano D'Amico

2009

Nordicum-Mediterraneum 4(1) 25-33

University of Akureyri

http://hdl.handle.net/1946/5971

Author Affiliation

Research Fellow

University of Oslo

Popular culture is a category of the learned. […] The debates surrounding even the definition of popular culture engage a concept that attempts to define, characterize and name practices never designated by its actors as part of „popular culture‟. […] One can reduce the innumerable definitions of popular culture to two great descriptive models. The first […] conceives popular culture as a coherent and autonomous symbolic system that functions according to a logic absolutely foreign to those of literate culture. The second […] perceives popular culture in its dependencies and deficiencies with respect to the dominant culture. On the one side, then, popular culture constitutes a world apart, closed on itself, independent. On the other, popular culture is completely defined by its distance from a cultural legitimacy of which it is deprived.

In the above statement book historian Roger Chartier stresses an impasse that has long characterized the understanding of popular culture and popular music. Although popular culture and music are widely researched and taught in scholarly institutions, their very definition has not managed to shake off their dependency and inferiority to „high‟ culture. The two traditional models, as suggested by Chartier, work well as long as popular and high culture function as two impenetrable and separate systems. Problems arise when popular culture starts dealing with discourses traditionally belonging to high culture. Thus, Chartier introduces the concept of appropriation, which „involves a social history of the various uses […] of discourses and models, brought back to their fundamental social and institutional determinants and lodged in the specific practices that produce them.‟ In this article I shall focus on black metal‟s appropriation of literary and mythological discourses — and the other way around. Following Chartier, I wish to show how the borders between „high‟ and „popular‟ culture often become blurred, and to help raise a debate on black metal as an art form, a debate which is „sorely needed.‟ In fact, unlike many other forms of popular music, black metal has hardly been the object of scholarly interest: Cornelius Jakhelln‟s activity as both writer and musician looks like a unique case in point for raising attention.

Black metal is a sub-genre of heavy metal music and was invented in the early 1980s by, among others, British band Venom (who released an album entitled Black Metal), Sweden‟s Bathory and Norway‟s Mayhem. Black metal knew a flourishing period (often named „the second wave of black metal‟) between 1990 and 1995, especially in Norway. Bands and records from this period are probably the most known worldwide, also because of the criminal offences perpetrated by some musicians involved in the scene (among others, the murder of Øystein Aarseth, founder of Mayhem and the burning of several churches). 25March 2009 Volume 4, number 1