Chapter 13 of Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: “Ashes Against the Grain: Black Metal and the Grim Rebirth of Romanticism” (pp. 235-257) by Julian Knox, Assistant Professor of English, Georgia College.
- Chapter summary
- This collection ends with Julian Knox’s “Ashes Against the Grain: Black Metal and the Grim Rebirth of Romanticism.” The genre of rock called “heavy metal” is often said to have begun in the 1970s with the bands Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, but heavy metal has since branched out into a variety of subgenres, including thrash, death, doom, and even folk metal, which blends regional folk music and traditional instrumentation with heavy metal. Knox argues that one of these subgenres, black metal, self-consciously draws from and then exceeds, sometime ironically, Gothic and dark Romantic literary tropes to promulgate an aesthetic of death and decay that one black metal musician called “Werewolf Romanticism.” Knox explores bands such as Burzum, Mayhem, Xasthur, and Varathron and their uses of Romantic-era literature and painting by figures such as Shelley, Blake, Byron, Novalis, Goëthe, and Freidrich to define Romantic rejection of the pastoral—which was seen by figures such as Novalis and Hoffmann as capitulation to power structures—as a form of inwardness or psychologizing. These figures explore Plato’s cave as the skull of the mind, the collective voices of the dead, to assert or affirm their individuality against capitalism.
- Music
- Note: many passing references to music, literature, and artworks are excluded from this list. If a specific song was not available, or if an album was mentioned but not a specific song, representative examples were taken for the iTunes playlist.
- Black Sabbath, “Killing Yourself to Live“
- Todd Rundgren, The Ever-Popular Tortured Artist Effect
- Billy Joel, “Only the Good Die Young“
- Barzum
- Filosofem
- Aske
- Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
- Xasthur, “Telepathic with the Deceased“
- Arcana Coelestia
- Varathron, His Majesty at the Swamp
- Judas Iscariot
- “Portions of Eternity Too Great for the Eye of Man”
- Arise, My Lord. . .
- Of Great Eternity
- Pest Productions, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
- Caladan Brood, Echoes of Battle, “Wild Autumn Wind“
- Rotting Christ, “One With the Forest”
- Carpathian Forest, “Return of the Freezing Winds”
- Horn, “The Fading Landscape’s Glory”
- Vargsang, Throne of the Forgotten
- Nargaroth, Geliebte des Regens [Beloved of the Rain]
- Agalloch, “Falling Snow“
- Wolves in the Throne Room
- Botanist, “The Verdant Realm“
- Mayhem, “Pagan Fears”
- Nagelfar, “Seelenland” in Hünengrab im Herbst
- Xasthur, To Violate the Obvious
- Literature
- William Blake
- William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis“
- Byron, “[A Fragment]”
- Coleridge
- Aids to Reflection
- “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“
- “Frost at Midnight“
- “The Eolian Harp“
- Lay Sermons
- “Inscription for a Time-Piece“
- Lectures on the History of Philosophy
- Goethe
- John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
- Novalis, Hymns to the Night
- Plato, Republic
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Charlotte Smith, “On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic”
- Wallace Stevens, “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”
- Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
- Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings
- William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey“
- Get the iTunes playlist
The Philosophy of Contemporary Song 