1990s Norwegian Black Metal

Recently I've been getting quite into First Wave of Black Metal music. The generally lo-fi production, combined with brutal music is heavenly. And of course, naturally, I begun to listen to some early 1990s Norwegian Black Metal.

Norwegian Black Metal is notorious for the crime waves that surrounded the genre in the 1990s. Murders, suicides, and church burnings to name but a few. Unfortunately, it's those murders and suicides which are the tragic part of the genre. By 1990-ish, the biggest up-and-coming name in Norwegian Black Metal was a band called Mayhem. They used the typical black metal formula of using evil-sounding pseudonyms as their names. In 1990, the line-up of Mayhem was Dead on vocals, Euronymous on guitar, Necrobutcher on bass, and Hellhammer on drums. Based on bootleg recordings of the time, the lineup is simply fantastic. Dead was one of the best guttural vocalists I've ever heard. The tragedy is that in early 1991, Dead commited suicide, without ever recording anything in the studio. Two years later, in 1993, Euronymous was murdered by former friend known by the pseudonym Count Grishnackh, of the band Gorgoroth. The crimes of course gave the bands notoriety, and made their music much more popular, as well as inspiring other young scandinavians to form bands. But the real tragedy is the impact it had on the music. Dead was an incredible vocalist, but the world doesn't get to hear it, because he never recorded anything. Euronymous was a great guitarist, but he only recorded one album with Mayhem, which was released after his death. Count Grishnackh recorded a couple of albums with Gorgoroth, and appeared on the same Mayhem album as Euronymous, but he's spent the last 14 years in prison, and as such hasn't recorded any black metal.

If you ask me, these deaths are much more tragic than a lot of the more well known rock deaths, such as Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Randy Rhoads. All those artists recorded a great deal of music before their deaths, and everybody can hear them today. But the casualties of the early Norwegian Black Metal movement don't have that privilege. They died without really recording anything. One wonders what effect they might have had on black metal had they lived just a few years longer, and recorded a couple of albums.