as to what inspired the creation of the website and its particular design as a method of communicating the history and intelligence of metal, the honest and simple answer is academic philosophy. once i began to see the world in terms of symbols, historical trends, ideological realizations and alignments, it became clear to me that metal was in conflict between skeptics and idealists of a naturalist religion that combined aspects of both former times and the "ultra- present," or cutting edge of humanity's confrontation with the problems of its own governance.

at this time, morbid angel's "blessed are the sick" had just been released and death metal was in its infancy. i spent a good deal of time listening to D.R.I. and C.O.C. before finding that the subconscious imagery of death metal appealed more to my artistic and philosophical senses than the direct political/social assault of fury and dissidence that thrash bands favored. between thrash and metal, i found something which more than an identity helped me find a way out of the fog of confusion of high school and the years afterward: an ideological clarity that was matched by an artistic spirit of exploration and in the succinct words of thomas pynchon, telling death to fuck off.

black metal came about really a year or so later, and was something that at first was controversial. i had begun my life as the presenter of a death metal program at that time and it seemed natural to me to include the new genre, since it was both as aggressive and as transcendent in its vision as death metal was, but unlike death metal in 1992-93, was not yet bloated and had a clearer statement of ideological advancement. also, it appealed to me in that it left behind the humanist and socially-conditioned responses to which many death metal bands fell prey. so at a time when many in the scene were calling black metal "fake," i was embracing it and lashing out at its enemies.

is it part of my identity/lifestyle? definitely it is part of my lifestyle. my identity is something i am hoping to do without. i exist outside of the metal scene and within it, but there my role is clearly defined as a facilitator and historian, a thinker and analyst, and this is not as much identity as optimized function. during the past, black metal and death metal have been part of my lifestyle and identity, as since age 13 i have been a foe of "morality" (the belief that subjective assessment of beneficiality of events can be ascribed to an objective dualism) and since age 15 i have been a nihilist (one who believes that there is no inherent value to events or objects except their function in a natural design). my definition of nihilist clashes with that of nietzsche and other thinkers, who see a nihilist as one who has no hope or belief, but i derive my nihilism from spiritual views in use in the eastern nations in which a belief in nothing is prerequisite to an understanding of anything, or everything.

after this initial outpouring, the genre continued over the next few years to grow, mainly important for its influences on bands like morbid angel and later slayer, but reached a final state of initial maturity with the extremes achieved by sarcofago, who made deliberately unsteady and violently unstable music which combined the simplicity of the most intense hardcore of the time with a uniquely metal vision of evil and a coherence arising from chaos. simultaneously, quorthon of bathory unveiled what was to be his masterpiece, "blood, fire, death," which combined the newly intense and chromatic musicality of death metal with an epic, odinist view of the anti-morality which is the hallmark of black metal's ideology. this occurred in 1987, and the genre essentially slept from that point on until 1992 when the nordics revived it. the interim material regressed into speed/heavy metal in a faster, more melodic and musically literate take on what venom had explored, which was essentially a less doom-and-gloom version of what black sabbath had originally undertaken in the founding of the proto-metal genre in 1969.

the nordic scene was the first outburst of "modern" black metal, and unquestionably the most important bands were darkthrone, immortal, burzum and to a lesser degree, mayhem. while mayhem are remembered by most people as the founders, this reputation was mostly backfilled by "historians" trying to figure out what was occurring the genre from 1987 to 1992, and finding a band that while active produced few innovations until influenced by others within the rising norwegian scene. after this first burst of creativity, a second wave of bands emerged in the middle 1990s such as graveland, summoning, ildjarn, gorgoroth and others who expanded upon the ideas of the previous generation.

in general, european bands are more coherent in their idealization of pagan beliefs and the necessary nationalistic structures required to do away with morality and follow this belief pattern. american bands are still caught in the image and need to break out of the society around them, for the most part, although there are some vivid exceptions. this follows the pattern of death metal, where the more worldly and less puritan europeans were able to get over the shock factor of the genre quickly and produce more impressive works in the long term, where the americans had only a handful of truly impressive bands in both musical and ideological departments.

many of these bands, across continents and individual circumstances, share roughly the same views, but as metal is a youth music genre few have had time to fully articulate their thoughts or to express anything connective in the long term. most capture a few basic ideas and then fade away. the bands that have kept growing have nurtured and developed ideologies and musical styles in which the most motion is able to occur.

the underlying ideology of black metal? it is dual: anti-humanist and idealism, in the sense of reaching toward a post-nietzschean concept of the overman. black metal has realized more than any philosopher the need for the feral to complement ideals, solid collective ideals based on sound values common to all life, which symbolize the learning of a human being who has become selective about desires for the future. humanism is the revolution against nature, and black/death metal are the revolution against humanism. in doing so they combine ancient pre-Christian ideals (Greco-Roman and Pagan) with the ideals of a technological, collectivist society of the future which has recognized the responsibility humans collectively wield in their industrial and intellectual strength.

nietzsche - the first philosopher to embrace the angry, the scary and the discontent; he saw that christ's world of "love" was in fact the same world of death that would later become the stagnant and horrifying boredom and constraint of first-world suburban lives

hedonism - appreciating the sensual and spiritual bond which joy makes between a person and the life they ride

crowley (and his shadow, h.p. blavatsky) hold some interest for me in that they resurrect gnostic and early hindu/buddhist concepts in religion without the neurotic manipulation that the middle eastern religions (christianity, judaism) have injected into seemingly every form of idealism they've touched. in a brutal nutshell, judaism is the original materialistic religion (materialistic = belief in nothing of practical value but the material world) which when combined with Greek idealism and Buddhist spiritual concepts produced the great mind-killer, Christianity. crowley and blavatsky made attempts to reach into the time before those religions to discover a motivation outside of "morality" and basically, fear of a personal, judgmental, inscrutable "God." this is a revolution against individualism, which is essentially the same human-centric viewpoint that produced morality, and in the works of crowley and blavatsky a collective, natural-process- centric belief system is produced.

for mainstream bands and insincere bands, satanic imagery is a tool for crowd-manipulation. for those who have found a use for its mythos, the symbols and value inversions (e.g. philosophical "arguments" in lyrical and semiotic form) have become essential means of communicating the point at which a post-Christian, anti-post-WWII American suburban lifestyle (PWASL) can begin. mainstream "satanic"/"shock" bands are products designed to give children just enough rebellion so that they can let off steam before entering colleges, learning secular humanist dogma and then moving on to jobs in the approved commercial systems of the state.

elements of the postmodern are clearly part of black metal as well, from the gritty and distorted aesthetic to a self-reflective view of a self-reflective view (in other words: the characteristic which distinguishes humans from animals, squared), but as black metal rejects any human-centered view of the universe and its values, the postmodernism which emerges is a feral, nihilistic one.

most black metallers and bands that i have encountered condemn capitalism and communism with the same single stroke: they are views for the herd, which is paradoxically worried about the individual more than the overall goal. black metal has no time for economies and societies which exist to empower the "individual" to do what "individuals" do best, which is act like everyone else in a total waste of resources and time. black metal recognizes that nature has made humans in a hierarchical pattern, and that no one is equal; people are given different abilities but each has a place in the drama of the human species, and nature, evolving on a scale of the whole.

at least, this is what the few intelligent thinkers that i've found in the genre have said to me. there are the few who create and lead the way, and many who follow and uphold the banner, and of late plenty of come-latelies who want to make this genre into a place for everyone to party just like they did to hardcore music, death metal, heavy metal, speed metal, etc. black metal is not humanism, and black metal is not skepticism or any other evasive philosophies. i call these philosophies "evasive" in that they attempt to use reductive logic to eliminate all possibilities except their narrow, subjective conclusions; in the same way "individualism" reduces the scope of each human to what seems immediately beneficial to the person only, evasive philosophies eliminate all options except materialism with a drug of the unreal added to take the sting out of life and enable subservience once again.

the scene does not promote commercialization or social usage of the music. it does, however, fit within the current system where labels sell products and are rewarded with profit; the only difference is that profit is not their only goal, and thus they are unwilling to bend music to fit an archetypal market ("pandering to an audience") when there are artistic, ideological and social goals ahead instead. i stress once again that death and black metal are not aiming to "save the world" or any other such humanist trash, but are a natural outpouring of the assertion of the natural within the individual and group alike. these genres would appeal to any living creature of a certain intelligence, and are in the eyes of those who lead them, not concerned with the stench of morality that accompanies human-centric views of the universe.

for example, anus.com is typical of the kind of site that someone who understands the rudiments of the ideology of the genre(s) would create. it aims to spread its information and "profit" by the change in awareness, but is unconcerned with material gain except as a further venue to existential pleasure in the genre and its music and ideas. commercial methods are just another tool to us, like xeroxed do-it-yourself flyers or matches/churches.

no one who deserves respect in the black metal scene respects marilyn manson or slipknot or their ilk. those bands are strictly commercial endeavors, usually manipulating the "stars" involved. further, their minute amount of rebellion hides a huge amount of conditioning toward mainstream values, turning ideology into playtime for "talking monkeys with car keys" (i borrowed this phrase from a kam lee interview; see www.anus.com/metal/massacre).

this war in black metal is not like a "save the whales" type humanist war; it is the assertion of masculine values by the youth who wish to design the best possible world for the next generation, and to use logic instead of feeble half-articulated emotion to guide the world in which they will live. the motives of black metal are purely selfish, relative to its members, but in doing so serve the natural world by asserting that which individual organisms acting in a concerted natural order need to achieve. black metal is a feral philosophy which hates christianity and its secular form, humanism/hippie-ism, not because it fears them but because they are unnatural, confining and worth destroying.

while this is a youth movement, its greatest defenders were intellectuals like f.w. nietzsche and arthur schopenhauer, who saw in christianity a nullification of all human motivation (in the same way communism nullified the competitive instinct) which aimed to ensure that all members of society were safe, but did not leave space for adventure, passion, desire and logic. in the black metal view, christianity and humanism are fear of the world and a pessimism against its methods which obscure the idealism which makes life wortwhile. half of this idealism is intellectual, and half is sensual/feral.

christianity and judaism and humanism/hippie-ism believe that there is good and bad in the world. black metal sees this as childish but more importantly, sees it as secondary to the question of having exciting and interesting lives in which a collective ideal moves forward for the better experience of the intelligent within society. while humanism and christianity want to make sure that no one feels left out, black metal is a revolt against this which wants intelligence to prevail over blind trend-frenzy, imitation, "slave morals," etc.

demographics: 70% european descent, 25% hispanic, 5% asian + "other" - these are very rough estimates. most of these people are from working-class or middle-class suburban backgrounds, and many have attained a fair amount of educational and social status, but are unwilling to accept the values of the system in which they earn money, raise families and exercise their "rights" to the pursuit of "happiness" (i concur with schopenhauer here that the individual seeks to fulfill a will not necessarily of the individual in origin, not "happiness").

one gets involved with the black metal scene by learning enough about it to be able to socialize with the different hierarchical degrees of the elite who have left normal social logic behind, and are now feral with fragments of the philosophy of the genre embedded in mind. one can also start a band, zine, label, etc. but without a sensible ideology will be clearly visible to those who know as an invader, parasite, or opportunistic predatory organism.

recent changes are bands experimenting more with longer melodies, ambient rhythms and timbrel placements, and sometimes more fragmented sonic appearance and texture. ildjarn, summoning, krieg, antaeus and averse sefira are some recent favorites of mine.

for example, i don't know how many times i've heard the following: "well, i'm into black metal, but i don't hate christians, i hate everyone equally" and "everyone should die, there is no hope, destroy everything" - these values are alien to black metal, in which (as in nature) the strong and noble are rewarded and the weak, pathetic, parasitic and priestly are beaten back to the positions which they deserve, namely the lower ones. black metal at its best is elitist. it is about celebrating what is great in life and rejecting the lies of the past 2,000 years, including christianity, judaism, humanism and egalitarianism. however, these views are only shared by the elite who actually do something in the scene, and not by the many legions of fanboys, imitators, ripoffs, commercial parasites, etc. etc. you might want to interview some of those for a blazingly illiterate counterpoint to any scene luminaries you can reach.

i have no questions for you but offer my thanks for a well- researched, well- analyzed set of interview questions. the only thing i would like to add further is that most critics of black metal (in the sense of "public denouncers" and not academic analysts) are skeptics who deny the inherent idealism (the "sacred") and nihilism/materialism (the "profane") to life. they look at black metal and say, "it will never work," meaning that in the mental confines of their own perception they cannot find a way why such a thing would work, as a plausible social system or a personal philosophy. to them i say, you are prisoners in a cage without walls.