Sarcastic Turbelence: Irony, seriousness, and ambiguity in black metal music culture

The extreme music culture of black metal is intensely occupied with judgements of authenticity and circumscription of boundaries, sometimes contesting these issues to the point of wild and transgressive violence. Extreme ideologies, actions, and aesthetics have become associated with black metal and its obsessive foundation in sonic distortion, while its development and dissemination over three decades has brought tensions in how this fundamentalism is articulated. Underacknowledged within such controversial spectacle is the elusive play of humour and irony, as part of a wider frame of ambiguity in how the music, aesthetics, and ideology of black metal are shaped, valued, and contested by a disparate audience of participants. This chapter examines irony and ambiguity in contemporary black metal culture, and in the treatment of black metal’s past mythologies today explores how irony functions in a popular music culture with fiercely asserted yet highly idiosyncratic conventions regarding authenticity and self-referentiality. The chapter questions what role irony can play in a form of popular culture in which seriousness and commitment are consecrated values, and in which humour is often missed or misunderstood by observers – perhaps because boundaries between ironic distancing and serious affiliation are challenged in a music culture which self-consciously seeks to conjure excess and distortion. In one sense, black metal circumvents any crisis of interpretation by providing an intense affective noise beyond language; but in another, the music’s insistence on opaque indecipherability and esoteric symbolism inexorably returns to questions of hidden meaning. Examining evidence from zines, recordings, online discourse, and ethnographic observation at music events, the chapter assesses black metal’s ambiguous politics of irony and resistance to irony, its controversies of authenticity and challenges to authenticity, its ideologies of extremism, and its aesthetics of excess.