Second wave true Norwegian black metal: an ideologically evil music scene?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The second wave (true Norwegian) black metal music scene has garnered attention for its ostensible negative impact upon contemporary consumption. Producers and consumers of the scene, as potential heretics, have been associated with acts of church burning, Satanism, murder, and violence. Such actions have circulated under the signifier of evil, and have been associated with anti-Christian semiotics and pagan practices. Contemporary media has positioned such acts of evil beyond rational comprehension via the deployment of a rhetoric of evil. This enframement has evaded the psychoanalytic question of evil and the significant role of negative ethics in theorizing the allure and potential impact of black metal music. The purpose of this paper is to examine the evil in the music scene, its relation to ID evil, and its consumption and production practices. Design/methodology/approach Drawing upon Zizek’s (2006) development of evil through Lacan’s three registers, this paper examines evil production and consumption through a detailed analysis of true Norwegian black metal. The authors rehabilitate the complex corridors of evil against its conceptual collapse as merely the ontological absence of good. Via Zizek, the authors offer a reconsideration of the anti-establishment violent activities enacted by some proponents of black metal ideology. Herein, the authors deploy a reading of ideological evil in order to interrogate the role of enjoyment and desire at work in the black metal scene. Findings After extensive immersion in the true Norwegian black metal scene, the authors elucidate on the key issues surrounding good, evil and Satanism, and their relationships to production and consumption. What many might term as “evil” is far more complex than what appears on the surface-level aesthetics. Originality/value While there have been examinations of the black metal scene, there has been scant literature that delves deep into the symbolism of the Satanic and the evil beyond the surface. This paper sheds light on the value of exploring evil in a scene as something that is much more than the mere absence of what is considered good.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".