The Construction of 'Peoplehood' in the Second Wave of Norwegian Black Metal

In the beginning of second-wave Norwegian black metal (SWNBM) was quiet, barely known to the world outside of the extreme metal underground. Soon after its inception, the young SWNBM underground gained much wider recognition, to the extent that some even referred to the music as Norway's 'biggest cultural export'. The newly garned attention in the early 1990s, however, was mainly due to extra-musical reasons. A series of church arsons, two high-profile murders and a case of suicide involving prominent scene members grabbed the attention of the mainstream media, causing a period of moral panic within Norwegian society. Owen Fung, Department of Sociology examines how SWNMB demonstrates a particular representation of 'Norwegian peoplehood'

Abstract

This paper aims to provide an analysis of the use of various racial discourses within the second-wave Norwegian black metal scene in the construction of a 'Norwegian peoplehood'. The argument presented below is two-fold: firstly, the analysis will demonstrate how musicians reproduce discourses of monogenism, polygenism and the encoding of culture as 'race' in constructing a particular representation of 'Norwegian peoplehood'. The second part of the analysis will draw comparisons between the racial discourses in second wave Norwegian black metal with discourses on immigration and egalitarian individualism in the wider Norwegian social and political landscape.

Fung, O. (2010), 'The Construction of 'Peoplehood' in the Second Wave of Norwegian Black Metal', Reinvention: a Journal of Undergraduate Research, Volume 3, Issue 2, full article warwick.ac.uk/go/reinventionjournal