Teeth sind Krieg

So 2023 marks 30 years since this happened:

If Kerrang were shitting their pants about those Norwegian kids and their wacky antics at this point, things would of course go further south a few months later… I think it is important to remember how young most of the black metal crowd were when the Norwegian scene began, even the guys from Mayhem were in their teens when they started in 1984 and so were a number of the bands that followed in their wake (a few are even younger than me, including Ivar Bjornson from Enslaved and quite a few of the rotating cast of Gorgoroth and most of Dimmu Borgir). I think that explains at least some of the idiocy that some of them took part in (it wasn’t all burning churches and killing each other), but also, frankly, some were kind of disconnected from reality on some level.

The scene has, I think, mostly grounded itself as its participants have aged and even come to realise there was and is something absurd about black metal’s theatrics and posturing. The documentary Until the Light Takes Us kind of drove the final nail into the coffin with its revelation that the Helvete shop crowd would be all “trve kvlt” and “Satanic” while other people were in the shop, but when the customers were gone they would talk among themselves about how they enjoyed their cornflakes at breakfast and that sort of thing. It was always posturing except for a few with even less sense of irony or self-awareness than the rest who took it too seriously and didn’t realise how much of it was just show (and some arguably still don’t; looking at you here, Gorgoroth/Infernus)… And with hindsight, the posing all looks sillier and sillier. I mean… for fuck’s sake, how were we supposed to take this sort of thing seriously:

Honestly? I gather this is someone called Heimvik from a band called Ofryskje which released one demo in 1997, apparently he was the vocalist and he had no nose, an amusingly elliptical mouth and a thing for gardening tools. I mean, black metal has been rife with ridiculous imagery, like this iconic and, well, immortal photoshoot for Immortal:

And Dimmu Borgir feared no nonsense either:

But really I think Heimvik and his dental work are underappreciated in the annals of silly black metal visuals, which are extensive and only get sillier as the years pass. It’s the sort of picture that’s probably better in this sort of mediocre quality, the sort of washed-out contrasty photocopy look is exactly how it should look and why would you want to see any more detail anyway? And it’s definitely the sort of thing that makes me wonder how we were ever supposed to take black metal seriously, which I say as someone who does enjoy the stuff…