Who ever said black metal is a useless musical genre? Without it, there wouldn't be any of these wonderfully goofy documentaries on the subject, with morose-looking pasty-faced never-seen-the-Sun buffoons spouting some half-baked religious/political gobbledygook while trying to appear "dangerous" to society.
Dangerous? A lot of these guys were just sniveling little nerds in their teens, the kind that got bullied left right and center, picking their noses in their lonely metal-poster-plastered rooms, while dreaming of being blood-drenched Vikings in an imaginary land that's a cross between Narnia and Middle Earth. Black metal fans and band-members alike are the Emos of the metal world; lonely, self-loathing misfits, dreaming of singing like castrated demons in their imaginary little bubbles. Just when we had thought that the imagery in the world of metal couldn't get any sillier, they came along, sometime in the early 90s (talking about the so-called "second BM wave"), with their clownish make-up, waving around their plastic second-hand-shop swords while long lines of drool dripped from their mouths. The metal scene pretty much died at some point in the mid or late 90s, with black metal and nu metal acting as the happy pallbearers who carried its coffin into the ground.
A guy with heavy demonic make-up (Satyricon's "Frost") stabbing a sofa with a large knife is something you'd expect in a Python sketch, and yet here it is, in a BM documentary. That kind of sums up the idiocy of this movement: a guy angrily lashing out at pillows.
Varg Vikernes, warming his cold Norwegian butt in a prison cell for 15 years (at the time of the filming), now has the appearance of a dweeby banker stuck in a 3-star hotel holiday (which is what Norwegian jail-cells are all about apparently; don't these left-wing dreamers believe in the element of punishment at all?); he rambles like a typical confused malcontent about "the Norwegian youth being instinctively against" the status quo. I bet all of Norway's youth are absolutely thrilled that a convicted black-metal murderer speaks on their behalf. If there is anyone to speak in the name of all of Norway's young people, then it must be a 36 year-old Odin-obsessed lunatic sitting in a prison cell (or in Norway's case, a 3-star hotel-room).
"Count Grishnakh is an arrogant name", says Varg. "It puts me above all others". No, Varg, it is a stupid name. Far from looking like one of Tolkin's better-known Orcs, he was more like a scrawny little teenager anno 1994. "Dissident voices are not tolerated in our society", says this silver-spoon-born crybaby. What would he say about Zambia or Syria then? Norway is one of the most beautiful, rich, free countries in the world, yet here goes this little nerd winging like a 3 month-old infant about the "cruelty" of his surroundings. What an ass. So what does he do as a reaction to this wicked, wicked environment? He proudly recounts shooting at a McDonalds window with his shotgun. If you don't like fast-food joints, don't eat in them. "I hate hamburgers, and I hate America, and because I hate them NOBODY will have them!" That's the essence of this tiny mind's entire "philosophy". (He probably goes to eat there occasionally wearing a fake nose so no-one recognizes him.)
His account of the night of the murder is somewhat muddled. He contradicts himself; for example, he stated that he had expected Europenis to kill him that night, and yet when Europenis did attack him Varg said that he "wasn't expecting an attack". Clearly, Varg is a big fat psychopathic liar and not a word he says can be believed. He had 15 years to get his story straight, to sort out all the lies in an orderly fashion, and still he gets it wrong. Even a dull-witted cop who failed all his detective exams could easily find inconsistencies in his testimony.
Norway is of course presented as a very prosperous, open, progressive country, which it is, i.e. not at all some Third World cesspit that one could use as a cheap justification for the "discontent" of the morons who joined the ranks of the Black metallers. What this basically means is that these Emperor/Mayhem/Burzum lot are/were just a bunch of whiny, spoilt, semi-sociopathic misfits whose main beef with society was that "things weren't as we wanted them to be" (as Count Urukh-Hai put it so well). In other words, these spoilt little Mommas Boys tried to sell their empty-headed, pointless rebellion as some kind of reaction that was for some strange reason inevitable. In that sense, they sound a lot like their countryman, that bird-brained buffoon who killed nearly 100 kids recently.
It is hilarious how they make out the Norwegian Protestant Church to be some kind of all-powerful ogre whose buildings require incineration – as if we were all still in the Middle Ages, when the church actually had a huge say in all matters. But at least Fenriz realizes this, and mentions it at one point, when he says that his own revolt stems from an easy, comfortable existence. In other words, "I am cozy therefore I rebel". If there ever was a rebellion without a cause, it's this one. But this is hardly the first time that a bunch of hateful misfits use "youthful rebellion" against imaginary scapegoat enemies as an excuse for their own failings and inherent misanthropy.
Ultimately, UTLTU, though entertaining, merely confirms what we know about the BM scene: musically almost worthless, hence still relying on (whatever little) shock-value (is left) and the year 1994 to keep us interested. A movement that acts as a natural magnet for losers.
As a little bonus, UTLTU offers us a brief look at a retard that we all know as Harmony Korine (writer of "Ken Park", director of "Gummo"). If anyone ever had any doubts that he was an attention-seeking imbecile, his embarrassing behavior here should dispel them.
Dangerous? A lot of these guys were just sniveling little nerds in their teens, the kind that got bullied left right and center, picking their noses in their lonely metal-poster-plastered rooms, while dreaming of being blood-drenched Vikings in an imaginary land that's a cross between Narnia and Middle Earth. Black metal fans and band-members alike are the Emos of the metal world; lonely, self-loathing misfits, dreaming of singing like castrated demons in their imaginary little bubbles. Just when we had thought that the imagery in the world of metal couldn't get any sillier, they came along, sometime in the early 90s (talking about the so-called "second BM wave"), with their clownish make-up, waving around their plastic second-hand-shop swords while long lines of drool dripped from their mouths. The metal scene pretty much died at some point in the mid or late 90s, with black metal and nu metal acting as the happy pallbearers who carried its coffin into the ground.
A guy with heavy demonic make-up (Satyricon's "Frost") stabbing a sofa with a large knife is something you'd expect in a Python sketch, and yet here it is, in a BM documentary. That kind of sums up the idiocy of this movement: a guy angrily lashing out at pillows.
Varg Vikernes, warming his cold Norwegian butt in a prison cell for 15 years (at the time of the filming), now has the appearance of a dweeby banker stuck in a 3-star hotel holiday (which is what Norwegian jail-cells are all about apparently; don't these left-wing dreamers believe in the element of punishment at all?); he rambles like a typical confused malcontent about "the Norwegian youth being instinctively against" the status quo. I bet all of Norway's youth are absolutely thrilled that a convicted black-metal murderer speaks on their behalf. If there is anyone to speak in the name of all of Norway's young people, then it must be a 36 year-old Odin-obsessed lunatic sitting in a prison cell (or in Norway's case, a 3-star hotel-room).
"Count Grishnakh is an arrogant name", says Varg. "It puts me above all others". No, Varg, it is a stupid name. Far from looking like one of Tolkin's better-known Orcs, he was more like a scrawny little teenager anno 1994. "Dissident voices are not tolerated in our society", says this silver-spoon-born crybaby. What would he say about Zambia or Syria then? Norway is one of the most beautiful, rich, free countries in the world, yet here goes this little nerd winging like a 3 month-old infant about the "cruelty" of his surroundings. What an ass. So what does he do as a reaction to this wicked, wicked environment? He proudly recounts shooting at a McDonalds window with his shotgun. If you don't like fast-food joints, don't eat in them. "I hate hamburgers, and I hate America, and because I hate them NOBODY will have them!" That's the essence of this tiny mind's entire "philosophy". (He probably goes to eat there occasionally wearing a fake nose so no-one recognizes him.)
His account of the night of the murder is somewhat muddled. He contradicts himself; for example, he stated that he had expected Europenis to kill him that night, and yet when Europenis did attack him Varg said that he "wasn't expecting an attack". Clearly, Varg is a big fat psychopathic liar and not a word he says can be believed. He had 15 years to get his story straight, to sort out all the lies in an orderly fashion, and still he gets it wrong. Even a dull-witted cop who failed all his detective exams could easily find inconsistencies in his testimony.
Norway is of course presented as a very prosperous, open, progressive country, which it is, i.e. not at all some Third World cesspit that one could use as a cheap justification for the "discontent" of the morons who joined the ranks of the Black metallers. What this basically means is that these Emperor/Mayhem/Burzum lot are/were just a bunch of whiny, spoilt, semi-sociopathic misfits whose main beef with society was that "things weren't as we wanted them to be" (as Count Urukh-Hai put it so well). In other words, these spoilt little Mommas Boys tried to sell their empty-headed, pointless rebellion as some kind of reaction that was for some strange reason inevitable. In that sense, they sound a lot like their countryman, that bird-brained buffoon who killed nearly 100 kids recently.
It is hilarious how they make out the Norwegian Protestant Church to be some kind of all-powerful ogre whose buildings require incineration – as if we were all still in the Middle Ages, when the church actually had a huge say in all matters. But at least Fenriz realizes this, and mentions it at one point, when he says that his own revolt stems from an easy, comfortable existence. In other words, "I am cozy therefore I rebel". If there ever was a rebellion without a cause, it's this one. But this is hardly the first time that a bunch of hateful misfits use "youthful rebellion" against imaginary scapegoat enemies as an excuse for their own failings and inherent misanthropy.
Ultimately, UTLTU, though entertaining, merely confirms what we know about the BM scene: musically almost worthless, hence still relying on (whatever little) shock-value (is left) and the year 1994 to keep us interested. A movement that acts as a natural magnet for losers.
As a little bonus, UTLTU offers us a brief look at a retard that we all know as Harmony Korine (writer of "Ken Park", director of "Gummo"). If anyone ever had any doubts that he was an attention-seeking imbecile, his embarrassing behavior here should dispel them.