And Now For Something Completely Different

For those of you who have been of the opinion that this blog has consisted entirely too much of "silly" and not enough of "serious," this post is for you. I have substituted what I hope to be something that is relatively intelligent and cohesive for my typical milieu of absurdity.
It's still about black metal though. That isn't going anywhere.

Satanism and Heathenism in Norwegian Black Metal: The Authenticity Fallacy in Revivals
Heavy metal is a genre of music dating back as far as artists like Led Zeppelin and Blue Cheer characterized by loud guitars and dark undertones. Over the years metal has spawned a multitude of subgenres as varied as pop metal artists like Guns N’ Roses to death metal bands like Cannibal Corpse. One such genre that is particularly interesting is that of Norwegian Black Metal. Forged out of an amalgamation of earlier black metal bands like Venom and Bathory and the intensity of hardcore punk rock bands like Minor Threat, it has been described as sounding like “Wagner mixed with punk rock, dressed up as Alice Cooper” (Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey).

Norwegian black metal is a unique subset of heavy metal because it is among the only types to be directly related with both with a distinct musical style and a religious ideology. Musically, black metal typically consists of longer songs that are often as epic and beautiful as they are dark and heavy; a characteristic that contrasts with the almost monomaniacal brutality of death metal. Keyboards are quite frequently present and can play highly melodic parts. However the standard metal instrumentation of guitar, drums, and bass is usually maintained. The vocals are typically rather buried in the mix, and usually consist of higher pitched shrieks. This contrasts with the lower pitched “cookie monster” vocals prevalent in most other types of extreme metal...

To read the rest, you can download a PDF here. (It's longer than typical "blog format" if there is such a thing and I figured the reading experience might be made more pleasant if it were to be in a different venue).

Also, if you are curious you can download the list of the works I consulted here.