The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around: it cracked and growled, and roared and howled, like noises in a swound!Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The ice explains nothing. It is the first thing every article about this subject reaches for and it is worthless as an explanation, because the same ice falls on Sweden, Finland, Iceland and half of Russia, and those countries produced music that sounds nothing like this. If cold weather made black metal, Siberia would have invented it in 1968. The honest answer to why this happened in Norway has almost nothing to do with the scenery and a great deal to do with a small population, a late arrival, an empty state church and a nineteenth century cultural programme that had already done half the work.
The explanations that do not survive contact with a map
Four of them turn up in every English account and none of them holds.
- The weather and the dark. Bergen, where a large share of this music was made, is one of the wettest cities in Europe and one of the mildest in Norway, warmed by the Atlantic and rarely deeply frozen. Most of these musicians grew up in commuter suburbs and small towns in the south, not above the Arctic Circle.
- The Vikings. Norse imagery arrives in this music mostly after 1993, and the bands who used it seriously, Enslaved above all, were doing something a good deal more careful with it than the shorthand suggests. The early records are about Christianity, not about longships.
- Isolation. Norway in 1991 had four and a quarter million people, near universal telephone coverage, a functioning postal system and teenagers writing to Brazil, Japan and Hungary every week. This was one of the best connected undergrounds in the world, which is precisely how a scene of thirty people reached four continents.
- Poverty and misery. The country was in the middle of becoming one of the wealthiest on earth. The scholarly reading, and it is the right one, points the other way: what these teenagers had was safety, boredom and an absolute absence of anything to push against.
It did not start there
The plainest fact in the whole discussion is the one the question conceals. Black metal was invented outside Norway, by an English band who named it on a sleeve in 1982, a Swiss one who found the vocal, a Danish one who found the theatre and a Swede working alone in Stockholm who found more or less all of the rest between 1984 and 1988. Brazil and Hungary were producing parallel work at the same time. Every element of the music existed before a single Norwegian teenager had picked up a guitar.
What Norway did was different and, on any honest reading, more consequential. It took a scattered set of first wave records and turned them into a method that could be taught: a specific guitar tone, a specific relationship to production, a specific vocal, a doctrine about what was permitted, and a set of people willing to enforce it. The room where that enforcement happened is the subject of KaosMetal's chapter on Helvete and the Inner Circle. The question is not who invented the music. It is why one country got to write its rules.
Small, late and broke, which turns out to be an advantage
Norway was behind. Sweden had a death metal industry by 1990 with studios, labels and bands selling in five figures; Norwegian death metal was a handful of groups with one good album between them. A scene that arrives late into a saturated market has two options, which are to imitate better or to refuse the terms, and Oslo refused the terms in public, loudly, in interviews, while its own members were still in death metal bands.
The economics did the rest. There was no venue circuit, so nobody could build a career by playing live, which meant the record was the only unit that mattered and the sound of the record became the entire argument. There was no money, so a four track machine in a bedroom was not a compromise but the standard tool. And a country of four million with one shop and one studio doing this work has a density no larger scene can reproduce: everyone knows everyone, a doctrine can be enforced face to face, and a person who breaks with it can be cut off inside a week.
Being late to a saturated market gave them one option that Sweden did not have, which was to refuse the terms in public.
A church with everyone in it and nobody in it
Here is the condition that actually distinguishes Norway from most of Europe. It had a state church, formally established, funded from the budget and written into the constitution, to which the overwhelming majority of the population belonged: still 85.9 per cent as late as the year 2000, and it was higher in 1991. Almost nobody attended it. That is a cathedral with the lights left on and the pews empty, and it is a target of a very particular kind: institutionally enormous, personally weightless, and therefore free to attack. Blasphemy in Norway in 1992 cost the blasphemer nothing socially and still landed on something real.
Then there were the buildings. Norway keeps twenty eight surviving medieval stave churches, timber structures treated as national monuments, photographed on tourist material and taught in schools as evidence of what the country was before it was modern. A wooden building that is simultaneously a church and a national symbol is the only object in the country that could carry both meanings at once, which is why the fire that made this story famous was set at one and why a photograph of the ruin ended up on a record sleeve.
The imagery was already lying around
The least discussed cause is the strongest. Norway spent the nineteenth century deliberately manufacturing a national culture out of folk material: collected folktales, folk music transcribed and arranged, paintings of mountains and mist, and a composer whose name is now on the concert hall in Bergen where half these albums were recorded. That programme was state supported, taught in every school, and by 1991 it had put a complete vocabulary of trolls, mountains, old metres and archaic Norwegian into the head of every teenager in the country.
So when the second wave went looking for imagery that was not American, it did not have to invent one. It had folk melody, an archaic spelling of its own language, and a set of pictures the state itself had spent a century promoting. Bergtatt in 1995 is the clearest case, an album of folk narrative and clean singing that no Florida band could have made and no Florida band would have wanted to. The national romantic project got an heir it had not planned for.
What Sweden had, and what Norway had
The counterfactual is worth running. Sweden had twice the population, a real industry, better musicians on average and, in Bathory, the single most important precursor in the genre. It went on to produce Dissection and Marduk and a body of work at least as good as Norway's. What it never produced was a doctrine, a headquarters and a scandal, and those three things together are what turned a set of records into a school that scenes in twenty other countries chose to copy.
We now have 106 foreign service missions and they get many enquiries from people who want information about Norwegian black metal as a phenomenon.
Kjersti Sommerset, Norwegian foreign ministry, to Dagens Naeringsliv, June 2011
So the short answer is that black metal did not start in Norway, and the long answer is that Norway is where it acquired its rules, its sound and its reputation, because a small, late, wealthy, bored, over churched and heavily mythologised country supplied every condition at once. The building where most of that was decided was a record shop with black walls, and it is worth reading about on its own terms in KaosMetal's account of helvete.
For the wider history, including the first wave bands who did most of this before 1990, start at our black metal pillar.
