Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
Controversy is a lazy word and this genre has had it applied to everything: a criminal conviction, a stage prop, a trademark filing, a printed apology, an album some people thought was too pretty. Those are not the same kind of event and treating them as one category is how a reader ends up believing that a band with a lawsuit about a logo and a band with a man in prison are equivalent. What follows sorts them out, with dates and with what actually happened at the end of each one.
What is on this list, and what is not
The arsons and the two killings in Norway between 1992 and 1993 are not controversies. They are crimes with charges, verdicts and sentences, and they are set out in the years the police got involved. A controversy is an argument about what is permitted. A conviction is a finding of fact. Putting the two in one article is the single most common failure in the writing on this subject.
The same distinction applies to a case in Sweden. Jon Nödtveidt of Dissection was convicted in July 1998 as an accessory to the murder of Josef ben Meddour in Keillers Park in Gothenburg, was sentenced to ten years, served about six and was released in 2004. He restarted the band, made Reinkaos in 2006, played a last show in Stockholm on 24 June that year and died in August. That is a record of what happened, and the argument it produced, about whether promoters should have booked the band afterwards, is a separate thing from the conviction itself. The conviction is not in dispute. The booking policy was.
When a stage act reached a courtroom
On 1 February 2004 Gorgoroth played a show in Kraków that was being filmed for a DVD, with sheep heads on stakes, about eighty litres of sheep blood and four naked models on crosses. Polish police opened an investigation into religious offence and into the treatment of the animal remains, seized the footage, and in the end brought no charge against the band, on the view that they had not known what Polish law required. The promoter, who did know, was fined ten thousand zloty in 2007. Nuclear Blast dropped the band from a tour and then from the label.
In September 2007, at a show in Gdynia, Adam Darski of Behemoth tore up a Bible on stage and called the Catholic Church a murderous cult. Poland has an offence of insulting religious feeling, and it was used. He was cleared at first instance. In October 2012 the Supreme Court held that the offence can be committed without a direct intention to offend, which put the case back into the lower courts, where it went against him. A separate prosecution over an image he posted in 2018 ended in acquittal in 2025. Eighteen years of court dates for four minutes on a stage.
The third Gorgoroth case had no religion in it at all. In October 2007 the singer and the bass player announced that they had removed the founding guitarist and claimed the name, and a trademark application went in the same month. The court decided in March 2009 that by attempting to expel the founder they had removed themselves, and that Infernus held the name. A black metal band spent eighteen months in a commercial dispute over a word, which is the least occult thing that has ever happened to one.
| Year | Who | What | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1994 | Darkthrone | A statement printed on an album back cover | Sleeve refused by the distributor, label rebuttal printed, apology, disclaimer on the next record |
| 1998 | Dissection | Accessory to a murder in Gothenburg | Ten years, about six served, released 2004 |
| 2004 | Gorgoroth | The Kraków stage set | No charge against the band, promoter fined in 2007, dropped by the label |
| 2007 | Taake | A swastika painted on the chest at a show in Essen | Removed from two festivals, apology and explanation, tour collapse in 2018 |
| 2007 | Behemoth | A Bible torn up on stage in Gdynia | Cleared, then the Supreme Court ruling of 2012, then decided against him |
| 2009 | Gorgoroth | Ownership of the band name | Court found for the founding member in March 2009 |
When it was politics
In 1994 Darkthrone put a line in Norwegian on the back of Transilvanian Hunger that the distributor refused to carry. The band answered the objection with a statement so ugly that Peaceville printed its own rebuttal alongside it. Darkthrone then apologised, explained the wording as a piece of clumsiness rather than a position, and printed a flat denial of any political allegiance on the following album. Fenriz has called the episode disgusting in the years since and has never tried to sand it down. The record is still in print and the statement still follows it about, which is the correct outcome for both.
In March 2007 Hoest of Taake went on stage in Essen with a swastika painted on his chest above an inverted cross. Two festivals dropped the band. He said it had been a provocation for its own sake, that the older symbols no longer provoked anybody, and that the band was not political. Eleven years later a campaign against a North American tour reached the venues, most of them cancelled, the support act withdrew and the tour did not happen. Both of those sentences are true at once, and a magazine that reports only one of them is doing propaganda rather than reporting.
A provocation aimed at nobody in particular still lands on somebody, and eleven years later it is still landing.
Behind both of those sits the real thing, which is not a controversy but a fact: there is a small, openly national socialist corner of this genre, with its own labels and its own distribution, and it has been there since the middle of the nineties. It is a documented position held by identifiable people, not a rumour and not a misreading of a stage prop, and it is the reason the accusations that fall on bands who have nothing to do with it are so hard for those bands to shake off. Anybody arguing that the entire subject is invented has to explain the catalogues.
When it was only taste
The last category has no court, no charge and no victim, and it generates more words per year than all the others combined. When Deafheaven released Sunbather in 2013, on a pink sleeve, with major reviews outside metal and a sound that borrowed as much from shoegaze as from anything Norwegian, a large part of the audience declared it was not black metal and a large part of the press declared that was the point. Neither side produced a definition that survived contact with the other, because there is not one.
That argument matters more than it looks, because it is the only one on this page about the music. Everything above it is about conduct, law and politics attaching themselves to a genre that happened to be small enough to be defined by whoever shouted loudest. Whether a record with blast beats and a pink cover counts is a question about art. Whether a promoter should book a man with a conviction is a question about ethics. They get filed under the same word and they should not be.
One habit that runs under all of it is worth its own page, since half the names in this article are not the names on anybody's passport, and there are reasons for that beyond theatre: why Black Metal Musicians Use Pseudonyms.
None of the above is why anybody listens to this music, and a reader who arrived here through a scandal is welcome to the big picture, where the records get more room than the court dates.
