Glad you asked!

It's a... well, I guess it's an "art film", produced last year by Varg Vikernes, one of the most notorious figures from the Norwegian black metal scene, best known for his involvement in the bands Mayhem and BUrzum, as well as his "extra-musical" activities. Varg is a gaping abyss of crazy; he's a pagan extremist, a hardcore white power racist, may have been a church burner, and a convicted murderer who stabbed his former band mate, Euronymous, twenty-three times in the head, neck, and chest, over what could be described as a hipster "scene musician" dispute amongst Satanic-communist-viking-cannibal-sociopaths.


Varg served about fifteen years in prison for the murder (Norwegain justice system!), but he's out now, and this is one of his most recent projects, done with his wife and I believe possibly his kids? Knowing Varg there's probably a whole big stupid backstory for everything going on here; the "spooky quotes" are presumably stuff either he's written or which he's taken from other neo-pagan/ black Odinist sources, and which he sincerely believes carries deep and esoteric occult meaning. Haven't watched the whole thing yet, but just skipping around I can already see the volkish, back to nature influences. No clue what the significance of the bears is; probably a reference to his proud Viking ancestors.

Anyway, here's a Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varg_Vikernes

The 90s black metal scene, and Varg in particular, is a bizarre and convoluted subject; I guess the way I'd describe it, for anyone who missed out on it, would be like the 90s gangsta rap scene with theistic Satanists. You remember all those moral panics American Christians tried to instigate against Dungeons & Dragons players? Well, the black metal scene tried their best to actually BE that. Picture someone reading a Chick Tract, and saying hey! That sounds like fun! I wanna do that, hey guys, let's totally do that!

There were some genuinely good bands coming out from that scene (DISSECTION!!!!!!!!), but sadly the music almost always got overshadowed by the batshittery. Mayhem was not a particularly good band, they sounded like ass and they spent more time doing drugs and eating each other than they did actually practicing their instruments, but the murder basically turned them into Nirvana. And Burzum, what can I say about Burzum? Well, Burzum is definitely a creepy band, especially when you know it's just one dude in a prison cell who's utterly convinced he's the centerpiece of some cosmic spiritual war, but Varg is a goofy motherfucker and it's hard to take a musician seriously who decided to stop using guitars on his albums because they were, quote, "a nigger instrument".

Also also, I'm trying to find Varg's old Geocities page, where he and his groupies posted all kinds of bullshit while he was in prison, including a chart detailing which music was racially pure enough for him to play, and rambling manifestos about how Satanists are poser idiots and Odinists should take it upon themselves to kill them or whatever the fuck, but I'm having no luck so far.

Well, can't find the old site, but there's a trove of stuff on the current site:


http://www.burzum.com/burzum/library/text/



Also be sure to check out the "Meaning" section.

Burzum.org is the official site. The .com is a fansite.

OH! It's that guy! From Until the Light Takes Us (A pretty interesting documentary that unfortunately glorifies the violence because METAL.) My family's originally from Norway and some of my cousins would talk about Burzum and Mayhem and yeah it was totally like Biggie and Tupac to them.

The rumors spread strangely in the west, or at least they did for the then-12-year-old-me, fresh into Gwar, that the band At The Gates (if it wasn't At the Gates maybe Children of Bodom) had a big bloody swordfight and the only surviving member started anew after beheading the rest of the band, something like that. I'm guessing Vikernes was also a model for Brendan Smalls with Metalocalypse too. It's not so much "making fun" of metal, just letting all these weird stories we heard when we were kids manifest themselves into this crazy band that holds humanity's fate in its hands (but just can't make an album)

Or to paraphrase Dave Chappelle, if the Wu Tang Clan did everything they said they did as their alter-egos, they'd be serving consecutive life sentences (maybe not cappadonna)

But this was like WOAH! I knew from the start that Gwar and Wu Tang weren't real. Maybe the stories from Staten Island were true and maybe the blood on stage was cows blood, but it was an act. What we all sometimes forget is that neither Biggie or Tupac shot each other. If either had survived it would have been the same as Kurt and Courtney: was it drugs? Your music? Your wife? Illuminati? I liken that to.. let's say I was part of GWAR's crew and actually did a Mark David Chapman/John Hinckley on their behalf. I'd go to jail and the band would be scrutinized for turning someone into a psychopath who took the music too seriously.. something like that. It was the same with Tupac and Biggie.. The pen, as they say is mightier than the sword and until the very end that's all it was.

With Burzum, oh gee willickers. I don't know if I'm that inclined to watch this video (I got through the first couple minutes) but it's a fascinating topic.

He definitely burned those churches. Now he's just a pagan redneck.

Well the depaganization or derunification or whatever you want to call it was pretty fucked up. I'm not trying to say one was worse than the other, or condone arson, but it was pretty much what happened in North America without any of the apologies. Just some little runic relic preserved in the church saying that Pagans were there or something.

Infinite_zest: There aren't that many written sources from that time, so it is difficult to know exactly how it went down, but considering there were no major displacment of people or large scale invasions it seems unlikely that the pagan to christian conversion in Scandinavia was particularily traumatic. Likely the somewhat more cosmpolitan elites converted first, with the unwashed masses following along eventually. Whatever atrocities were commited are a thousand years in the past commited by kin and countrymen against each other, and seems mostly to have arisen from attempts at power consilidation, and were not particularily different from what went on before the introduction of christianity. I do not think the situations are coomparable.

What I learned from this video:

You can be a convicted murderer and repeat arsonist, and be allowed to legally immigrate to France. Just don't buy a rifle or say "nigger" if you want to remain free.

Well you arent that far off. Varg and his wife believes Europeans are remnant Neanderthals that are slightly polluted by African Sapiens, and that their pure Neanderthal forebears were superior to present day humans. There is also something about a bear cult and the oestrous cycle of the cow mixed in.

I wonder what he thinks/would think of that little aspie splinter group that thinks the same thing except replace "Europeans" with "people who have Asperger's"