Black Gold, Black Metal: How Nixon Killed God in Norway - a prologue
A preview of how the petrodollar led to the creation of Norwegian black metal as evidenced by the author screaming in a car
It is August in southern California and I am parked outside a house in the city I grew up in that I returned to without understanding what is next in my life, the engine is running because I am not ready to go inside to a home that is not mine, and on the stereo a Norwegian man has been screaming for ten seconds straight with a frenetic growing riff that feels like you’ve been kicked into a room on fire, gaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaah, and this is the moment I turn it up because it is exactly how I feel.
And then I begin to scream too because it is the only thing that feels real in the seeming devaluation of my life, because I have spent months trying to understand why the most violent music ever made came out from one of the safest and wealthiest countries in Europe and I still do not have a clean complete answer to it except that the engine in this car is running, the engine runs on oil, so did Norway, and so does this whole story, because once you go looking for oil and how it connects to black metal, it is everywhere.
There is a version of this where I am a writer contextualizing a genre, and a version where I am a woman having what some might describe as a hard day or others describe as a breakdown in a parking spot, and perhaps these are the same things, perhaps they are not. I have been back in the hometown I did everything I did to get away from with nothing but the debt of two master’s degrees, ambitions that would scare those who really knew the extent of them, and a life I took apart with my own hands across two continents, and the only sound in the world that has matched the devaluation of all of that hitting all at once is a recording made in Bergen in the 1990s by teenage boys in corpse paint who burned down churches that had been standing since the twelfth century.
The thing that makes it hard to reproduce such a scream, guttural or not, is actually not your lungs. It is the hesitation. You must drop all hesitation. You must and this is much harder than you think. It takes quite some practice to get used to because you have been so deeply and thoroughly trained by so many forces around you in life to perpetually keep it together.
And so when you thus finally do find yourself sitting in a parked car screaming without hesitating, you understand something about Norwegian black metal that no essay, no concert, no documentary, nothing really can properly capture, because it most certainly actually is not about the lyrics or the ideology or the murders or Satan or church burnings or any of it. It is music about the moment you stop flinching. So what kind of country produces a music genre whose entire point is that refusal to flinch and how did corpse paint get involved?
Right around this time in August 1971, Richard Nixon went on television and told the world the dollar was no longer backed by gold, very matter of factly that the monetary event of the twentieth century had just happened, no big deal, and for it to work meant that no one could flinch because if they did, could you imagine how spectacularly humiliating it would be it the thing fell apart? The whole thing could only work without flinching, really, and that required everyone just kept treating the dollar like it meant something even after Nixon announced that it didn’t, it was devalued, and gone forever.
And so the entire global financial system is built on that collective refusal to flinch, because we tell ourselves stories to live or whatever, right? Besides, your options for reacting to such changes are limited, i.e. the floor cannot be pulled out from underneath you if you go along with it or for example happen to stumble upon a beneficial part of your seafloor similar to Norway. About eight weeks before Nixon’s announcement, Norway begun pumping oil from the North Sea and for the next few decades, it did not flinch either as the country found more money than God under its own seabed, even naming its oil rigs after its gods while it told itself a story of mythmaking and dreams and fjords, of money from a mystical saga instead of from a geological accident amplified by a currency system designed in Washington, everyone not flinching as black gold poured in and oil changed this Nordic country through wealth forever.
Norwegian black metal is what it sounds like when you stop flinching.
This is the story of how the petrodollar led to the creation of Norwegian black metal, how a country’s money made a country’s music, and how wells and rigs and bank collapses and municipal stipends and burning pig heads on sticks and stabbings and all of it came together. I went looking for oil in this story and I found it everywhere, everywhere - from the rehearsal rooms and the recruitment ads and the festival budgets and the school copiers and the gods bolted onto oil platforms by a King and mothers trying to bail out their sons for murder and much more. Not one person in the scene ever said the word, but no need, because I will. The essay series is coming in three parts soon.