What is Black Metal ?

David Wood: Founder of Neat Records.

" Black Metal is like Black Magic without the chocolate"Vincent Crowley: Vocalist with cult Black Metal band Acheron"Venom, the true gods of Black Metal started this whole thing. So to me, it is a music that you can take to an unholy extreme. Songs about Satanism, The Occult, Myths, Blasphemy, and Hell, takes the listener on a journey to the Dark side. Satan always is the center of attention in Black Metal. And band members always have a dark aesthetic. But the main thing is Black Metal has to be the most demonic music ever!"

Malcolm Dome : Rock journalist

Black metal is whatever you want it to be...just think of a number, double it and hey, presto, it's black and inventive. That's the beauty of the bestial side. Anything's possible. Everything's probable.

Gavin Baddeley [ author of Lucifer Rising]

Black Metal is, as these genre labels almost always are, something of a misnomer. Most rockers have always worn black, and more than one outsider has seriously wondered whether the term refers to some kind of afro-Caribbean rock sub-genre. The other alternative to using the termhowever, where special pleading by bands leaves you with as many genres as acts - vampire metal, occult metal, hate metal, and whatever the hell else - is an even more confusing situation. I guess Black Metal as a term is then, appropriately, something of a necessary evil. And if you think about it, even the term Heavy Metal itself is hardly descriptive of the genre,but it's stuck for want of anything else.Eighties boozy Satanic thrash pioneers Venom have the best claim to having coined the Black Metal moniker, and even they have distanced themselves from it to an extent. Thankfully, subsequent bands have appeared who have taken the term - and ironically Venom's back catalogue - more seriously than Venom ever did. Most serious fans also concede that Black Metalpredates Venom by decades.

Indeed many contend that Black Sabbath's eponymous 1970 debut was the first Black Metal album, and in my opinion the first true Heavy Metal recording. But rock act Black Widow predated Sabbath's Satanic imagery by some months - so are they Black Metal?I'd say yes, inasmuch as the lyrical content was better researched than Sabbath's, though they never pioneered an ominous new sound in the way Ozzie's outfit did. This perhaps is significant. I think one component to Black Metal is demonic imagery and lyrics, but the other is a musical approach as daring or innovative as the visuals and ideas. These tend to gotogether organically. People attracted to the extreme concepts and aesthetics of the Devil tend to enjoy and express themselves in a similarly outrageous and passionate fashion. That this has been almost exclusively in rather monotone terms of anger and aggression among Metal musicians has alienated many Satanists, who also perceive subtlety and seduction in their chosen archetype. Demonic music, they argue, is not just older than Venom, or indeed Black Sabbath. It is far, far older than that, in which grand context either band represent little more than fascinating ripples in a profoundly dark ocean. Ultimately, this has driven something of a wedge between the established Satanic community, who dismiss Metal as adolescent angst, and Black Metal fans who see such Satanists as tedious old bores. This is a shame - but I'm optimistic that the best of both groups are finding some common ground. More authentic Satanists are appearing with a grounding in the darker fringes of rock, and more reputable Black Metal musicians are launching increasingly brave and interesting projects that draw on influences which go back not just decades but centuries.

CRIN: Godreah Zine/ Records

Apart from the obvious Satanic imagery, Black Metal is an institution built on the rise of extreme metal in the eighties and solidified by the very real evil of the Norwegian Black Metal explosion of the early nineties. Like Punk, Black Metal transformed a previously unseen select group of outcasts/ bored teenagers into a socially abhorrent reality, sticking two fingers up at the system and to hell with the consequences.It was an exclusive institution where kids could feed from the brutalisation of a genre through startlingly inhumane acts of violence and an apparent disregard for the stringent laws of the land. A freak show for the masses if you like that has been polished into a musical entity far stronger than it's punk predecessor .Black Metal has outgrown the underground and become a marketable product much to the disdain of Black Metal purists. The very term Black Metal is now hard to define to an actual style but I would cite the likes of Dark Throne, Marduk, Immortal and Burzum to embrace every hideous echelon of the genre. Every evolving.. is but a new addition of remarkable music loosely entwined within the genre as a whole but never exceeding the archetype of the original blueprint. In all extreme metals sub-genre's' Black Metal is also one of thee few havens for right wing/ neo nazi purists who are thankfully few and far between and mostly emanate from the former eastern block countries. Black Metal like any other musical embodiment has proved itself a worthy addition to the Metal fraternity and like Death Metal is here to stay, like it or not.