Concordia’s Vivek Venkatesh takes an academic approach to his love of black metal.
PROFESSOR took his conflicted love of metal for a thesis on the genre’s ugly side
“Of course, I have heard lyrics exhorting Norwegians to kick Muslims out of their country.”
VIVEK VENKATESH
“Imoved to the right country,” says Vivek Venkatesh. “Thirteen years in, I still love winter.”
From a native of India who grew up in “fairly equatorial Singapore,” that’s an unlikely statement. Then again, there isn’t much that’s likely about a scholar whose thesis subjects include Darkthrone, Venom and Watain.
Venkatesh is an associate professor in educational technology and associate dean at the School of Graduate Studies at Concordia University, with training in computer science and social psychology, a wife and two kids.
He is also a lifelong metalhead, with a special dedication to “the extreme side — black and death metal.” And perhaps blackened death metal, which is also a thing. Interestingly, his younger brother is in a death-metal band. “My parents are still scratching their heads. But they’re my brother’s biggest fans; they go to all his shows.”
So it runs in the family. As does the incomprehension. “My wife doesn’t understand my obsession with extreme metal. It’s something I can’t explain to myself.”
He can, partly. He can explain its genesis. And he is exploring its significance, both cultural and personal, in a thesis titled From Pride to Prejudice to Shame: Multiple Facets of the Black Metal Scene Within and Without Online Environments.
It’s not as catchy as Goatlord, but it’s not a Darkthrone album title; rather, an academic quest to understand the uglier side of the fan base, and perhaps Venkatesh’s own place in relation to it.
“It certainly is a personal quest, despite myself. I’m a person who agonizes over what T-shirt to wear in the morning — my wife thinks it’s ridiculous; my kids laugh that I have the biggest wardrobe in the family.”
Venkatesh “grew up everywhere.” Born in India, he spent time in Oxford, Ohio, when his father taught university there. His formative experience, however, was in Singapore, where he moved, by himself, at the age of 14.
“It’s not an uncommon practice in India. It was not a land of opportunity; the economy was still fairly closed. Parents jumped at the chance to send their kids away. At 14, I was still trying to figure out what sort of philosophy I wanted to follow.” Musically, being 14, this initially meant a philosophy centred on Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull. “I was fairly introverted. I wanted to spend a lot of time by myself.”
This was rich psychic terrain for the seed of metal. “Black Sabbath would have been the first metal band that caught my attention. Metallica hadn’t yet released their sellout album” — the Black Album, i.e. the hit. “But Entombed — to me, they’re the blueprint.”
Venkatesh’s first fave extreme band, the Swedish group helped pioneer Scandinavian death metal, noted for switching up the time signatures (not all speed-blast) and fusing ferocity with sophistication (viz. the 1990 album Left Hand Path and such classics as Morbid Devourment and Abnormally Deceased). The loneliness, the unintelligible lyrics, the speed and savage riffs were alluring to a solitary kid; the allure of the Scando winterscapes is less explicable. But there was a more practical concomitant benefit. “This would be less true in Canada, but in racially stratified Singapore, you are identified by race on your ID card. Metal helped transcend racial barriers.” Suddenly, you could be in the same arcane cult.
Or on its fringe. Venkatesh wanted to explore how communities of metal fans interact in online forums, and how those communities function. “There is empirical data that people form and rationalize arguments in a different way in online forums.”
These metal forums are “sustainable” as a subject for scholarship, having existed continuously for more than two decades. There is talk of “longitudinal streams of information,” but the furtive core of his thesis is racism, especially as expressed in online forums that often devolve into white supremacism. Venkatesh is a stakeholder in two senses: He is a lifelong fan, and he is not white.
“There’s a line that I draw. I don’t purchase music that is anti-Semitic or white supremacist. I also have mixed feelings about bands that repudiate their former racism. But I’ m more interested in standing up for my nonracist beliefs and influencing those who I can.”
But isn’t extreme-extreme metal innately exclusionary? A form that stresses “purity” and “authenticity” always exerts a centripetal force — often driven by its primary stakeholders, the zealot-fans — to drive the music back to a presumed “core.” In the metal purity debate, you can see the narcissism of small differences, the desperation to differentiate oneself — and in these terms, the lure of a presumed racial purity could be seen as the ultimate cachet.
“The music that hearkens back to the Old Times doesn’t connect with me on a lyrical level anyway,” Venkatesh says, perhaps slightly missing the point: Its very existence is a reminder of the point above. He does emphasize how metal expresses feelings of “hostility, loneliness, depression, not just anti-Christian sentiments or Scando-mythology.”
Some of his stats are eye-popping. The online Encyclopaedia Metallum lists more than 24,000 black metal bands worldwide; that is further broken down into genres including National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM), which is exactly what you think it is and had spewed up 360 NSBM bands as of June.
Venkatesh says his training as a social scientist reflexively prods him to exclude himself from the process. To rely on empirical data. But there remains a struggle to come to terms with a form that he loves that might exclude him.
He has been to Scandinavian countries including Norway, where the second wave of black metal was born, and had personal encounters with fans. “Of course, I have heard lyrics exhorting Norwegians to kick Muslims out of their country. Some fans there said, ‘(The bands) are just saying what we all think. We wanna kick out the Somalis and the Pakis.’ But when they learned I was Indian, they liked me. They thought Indians were ‘hard working.’ ” So it’s conflicted. “True, there’s a constant tension there, and it’s interesting to work through,” he says with something that can only be described as understated decency.