The story of Mayhem is the quintessential tale of the black metal scene. Before even releasing their debut album, they became famous for their striking aesthetic and violent live shows. In 1991, however, their singer, Per Yngve Ohlin, a.k.a. Dead, committed suicide. He was found by the band's guitarist, Øystein Aarseth, a.k.a. Euronymous, who, instead of reporting it to the police, bought a camera, arranged Dead's corpse and took photographs of it, then make a necklace with pieces of his skull.
But wait, there's more! Soon after Dead's suicide, Mayhem's new bassist, Varg Vikernes, took to burning down churches with Euronymous. However, their relationship soon went sour and the two got into an altercation that resulted in Varg killing Euronymous. He was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison.
Of course, Mayhem, as well as Varg's other band, Burzum, are now considered absolute fixtures of the development of black metal and between them have several all-time classics of the genre under their belt. So, you know, there might be a bit of a problem in your scene when one of the biggest idols of it is a violent convicted murderer. Did I mention Varg's also a Neo-Nazi?
My point is that black metal is a genre where you have to go very far in separating the art and the artist, because most of the artists are terrible people. It's simply an insular, hostile community, and both the artists and fans reflect this attitude.
With all that said, this is an album of techno covers of black metal songs, done by a gay artist.
There's a lot to say about the codes of meaning inherent in Why Do the Heathen Rage?, and I'll get to all that in a second, but firstly I want to ask the question: what does this end up doing in a musical sense? Techno and black metal are two genres that really don't have a lot of obvious stylistic overlap – anybody who has even cursorily listened to either will be able to tell you that. But somehow the fusion of these two contradictory things creates a fascinating tension – turns out when you translate a piercing tremolo guitar riff to a synthesizer, you get something that has its own unique kind of sound, of the kind you wouldn't think of just by messing around with a synthesizer on your own.
This odd juxtaposition is in place all over the album – black metal's strengths being played in an environment where they're totally alien, and yet continue to function. The emphasis on structure and discrete parts inherent to black metal songwriting gives these songs a sense of progress, composition and deliberateness that is unusual for electronic music, which broadly tends to have variations on a theme or riff rather than verse-bridge-guitar solo parts. The tension is also there in the vocals, which are obviously and unapologetically “black metal vocals done with a gay man's voice”. The fact that Daniel Drew, the man behind The Soft Pink Truth, is better at black metal vocals than the next guy doesn't really obscure the fact that he's just not really cut out to be the vocalist of a black metal band. And yet in the context of the album it works perfectly, because the vocals end up being held at a slight remove from the material, much in the same way that the music itself is.
So the black metal style ends up meaning something completely different when placed in a different context, and this is reflected throughout the album, including what is in my mind the most gloriously cheeky thing about the whole project – the cover, which depicts a gay orgy full of dudes spraying pink cum that forms a symbol that looks an awful lot like a black metal band's. Not any specific one, mind you, just evoking the general style.
At first, Why Do the Heathen Rage? might seem like nothing but cheek – a gay man tackling a notoriously hateful and homophobic community by doing a camped-up pantomime of their classics. The album cover certainly seems to point towards that. What is it if not an album-length middle finger?
But this assumes a person who would, purely out of spite, listen to a variety of black metal music to select enough songs for an album of covers, take the time to reinterpret them on entirely different instruments, learn to do a black metal voice, and recruit guest artists like Antony and Jennifer Walshe to provide extra vocals and instrumentation (and we'd also have to assume the guest artists are dedicating their time to covering black metal songs out of spite as well). This seems like a bridge too far.
No, the only kind of person who would do a black metal covers album in a completely different style – moreover, an album that features obscure picks from artists like Sargeist and AN – is a person who really, devotedly loves black metal. Look up any interview with Daniel Drew about Why Do the Heathen Rage? and you'll see how legitimate his love for the music is. Here's one where he dons black metal face paint and talks about going to see Emperor live! The thing is, he has every reason to hate the subculture of black metal for being, as I said, inclusive, hateful, and homophobic. He talks in that interview about seeing Emperor live and the dissonance involved in being a gay person having a blast at a concert where the drummer killed a gay person in 1992. In fact, here's an incredibly revealing quote from Drew in the interview:
'So I went and saw Emperor live, and they are fucking awesome. It was my birthday and I remember the drummer threw out a drumstick and I caught it. But the whole time I thought, “I'm a kind of Uncle Tom motherfucker if I'm going to see Emperor and support what they're about. They killed a gay man.” My record can't redress that kind of a crime, but it's part of a queer response to that subculture. I've also embroidered my Emperor shirt with "Rest in Peace Magne Andreassen."'
It's clearly something that weighs on Drew's mind fairly often, but at the same time, look at that last sentence. Confronted with this huge dissonance, he responded to it by adding on a message of healing and love to the iconography of a black metal band. It perfectly represents what Drew does with this album as a whole.
Because more than anything, Why Do the Heathen Rage? is just that: an act of healing. It confronts the checkered and hateful past of black metal and, while never quite forgiving it, validates its essential goodness. It's a powerful argument for the genre: that in spite of all its terrible connotations, it can still inspire someone who by all rights should hate it to make art – to make an album that, even if it weren't making a statement about black metal, would still be a fascinating and compelling techno album. Fortunately for us, it's both – an album that sounds like nothing else before it that also happens to be an exorcism and a promise that there can be something better. Why Do the Heathen Rage? is pure alchemy – the transmutation of a base and black thing into something purer and more inspiring.
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