Pink Metal

A few weeks ago, I went to a concert in Antwerp with my brother and two friends. The name of the place was the Trix, the name of the band Dimmu Borgir (which means 'dark castles' in Old Norse, a North Germanic language spoken during the Viking Age), a five-headed black metal band from Norway.

For those of you who are not familiar with black metal, this is the kind of music played by the sons of Satan themselves, which usually come in the following varieties:

(1) A lead singer doing all kinds of crazy shit with his voice - from screaming and yelling, over growling to grunting and barking - except actually singing, of course. Even when this guy (or girl, for real) addresses the audience, he sounds like a sleep deprived zombie who did nothing but smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol in the last 7000 years. I bet even blind girls pee their pants when a black metal lead singer approaches them in a pub, just to whisper "You look beautiful, fancy a drink?" into their ears.

(2) A drummer beating and kicking at speeds which are so incredibly fast that it actually makes sense to assume that the roaring waves he produces are simply a consequence of him breaking through the wall of sound. This guy deserves utter respect though, since black metal drumming for more than fifteen minutes in a row beats single-handedly hauling a piano up a tree on the scale of things-that-make-you-feel-tired.

(3) Guitar and bass players torturing their strings, hereby combining speed, precision and the kind of devotion I prefer to reserve for sentences in which the word 'bloodlust' is combined with 'a slightly right-winged, frustrated, grumpy old man getting hold of the young mole that has been ruining his garden, his afternoon and - by lack of decent substitutes - his life'. Excellent musicians, that is, but not the kind you would like to meet in real life.

(4) The occasional keyboard player, trying to add an outlandish layer of ominous vibes to the blasphemous wall of sound created by his horned peers. Despite his good intentions, as in 'evil ones', this leads to a bizarre mixture of heavy metal and nightclub trance lines, inducing people stretching their arms. No need to blame Regi here, apparently it's a natural reflex.

Even if your ears can take black metal, there's still plenty of reasons to have objections from the visual point of view.

First if all, black metal artists have a bizarre tendency to travel around with a wardrobe containing more iron, latex and leather than a cargo ship carrying mechanical rodeo bulls and crash test dummies. Dressed in black, donning clothing accessories which look like a crossing between a piece of knight's armour and a fakir's bed. The most positive adjective I can come up with is kinky, but that's just because ridiculous and freaky are still fighting over a dog's bone that is no longer there. In the real sense of the word, it doesn't even look dangerous, because even people in a wheelchair could easily get away from an attacker wearing erhm... stuff attached to his arms and legs adorned with 5 inch spikes.

Secondly, there's the corpse paint: black metal artists paint their faces completely white - which could be useful for African artists, so that you can at least see where their costume ends and actual face begins, but I am not sure whether Nordic people, coming from a country where the sun doesn't even appear above the horizon for a few months, need an extra layer of white - and then accentuate their eyes and lips with black lipstick and mascara (iLiner for the hipsters amongst you). It's not that I question the very concept of make-up for artists, but in this particular situation I do have my objections. For when Dimmu Borgir came on stage, I couldn't help but think of five men sitting in front of a long mirror - lined with the kind of plastic tube they grow in Christmas trees, containing cosy lights - sharing make-up, brushes and sex stories. And, let's be honest, this is not really what you envision Satan's sons to do backstage, right? If they would have come on stage with fresh goat blood dripping from the corners of their mouths and nipples, wearing snakes as scarves, walking on smouldering coals, burping fiery fumes of rotting smoke, I would at least given them credit for what they claim to be (a bunch of crazy motherfuckers). The way they entered, however, I felt like being at a training session for the annual gay fetish wagon.

I even started wondering why five friends would actually decide to start a black metal band in the first place. Although my belief in musician's common love for music - in the broadest sense of the spectrum - stands as firm as a pudding in the freezer, I do believe that its any artist's dream to occasionally consume this love with the groupies flashing their bulgy bonuses from the first row, after a few free drinks backstage. As a black metal artist however, you are staring at long-haired men flashing their ever-growing beer bellies from underneath an ever-shrinking t-shirt, in which some illegible writing refers to - what I think - a name of a metal band, although it could be a kind of medicine as well (I am not a pharmacist, sorry).

In the end, I realized that what brought these people together can only be one thing: sheer love. For music. Their music: metal...