The Pollitics, Milieu and Music of Black Metal

The genre of black metal music and its association with violence, Satanism and paganism offers an opportunity to think through the political dimensions of music. This essay argues against Ronald Bogue's depoliticisation of black metal through Deleuzian theory, instead defending the possibility of a politics that inheres to the form of different music. Violence, I argue here, is an extension of the milieu that black metal gave rise to.Musical experience correlates with political acts of church burning, black metal music carrying with it the politics of the milieu that it created.