Arvid Skancke-Knudsen

Arvid Skancke-Knudsen was the editor of Norway’s leading rock magazine, Rock Furore, when Black Metal first made an impact on the country’s small but active music scene. A senior music writer with a long record of following Norwegian rock, he initially treated the new style as an exciting musical development. His changing relationship with the scene traces a wider change in how it was covered: from an effort to report on a musical movement to coverage dominated by crime, and eventually to a more conventional recognition of the music itself.

Editorial engagement

At first, Skancke-Knudsen approached Black Metal as a development in rock rather than as a criminal phenomenon. He recruited writers from within the scene for Rock Furore, aiming to give it accurate coverage. The choice suggests an effort to bring informed voices into music journalism at a moment when the scene was still being understood primarily through its musical and subcultural context.

That engagement did not last. Skancke-Knudsen later felt compelled to withdraw from contact after leading figures made statements in the media that gave what he regarded as a distinctly racist impression. The account also notes that the crimes that followed did little to encourage renewed involvement. His withdrawal marked a break between a music press willing to approach the scene as music and a public conversation increasingly shaped by provocation, political extremity, and criminal cases.

From music coverage to crime reporting

As the subculture grew more extreme, the Norwegian music press pulled back and crime journalists took over. The mainstream media encountered a milieu whose members said and did things that readily supplied material for alarming headlines. Coverage of the scene thus changed not only in tone but in its organizing subject: musical development receded while crime and controversy became the principal frame.

The change unfolded amid highly visible reporting. In January 1993, Bergens Tidende put Varg Vikernes on its front page beneath the headline “WE LIT THE FIRES,” presenting him as a defining public face of the scene. In March, Kerrang! ran a cover feature built around a dramatic image of Vikernes, crossed knives, and a burning church. Such coverage helped make the Norwegian scene visible far beyond the country, but its sensational presentation also reinforced the shift away from ordinary music criticism that Skancke-Knudsen’s earlier editorial approach had tried to resist.

A changing media relationship

The book places the press’s role within a feedback loop rather than treating publicity as a neutral reflection of events. Asbjørn Dyrendal later argued that mass-media attention had helped Vikernes build a near-mythological public image and intensified competition within the scene for dominance. Vikernes, looking back, likewise said that the attention following the arrests drew more young people to the scene, including children who became involved in later church burnings. These observations describe the broader media environment surrounding Skancke-Knudsen’s withdrawal; they are not presented as his own explanation of the consequences.

The press’s stance changed again as Black Metal gained popularity abroad and its bands achieved notable sales by Norwegian standards. The account describes how coverage eventually had to acknowledge that the scene was primarily musical. Satyricon’s Sigurd Wongraven, previously featured in a Rock Furore exposé about racism in Black Metal, later received a mainstream tabloid profile focused on his taste in Italian designer clothes. The contrast captures the scene’s changing public presentation: a subject once treated through crime and political menace could also be recast as rock-star culture, even while racism and Satanism continued to sustain its unsettling image.

Significance

Skancke-Knudsen’s significance in the account lies in his position at the hinge between two kinds of coverage. His early editorial response treated Black Metal as an emerging style and sought accuracy through writers with knowledge of the scene; his later retreat coincided with the music press’s loss of ground to crime journalism. The eventual return of mainstream interest, after the music had become popular and more domesticated in the press, did not erase the earlier association with extremity. His trajectory therefore reflects the unstable boundary between musical reporting and the manufacture of a public image around a scene whose notoriety could attract attention even as it drove music writers away.