Norwegian Black Metal–the media

Norwegian Black Metal–the media is a relationship of mutual amplification: newspapers and magazines made a frightening public spectacle of the scene, while its most prominent figures used that attention to build notoriety and standing. The book traces this cycle from earlier Satanic scares through the defining reports of 1993 and later coverage, while resisting the simple claim that journalism either caused the crimes or merely recorded them.

From Satanic scares to a visible youth scene

Satanism was not initially treated in Norway as a grave public danger. The Church of Norway had discussed it at bishops’ conferences from the late 1970s, largely as one small feature of expanding New Age and occult interests. Newspaper headlines gathered pace in the summer of 1988, when reports described alleged Satanist groups, church thefts, threats, and a ritual site found during a drug investigation. Concern about the availability of The Satanic Bible also entered the coverage. These stories arrived after similar tabloid narratives had circulated in America and Britain, bringing imported fears into Norwegian public discussion.

As Asbjørn Dyrendal’s study of Norwegian press coverage from 1988 to 1997 describes it, the arrival of Black Metal in headlines in 1993 shifted the focus from alleged hidden cults to visible teenagers performing identities associated with evil. Some claimed Nazi or Satanist identities; others rejected labels or adopted an all-purpose posture of hostility. The press gave these declarations a platform, while reports of attacks on people and property, grave desecration, and church arsons made the spectacle harder to dismiss as performance alone. Between 1991 and 1993, the documented context included assaults, stabbings, a reported rape, and two murders. Yet coverage could make a varied set of acts appear to be one coordinated Satanic assault on Christians.

That framing had consequences beyond newspaper pages. Dyrendal notes that fearful responses from police and church communities were sometimes warranted, but that allegations and unusual sites could also provoke panic. Congregations and police kept watch at churches; in Oslo, a priest armed himself with an axe while guarding his church at night. Some churches were later burned when watchfulness had eased. The sequence reveals a difficult distinction: public alarm could answer real danger, while sensational claims could also enlarge the perceived threat and encourage responses built on rumor.

The 1993 breakthrough and its images

The scene entered mainstream attention in central Norway with Bergens Tidende’s front-page story on January 20, 1993. Finn Bjørn Tønder had been approached by two young people who had grown up with Varg Vikernes; they had interviewed him as Burzum prepared to release an album and hoped the paper would publish their material. Instead, Vikernes’s gaze filled the front page beneath a headline declaring that the group had lit the fires. The story presented an extravagant account of a conspiracy against the forces of good and used provocative statements to portray the scene as a source of fear. Its closing allegations linked Vikernes to eight church arsons and a killing at Lillehammer, a crime for which Bård Eithun would later be imprisoned.

The article offered unusual insight into a developing subculture, but also into Vikernes’s attempt to shape his public image. The book describes how the story’s exposure delighted central figures, including Vikernes and Øystein Aarseth, as attention intensified. The effect was not simply that readers learned about the music or the crimes: a front-page persona could make transgression itself part of a performer’s public standing.

A second, larger breakthrough followed in the British magazine Kerrang!. Issue 436 reached newsstands on March 27, 1993, with a cover showing Vikernes holding crossed knives, a burning church, and members of Emperor in corpsepaint and medieval-style clothing. Inside, a five-page feature by Jason Arnopp presented Norwegian Black Metal to an international audience through a sensational account centered largely on alleged remarks by Vikernes and Aarseth. The article also described the scene as neo-fascist, drawing on statements and claims that were not all reliable. The book notes that Vikernes later said many remarks attributed to him had been fabricated, misunderstood, misquoted, or removed from context; other participants later regarded the scene’s statements as naive and deluded.

The article’s distortions did not cancel its reach. It brought Norwegian Black Metal to global attention, but also helped ensure that crimes and scandal would overshadow the music. For the scene’s leading figures, that coverage was extraordinary publicity. Its power lay partly in the collision between image and report: staged menace supplied journalists with arresting material, and the resulting stories made the menace more widely visible and consequential.

A feedback loop, not a settled cause

Dyrendal initially doubted that media coverage had played a major role, but later reconsidered after speaking with journalists and people involved in Vikernes’s trial. In his account, mass-media exposure was valuable to Vikernes’s street credibility and helped build a near-mythological public image. Participants also recalled that events became wilder after journalists began focusing on the scene. Coverage intensified an internal struggle to become its dominant personality, though the scene had its own dynamics independent of outside attention. The argument is therefore one of amplification, not proof that coverage alone produced criminal behavior.

The book also considers whether young people borrowed their images of Satanism from the press and Christian sources, because those were the accounts available to them. Dyrendal suggests that some tried, with limited means, to imitate the myths they had encountered. In this reading, the media supplied a repertoire of gestures and stories that could be performed, while the resulting provocations then generated further coverage. But the book cautions against assuming that people automatically imitate what they read; the extent and pathway of media influence remain difficult to establish.

The appeal of the scene likewise cannot be reduced to headlines. Dyrendal points to aggressive music, its mythological connection to the Viking Age, and the force of identifying with it. For adolescents who felt unable to influence their surroundings, the music could make hatred and strength feel liberating. Its stark visual uniform also offered outsiders a way to project an identity that made others wary. Media attention could magnify those signals, but it did not create every attraction or explain every action.

Sensational claims and later corrections

The book criticizes the press less for reporting on Satanism than for allowing rumor and urban legend to pass into stories without adequate scrutiny. Journalists could not be expected to anticipate every consequence, and censorship would have been worse; nevertheless, recent Satanic scares in England and the United States should have made reporters more alert to familiar tales of secret groups committing atrocities. The danger was not only exaggeration: repeated stories could give unverified claims the appearance of established fact and make a diffuse youth subculture look like a single organized conspiracy.

A later Norwegian case shows the continuing force of the frame and the importance of correcting it. In June 2003, the arrest of a 26-year-old former bass player and several younger people after the desecration of a chapel dominated news coverage for days. Tabloids speculated about Satanic ritual and some called for Black Metal to be outlawed. Yet the former musician had been dismissed from his band for musical reasons and was largely ostracized from the scene; the account identifies psychological and pharmacological factors as more plausible contributors than music or Satanism. The book also notes that the crimes near Helsinki were heavily suppressed by authorities who feared copycat incidents, a different response to the same problem of publicity and imitation.

By then Black Metal had become critically acclaimed and commercially appealing, and people within mainstream media were prepared to defend it. One radio DJ argued that corpse desecration would bring no status in the scene. The book treats that defense as no more adequate than tabloid claims that metal fans were potential corpse violators: both turn a complex scene into a sweeping generalization. Its account of Norwegian Black Metal and the media ends with this unresolved tension. Publicity could lend notoriety, intensify competition, and plausibly furnish models for imitation; it could also exaggerate, misattribute, and flatten. The relationship mattered precisely because neither side controlled what the other made of the spectacle.