The Devil's Music : Into the Wolf's Lair Abyss
The twenty-first century has been kind to Al Gore. Since losing a razor-close presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000 allegedly due to voting mechanics confusing the shit out of Florida residents, he’s largely remembered today for being the first person in mainstream media to care about global warming. Not for having a crazy wife who decided to police the entire music industry because she caught her daughter listening to Darling Nikki, by Prince.
Little did she know, Tipper Gore’s efforts started a nationwide moral panic that would indirectly cause Judas Priest to be accused of putting subliminal messages telling listening to go kill themselves in their music. Hindsight is always 20/20, but that infamous lawsuit was always idiotic for several reasons:
The idea of telling your own record-buying audience to kill themselves is counterintuitive to the idea of selling records in the first place.
Judas Priest’s frontman Rob Halford was basically a closeted gay man living his inner fantasies by dressing up in leather and telling everyone is was the manliest shit ever. That is what he cared about.
The song Priest were accused of hiding subliminal messages on is NOT THEIR FUCKING SONG. Better by you, Better than me is a fucking cover. It’s a garden variety song about depression and need for change written by a British rock band called Spooky Tooth. Songs that are insanely more depressing have been written since and were probably written then.
The most idiotic thing about Tipper Gore’s crusade and the ensuing moral panic it caused is that there were heavy metal bands who were actively trying to corrupt the youth back then. Except for Venom, Gore did not care about any of them.
One of these bands was Norwegian Black Metal icons Mayhem. Originally founded in 1984 by sixteen years old Øystein Aarseth (also known as Euronymous), the band’s de facto music debut was the release of their 1987 EP Deathcrush. Aarseth’s clumsy attempt to rip off Venom accidentally created a musical genre, inspired a series of church burnings and inadvertently led to his own death seven years later.
What made Øystein Aarseth so musically and culturally influential in extreme metal circles is that he was a guitarist with original, idiosyncratic ideas and a batshit crazy person who enjoyed being around crazy, extreme people too. I’m not going to tell you the story of Mayhem’s first decade again, but Aarseth’s infatuation with being crazy and extreme would lead to two deaths including his own to his own bassist’s hands. It’s not what I think about, though.
Mayhem is one of my favorite bands and it has little to do with Euronymous and his craziness. But it’s not completely separate either because it has premeated who they are artistically. I love Mayhem because the ideas and emotions they communicate through their music are real. They are people who burned churches, who made music for people to burn churches to. They are performers who aren’t completely constructed.
What makes Mayhem even more interesting to me is the most underreported aspect of their career: after Euronymous and Dead’s respective passings, they were reformed by their drummer Hellhammer and original bassist Necrobutcher and released what is still today Mayhem’s best record: 1997’s EP Wolf’s Lair Abyss.
Older, wiser and more interested with the musical aspect of their career by force of things, they invited the main singer on Deathcrush Maniac to rejoin the band and became the best, meanest, most competent and extreme version of themselves. That’s another aspect of Mayhem that’s very real: they survived self-destruction and recorded an album that quoted Nietzsche liberally, talked of apocalyptic destruction and becoming some sort of demon.
That’s pretty badass.
Whether Wolf’s Lair Abyss was self-conscious or not, it became an anthem to embracing adversity and the changes it creates. To letting negativity break you and mold you into something different. One could argue that 90% of heavy metal and 99% of black metal is exactly about that idea under one form or the other, but with Mayhem it was different. They lived it and their music was not explicitly about that. It was the byproduct.
They also found the perfect mouthpiece to express these uncommon feelings. Although it didn’t seem like Maniac knew how to sing at all on Deathcrush, ten years did wonders for his singing technique and his on stage persona reflected (self-consciously or not) the destructive cycle Wolf’s Lair Abyss was born from. He infamously cut himself on stage in the intro to Freezing Moon while they toured to support the album.
Without knowing anything about who Maniac really was and why he was doing what he was doing, I understood exactly who he was and how he felt because he did something against himself that could not be interpreted metaphorically. It was a performative act that wasn’t a performance. He’s not the only extreme metal singer to do this to himself, but Mayhem is the only band where the music and the on stage performance complemented each other so well.
The music was the purest artistic distillation possible of the experience.
For those who care, Maniac seems to have found peace despite getting booted from the band in 2004 for his rampant alcoholism. He’s married and has children now. He also has a killer doom metal band called Skitliv, which is still powerful, original and driven by his need to exorcise his own negative energy.
I love Mayhem for the music, but in their case it is indistinguishable from the artist. An album like Wolf’s Lair Abyss could only have been recorded by a band that has flirted with self-destruction and had an actual understanding of how negative energy actually sounded. That should’ve freaked out Tipper Gore. They were probably not big enough and came too late in order for Gore to notice them, but they were her worst nightmare come true.
Mayhem were who concerned Americans though Marilyn Manson was and they didn’t even bother putting subliminal messages in their songs.
The idea carrying Mayhem’s post-Euronymous legacy that is so powerful is that you shouldn’t protect your children against music. If they end up listening to music like Mayhem, you should look inward and wonder where you fucked up in the first place. Extreme music is the byproduct of extreme thought or experiences. It doesn’t trigger them. What made Mayhem special was that they didn’t manufacture them.
Tipper Gore didn’t give a shit about the children. She wanted to give a meaning to her life by undergoing a moral battle for innocent souls. The members of Mayhem lived the life they were dealt and were hellbent on creating something new out of it. That’s how Wolf’s Lair Abyss was born. The album that should’ve terrified Tipper Gore into endless insomnia. Gore dealt with a problem that was theoretical and Mayhem dealt with problems that happened.
This is why I love them so much.
