As far as the 'divide' between the 'trve' and the 'false', that's in every subgenre of metal and to be honest, metal in general. It's not an inclusive hug a nikka type environment. It's "this is what i stand for as a musician, artist, and person, if you don't like it fuck you". Yeah it's childish, but it's just the way things are. I kind of like it that way, leads to more entertaining #banter. But like all arguments of authenticity, they're built on little and amount to little. Honestly i think most metal fans my and jake's age are pretty much not interested in the trve/false dichotomy; it had already approached meme joke status in our teens.
It is what it is. You're dealing with basically music made by a bunch of disaffected youth who lashed out at the highly ordered sterile placidity of Scandinavian life. The world of IKEA, quality public programs, high standardized test scores and quality of life have a dark side too, this is it. Memories of a world before Christians came and put their folk culture to the sword and spear, and of course the decimation of World War II. Chaos, blood, death, tribalism. As unpalatable as these visions and ideologies can be, extreme metal is the acknowledgement that these things are undeniably real and exist, and permeate the circumstances and the foundations of our world. I guess. It's part of the reason why PC culture is so offended by metal. Also it's important to note that yeah, these guys were frequently just young dumb kids.
Sohh, these two things are related. I wanna start off by saying- the genres we're talking about thrive[d] as counter-culture enclaves, something that should be intuitive to anybody who's paying any attention. Intrinsic to a counter-culture movement is a sense of identity rooted in contrarion attitudes to a given, popular, set of principles. If we take the Norwegian scene specifically, I think it's much more easily understood as a spectacular blanket refusal of societal standards with a Scandinavian flavor: nominal Christianity, multiculturalism, and, to a more limited extent, social welfare. Something that I find very telling is how none of the more vocal advocates for the aforementioned (Varg, Gaahl) can really frame any kind of argument past some pseudo-historical/scientific romanticization for greener pastures. My opinion, and this is completely off the record because I have nothing to ground this in, is that these figures find it much more appealing to
be socially unaccepted than actually achieve any of their stated goals. I can't imagine any kind of scenario where, if these guys won, they'd be legitimately content. To a certain extent, imo, being counter-culture
is the goal.
You mentioned earlier how you found the genre appealing because it didn't pale from "showing you the ugliness." I'd go a little bit further and say that it invites you to embrace the ugliness (there's also the intended effect of repulsing "others" with ugliness, thereby reinforcing metal's status as an insular enclave). What needs to be mentioned is that, prior to the Internet, this particular attitude/identity is what provided social cohesion to the metal underground - essentially irreverent of scene/subgenre. I think you're absolutely right in that there's a change of guard among heads and their attitude towards the lines that have been drawn in the sand by the preceding generation, and I think it's demonstrative of a much broader phenomenon in the information age where unprecedented access and convenience are obsoleting niche subcultures. I look at how I got into the genre in the first place - through my parent's desktop- and it's hard for me not to see the bigger implication: the Internet effectively ended counter-culture as we know it.
