The Duty's Feral House Trifecta: Lords of Chaos

In our never-ending quest to like music even more than everyone else in the history of ever, Heavy Duty decided to branch out into the realm of rock tomes. Not that the music scholarship is foreign to us, but we figured that if we're gonna spend all day and night listening to bad-ass tunes we might as well spend a few minutes each day readin' about 'em. Our first foray into our brand new "Books, Check 'Em Out" feature is Michael Moynihan/Didrik Soderlind 1998 Feral House publication, Lords of Chaos!


Okay, so this one's been on our list of Potentially Interesting Reads for years and years now, and we finally decided to pick it up since we're blasting that Northern Darkness album every goddamn day. We knew Lords of Chaos was Feral House's cash cow and that everyone from Howard Stern to Germany's Financial Times seemed to love the tabloid tales of a few fucked up Norwegian kids who played scary fucked up metal and burned churches to the ground, but here at Heavy Duty we thought the Chaos was a bunch of sensationalist bullshit. We'll admit that we were waaaay into that early chapter 'bout the History of Satanic Metal and thought just about everything leading up to Euronymous' brutal stabbing was pretty cool. And every now and again Moynihan's wildly exaggerated and serious writing style (Florida is a "swampy netherworld" and Black Metal's cacophony is a sonic recreation of a Norse legend about a thundering army of dead souls) brought a smile to our lips.


But the bullshit part about Lords of Chaos is the entire second half where it's either about the absurd connections between Nazism and UFO cults or about some isolated incidents where fucked up kids from other countries killed some douchebag or broke into a cathedral. Black Metal is just kids who made everything "evil" their raison d'etre. And then this psychopath Varg murdered someone and became the spokesman for the Black Metal scene before anyone knew there was a scene in the first place. End of story. This book rightly tells some intriguing and fascinating stories, but after awhile it not only seems to place more importance on Black Metal than the small phenomenon deserves, but it also makes these few minor instances of violence and destruction out to be the typical and expected actions of everyone involved or associated with the genre. How fucking stupid. Maybe we're biased since the only Black Metal cat we know is also one of the least scary cats we've ever known, but we figure most duders blasting Mayhem's latest are just duders into creepy shit not dumb ass motherfuckers who want to burn a priest. We ain't gonna discount the entirety of Lords of Chaos 'cause we just can't hate on that "etiology of a scene" stuff, but unless you find this one used we think your time would be better spent learning about Emperor and Darkthrone on Wikipedia, YouToogle, or especially by watching that VBS.tv series we posted about a few months ago. That way you won't have to wade through all that garbage on Satanism and mythology.