Chapter 7: Bathory and Viking Metal

Among the hundreds of interviews with Quorthon, the main musician in the band Bathory, is one that can be found on the website Death Metal Underground¹:

Quorthon here tries to reject the idea that his music is right-wing, reactionary, nationalist or racist. Songs about Satan and Vikings are in this self-analysis just “atmospheric metal”. The influence of Nietzsche on the band and Quorthon’s lyrics is dismissed as something that he read “ten years ago”, something he has channelled through listening to Wagner. When he says Bathory have been accused of glorifying war and the holocaust in the German metal press, he cannot help but hint about the bigger critique: the metal press accused Quorthon and Bathory of being sympathetic to the Nazi cause, racist and glorifying the Nazis and being ambivalent about the genocide associated with the Nazis: the Holocaust (Kahn-Harris, 2004, 2007; Sellheim, 2018). This re-imagination of his own work can be found in interviews all over the internet, and in the hundreds of thousands of words of autobiography and reflections collated and maintained by Quorthon’s father on the official Bathory site. What makes this interview more significant is the deliberate lack of capital on the most important word: why holocaust, not Holocaust? Interviews in metal zines in the age of email tend to be conducted in text form rather than face-to-face or over the phone. It may well be, then, that Quorthon sent the text of this quote exactly how it is written, and the editor of Death Metal Underground has just copied and pasted without correcting anything in it.² So it may be that Quorthon left Holocaust as holocaust. This may have been an accident, but it does not look very likely. The word and the mistake are repeated. There is a correct use of capitals in the names of the albums. So the effect is deliberate, and we might conclude that Quorthon was deliberately downplaying the importance of the holocaust by deliberately not using the respectful form. But it may well be that the removal of the capital letter was actually an editorial decision at the webzine.