I think it’s fair to say that I was not particularly a fan of any kind of music when I was a kid. This isn’t to say that I didn’t like music; I had preferences, I just don’t think that I had any kind of taste (good or bad), strictly speaking. The music I enjoyed was more-or-less a product of my environment and of opportunity: My father played 60s and 70s rock, there was a Def Leppard tape lying around, Godzilla movies had Godzilla music, etc. There wasn’t a lot of conscious choice going into it. I remember when I was very young, my mother teased me (gently, I assure you) for once dancing to a Brittany Spears song, as this was surely behavior unbecoming of a young man. I didn’t understand it at all - I mean, it was just the music that was playing. I hadn’t been taught to like or dislike things like that according to some imaginary product-identity-experience yet. To put it more simply, music didn’t matter to me all that much yet. I didn’t have anything for a love of music to reinforce.
I think that I probably started to actually care about music (however superficially) in middle school. Of course, at that age everything you like is very blatantly a function of how you want others to perceive you (that’s probably true to an extent at every age, but here we are), and so I needed the music I liked, publicly, to galvanize the social roles and private interests I was interested in pursuing. Anyway, this will sound pretty strange perhaps, but at that age I was very interested in suicide (not committing it, necessarily), and so I gravitated to music that I associated with suicide, mostly grunge acts. While I did sincerely enjoy the music, it still wasn’t a terribly personal connection. All I had done was take the music I had been previously exposed to and sift through it a little to eke out arbitrary points of congruence. I hadn’t found this music, I just chose it from what had already been put in my lap. My fantasies of starting my own grunge band (called Tainted Meat) notwithstanding, the music was not something I really invested myself deeply into. It was just a conveyance towards social bonding or an ideological gang sign I could flash in math class.
Besides suicide, another subject I was interested in at the time was cults. For some reason, my middle school library had a very large, comprehensive book about cults in the 20th century. Save for Heaven’s Gate (which I think happened after the book was published), it had all the major players - Jonestown, the Manson Family, Children of God, Branch Davidians, Aum Shinrikyo - as well as some more obscure or minor groups, like Raelians and some messianic Jews who were involved in terrorist plots. In hindsight, it was a really strange book for that library to have. Anyway, one chapter of the book dealt with the Satanic Panic of the 1970s and 80s, talking about the foundation of LeVay’s Church of Satan, incidents like the McMartin preschool trial, books like Michelle Remembers, Dungeons & Dragons (Satan’s game!), and the ever-present rumors (and occasional facts) of rock music’s intersection with the occult. I’m not sure if it was in that book or during a subsequent Wikipedia binge inspired by it where I learned about early Black Metal. Maybe it was actually just from watching Frank Zappa’s testimony on the PMRC - you know how memories are - but, anyway, somehow I found myself looking at the “Filthy Fifteen,” and of course the two black metal acts, Venom and Mercyful Fate, stuck out to me the most. I decided to listen to Mercyful Fate solely because I thought the cover art was the better of the two. And then from there things kind of spiraled.
Black metal was the first musical genre that I really deeply invested myself in. Where my previous musical tastes were dictated by their connection to my interests, Black Metal was the first that became an object of interest itself. From Mercyful Fate I learned about the second wave groups from Norway and the like, read tirelessly about church burnings, murders and suicides, secret tape trading societies and isolationist subcultures, bizarre rumors of people cutting their hands off and sewing on pigs’ feet in their place... It was a lot of fun to read about, and I enjoyed the music as well. I never truly bought in to all the “image” stuff surrounding the music, it was kind of just an aesthetic that I enjoyed looking at but not participating in myself. This isn’t to say, though, that I didn’t revel in how edgy it all was. At that age I really loved shocking and upsetting people, and where I grew up that was pretty easy to do by just showing them the cover of Transylvanian Hunger or playing them six seconds of “Chainsaw Gutsfuck”. I remember once in ninth grade English class, we had to make a kind of soundtrack for different scenes in Romeo and Juliet. My friends and I submitted one featuring “The Black Vomit” by Sarcofago and whatever Hello Kitty Suicide Club track had the title we felt would get us in the least serious trouble. I think it also involved “MmmBop.” We had to play excerpts from all the songs in front of the class and explain why we chose them. People were really upset, actually, but we got a good grade. Maybe I never actually grew out of that kind of behavior.
Eventually, of course, black metal as an interest fell by the wayside a bit. There’s a lot of talk online about “growing out of metal” as an objective phase of one’s life, which I do think is partly legitimate, even if stupid. While I still listened to many albums (especially Burzum, Darkthrone, Corrupted, Gallhammer), I was no longer interested in or sympathetic to black metal groups solely on the basis of their semi-arbitrary genre classification. A lot of it just seemed really goofy to me. I mean, 90% of anything is slop, and maybe the shine of my initial interest wore off and I could see things a bit more clearly or critically. Most of these albums were made by dumb teenagers (mentally or physically) whose intent was to seriously convince the listener of their allegiance to Satan’s trve kvlt legions, and most of them couldn’t even do that in an interesting way. The worst part is that they didn’t seem to realize how silly all of it was.
On the surface, of all the music I was listening to back then, Mercyful Fate should really be number one on the silliness scale. Their songs are about mummies and werewolves, their lyrics are often mish-mashes of every possible Hammer Horror trope and LaVeyan stereotype, and King Diamond sings as if he is perpetually in the process of animorphing into a bat. It really should be the worst goofy offender, but somehow it just isn’t. Part of that, I think, is that the music comes from both a place of genuine, self-aware sincerity - King Diamond really is a devoted follower of LaVey, and the band knows that they are creating Halloween music. They are not trying in vain to scare you (or whatever normies are around you) with their songs about vampires and witches, they’re not trying to convince you of their own uber-kvlt power and toughness, they’re just trying to create an atmosphere to build guitar solos around. And, you know, it works really, really well. All the musicians in the band are outrageously talented, and even more importantly everybody in the group knows when and when not to show restraint. Whereas a lot of the band’s 1980s contemporaries could fall into really fruitless self-indulgence, Mercyful Fate songs are always tight, well-structured, and engaging. They understand how to manage tension, and how to use the atmosphere they create to facilitate that tension.
While I still enjoy all of their albums, to me Mellissa is Mercyful Fate at their best. Every note on this album is perfectly placed, and repeated listens become these fun games of anticipation as you repeatedly say, “ah, here comes that part!” It’s one of the ultimate “driving in the car” albums. When you’re moving, it makes you feel good. When you’re sitting at a light, you can mime all the instruments. And the whole time, you can try your best to hit those same falsetto notes on King. I don’t listen to it all that much these days, but every time I do it’s a treat and still very dear to me. If you’re interested, check it out.
My favorite parts of the Melissa album:
BAUMBAUMBAUM BA-BAUMBAUM BA-DA-DA-DUH (duhdehduh, duhdehduh…)
HALLOWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN
“Oh! YEAH!”
“No! It’s Satan’s call!”
The intro to “Into the Coven”
Innumerable battles of squeedly vs. meedley