Wolves Among Sheep: History and Ideology of National Socialist Black Metal

Compiling a book that deals with polarizing topics, yet which avoids providing the reader with easy answers or readymade interpretations, means to walk a precarious tightrope. Such was certainly the case with Lords of Chaos, the 1998 investigation of black metal that I co-wrote with Didrik Søderlind. The book became immensely popular, but we were also accused of harboring all sorts of nefarious agendas. To black metal fans mainly into the music, we were crime-obsessed; to the doctrinaire leftists, we were crypto-fascists; to Christian fundamentalists, we were advocates for satanic mayhem; and to Varg Vikernes and his followers, we were Jewish lackeys out to make the Aryans look bad. Wolves Among Sheep may elicit a similarly divided reception, for the authors allow the social antagonists who fill its pages to speak without censure. Ribaric and Maspero leave no stone unturned as they recount NSBM’s bloody birth pangs, hyper-malignant growth, and surprising resiliency. They take a morbid curiosity in dissecting the still-living beast of NSBM and searching out its countless tentacles. If you are looking for moral condemnation of the subject matter, however, you’ll need to bring that to the operating theater yourself. Christians will be revolted by the Satanism and paganism. Pagans will resent the misuse of ancient symbolism and the implication that it shares some innate connection with Nazism. Liberals will be appalled that such a genre exists at all (they’ll sleep better if they simply stick the book back on the shelf, unread). Conservatives will be repelled by the tactless - and frequently tacky - glorification of the Third Reich. To a doctrinaire National Socialist, the bulk of NSBM will look and sound like a new form of entartete Kunst. -Michael Moynihan (author: Lords of Chaos / musician: Blood Axis) from the foreword to the English language edition of Wolves Among Sheep