Digital Subculture #1: Radio Free Innsmouth

In this new column, Adam explains the art historical relevance of various internet cultural products

When the publishing world went belly up in the 2000s, I experienced a real sense of mourning. Like all milennials, I became inevitably a product of the Internet. Of message boards, of obscure websites. But the digital experience never quite lived up to my early experiences with print media. Sure, there’s still a zine culture out there, and many small-print zines are ones I read regularly. But there’s something so potent about the power of a magazine, of a big platform meant to be a launching pad for art inquisitive minds of all kinds. I do feel, however, that Youtube shows and podcasts and the like are now finally attempting to occupy a similar position in the popular culture that small run magazines once occupied.

As an example: launched as a kind of side project to the Hate Bus podcast, Radio Free Innsmouth is a free Youtube talk show that deals explicitly with the history of extreme metal: death, black, doom, thrash, speed, and classic old school shit alike. The host, the somewhat mysterious Jiub, has excellent taste and a seemingly limitless passion for and knowledge of his subject matter. The platform captured my attention with excellent historical and cultural breakdowns of some of my favorite projects in extreme metal: French nationalist black metal band Peste Noire, Black Sabbath (no description needed there I hope,) Austrian atmospheric black metal band Summoning, Norwegian pagan black metal project Ildjarn, LA-based doom legends Saint Vitus, Virginia NSBM provocateurs Grand Belial’s Key, and I could go on. Every single one of these episodes intensified the depth of my interest in these groups and greatly broadened my knowledge of what it is that they do musically that makes them so thrilling. Furthermore, Radio Free Innsmouth also directly introduced me to bands that I’d never heard and now count amongst my favorites. Bilskirnir, Temnozor, recent projects like Wulkanaz. Whatever. Hell, Jiub even convinced me of the artistic worth of “Visual Kei” groups – essentially J-pop groups that pantomime the aesthetic signifiers of extreme metal to garishly hallucinatory effect. The page’s content is both expansive but diligently well-curated. Because he likes this stuff, you assume it has some relevance. That’s the hallmark of a great critic.

There are A LOT of Youtube shows that deal with similar content, and almost all of them are a fucking joke. The 2010s, millennials and the Internet ensured that the proverbial “posers” flocked to extreme metal like moths to the flame. Brooklyn metal wasn’t just a dilution of the subculture but an outright perversion of it. Over-educated middle class hipsters claiming a decades old art form as their own and then gatekeeping it for compatibility for the dorkish, normie hipster sensibilities of the average Pitchfork reader. These are typically the guys who run these kinds of Youtube shows: mid-IQ, leftist scum with half-beards and doughy, under-exercised bodies.

As an example, I’ll never forget when it was revealed that French experimental black metal unit Deathspell Omega, a band slick and “deep” enough to have cultivated some crossover fame with the Anthony Fantano/Pitchfork fagosphere, was using Finnish black metal and harsh noise renegade Mikko Aspa as its vocalist. Aspa has never shied away from expressing his right wing politics, and within hours there were dozens of these metal Yutube shows crying about how Deathspell Omega was to be no more. How, oh how, could these good liberals have not seen it? They’d been supporting a (GASP!) right wing artist!

In contradistinction to any form of guitar music that came post punk (including, obviously, post-punk, noise rock, indie rock, and otherwise,) metal lives in a universe entirely unconnected to any pipelines that would lead back to the art world. This doesn’t mean that metal musicians aren’t artists, they are often indeed artists and occasionally highly intelligent ones with deeply conceptual and intellectually rigorous projects full of well-conceived content. Famine of Peste Noire is an artist. Fenriz of Darkthrone is an artist. Varg Vikiernes is an artist, or at least he was, before he became a dork on X. It’s rather that the artists of metal have an entirely different set of rules and criteria from other artists that do operate that is somewhere proximate to the art world, even if far removed from it.

They operate in a subculture that, while massive, has its own ecosystem and industry. Therefore, metal is highly suspicious of any art school educated hipsters being drawn towards it because, whether by social conditioning or peer pressure or both, they can’t fully submit to its codes and are often offended by its content. They start making lists of bands that are “sketchy” and telling people which groups can actually be listened to. This obviously enrages purist fans who can’t believe the gall of someone who would arrive decades late to the party only to then decide what the DJ should be playing on the stereo.

Metal is an artform by white men for white men. That is the plain truth of it. Black metal bands weren’t donning corpse paint to buck any gender binary, as the black metal trannies of now suggest, but to terrify the modern world. There’s nothing queered about it. There’s nothing humanist in it. Metal is a direct threat to liberal modernity, even though it’s also technically an outgrowth of it. On this level, hipsters can never engage with it in its pure form and become obsessed with bands that claim radical right wing politics or otherwise, incapable of reconciling the fact that this music is not for them.

With his deep “regular dude” voice and unaffected delivery, Jiub is as far away from a hipster as an Internet personality gets. But he is, like the aforementioned artists above, also an artist in his own right. What I mean by this is he’s an art critic who uses his own taste to cultivate his own aesthetic. He’s an artist in the same way that I consider other critics to be artists. He’s an artist like rock writer Richard Meltzer is, throwing out musical references and his own passions for music out on the line to shape his communications. He’s an artist like the character of Huysmans’ Against the Grain is, dedicated to cultivating a very specific taste and refining it over many years. He’s also, like his subjects, innately underground. There’s no more magazines for someone like him to be a part of, so he’s made the video essay his primary method of communication. His imagery is sparse, typically references to hot Korean K-pop girls adorned in black metal makeup with the odd reference to a classic film or in-jokey clips from the very Youtube metal show hosts that his own show is in direct defiance of. This all gives it an insider’s feel; you have to know who those fags are for their appearances on Radio Free Innsmouth to be funny.

The magnitude of his taste doesn’t just lie in his knowledge of metal, but in the way that he understands metal as a genre that, despite its claims to the contrary, still exists in communion with other genres. Just take his recent, excellent three-part series on Kraftwerk. While the influence of the German electronic music pioneers is as vast as any act of the 1970s (industrial music, techno, synthpop, minimal wave and on and on), which the host acknowledges, Kraftwerk also has a special place in the lineage of black metal, in particular.

“Given that they were fairly instrumental in moving popular music away from [here he uses the album cover of big band jazz producer Louis Jordan with his music playing over it].” What he means is Kraftwerk conceptualized a new contemporary sound that wasn’t rooted in black American music.

So, this isn’t a metal chud that we’re dealing with here, nor is it anything resembling a gourmet coffee sipping hipster, either. Instead, Jiub is a genuine critic and historian who understands and loves the subculture of extreme metal for what it is, without having to sanitize it for the strictures of postmodern liberalism in the way that the hipsters so often do (Brandon Stosuy fuck you, Kim Kelly fuck you, etc.) Intelligent enough to place it in its own kind of art historical context, legit enough that he never crosses over into the territory of obnoxious pseud.

It’s great having a program dedicated to a particular form of art that has been with me since childhood, delivered by a guy who really loves it. He appreciates metal for what it is, racism and all. He understands that you can’t love a band like Arghoslent despite their racism, but that you have to acknowledge that part of your enthusiasm for such a band is in fact rooted in their racism. Metal’s appeal is borne of its defense of masculinity, ancient European values, strength, violence and evil. To pretend otherwise is, well, fucking gheyyyyyy. I applaud the work that Radio Free Innsmouth is doing.