Burzum ended black metal. While this statement will be protested by those many who participate in black metal "in form" and not as an active movement of art toward change, the evidence is overwhelming. Burzum set a new level of musicality and thought which others couldn't surmount. It was a challenge to all future black metal to join it at this new level, and since most people lack this capacity, they were revealed to be hangers-on and not innovators. The new standard of Burzum separated sheep from shepherds, leaders from followers, artists from scenesters. Any band that came after Burzum was judged by how well it stood up to the power and honesty of the music and ideas of Burzum.
After all, black metal was a movement against modern society and its lack of value, in theory. The founding bands like Burzum, Immortal, Emperor, Darkthrone, Enslaved, Gorgoroth, Ildjarn and Mayhem upheld a Romantic vision of a more primal time: the meaning found in conflict, the beauty of nature, the secondary importance of comfort toward epic achievement and conflict, a desire for a less plastic and democratic time. They unconsciously expressed what many in modern society feel, which is that humanity has domesticated itself and is comfortably breeding idiots and parasites through the wealth of its technology and fossil fuels and global domination. Capitalism and democracy are card-shuffling that redistribute wealth among those low-minded enough to be fascinated by it, the implication goes, and the Crowd is always present with its desire to tear down the independent thinkers and leaders and replace them with "safe" ideas and institutions for the education of more people of specialized ability but no leadership prowess.
Those who came after this initial wave, with a few exceptions like Graveland and Absurd and Averse Sefira, were those who thought more like modern society. They saw black metal as a riff style, a clothing style and a series of attitudes one could repeat like dogma. Hail Satan, burn churches, worship darkness and hate all humanity... and keep on drinking beer, watching TV, going to pointless jobs and doing nothing about the problem. This was the face of the
Crowd. They saw no reason to change society as it is, or even change themselves, but wanted to be "part of" the black metal movement so they could have an identity to show their friends, a reason for living, an accessory on top of a normal life which never considered the "dangerous" Romantic idealism of black metal.
It is not like black metal is unique in this regard, for it is only the latest of many Romantic movements in art. Romantic art sidesteps moral questions in favor of a worship of power and beauty and the satisfaction of the individual in intangible and ephemeral achievements, like moments of contemplating natural or ancient beauty. Romantic artists turned from the control structures of Church and State to look inward for meaning, seeking a correspondence between their feelings and the mechanism of nature. They were heretics, at first, but over time their words took on new meaning as the continuing degradation of European/American culture turned these societies into industrialized nightmares of ugly cities, boring jobs serving mass tastes, void culture and directionless, anti-creative "consumers" who poured into any new region with no regard for natural beauty, tore down the trees and left concrete and endless stores catering to the lowest tastes imaginable.
This was the challenge black metal offered, and Burzum stated most explicitly, and this separated those who liked black metal into the ones who understood it and those who imitated it, much as happened with death metal (a genre of more modernist Romanticist, emphasizing the importance of personal mortality in reducing the power of false idols like money, religion and social prestige). In this black metal was a further development of the ideas that had followed metal since its inception with Black Sabbath as a revolution against the idea that hippie ethics could make society "safe" through love and peace, and redirect us from our path to doom. Hippie idealism was after all mostly a restatement of the liberal democratic principles that engendered revolutions in America and France and Russia, albeit from the viewpoint of bored middle class kids who saw a future of corporate jobs and suit-wearing obesiance as not only tedious but destructive. However, they failed to out-think the philosophy that brought about this existence, and instead repeated its dogma in a new form, which explains why so many embraced the corporate lifestyle after a token decade of protest.
In its most primitive formulation, metal is a worship of power and the beauty that can be found in darkness, as exemplified by its distorted chords strong together in melodies which rise from chaos to order. It is esoteric and occult in that it does not believe the world can be neatly divided into public categories of good and evil (consonant/clean versus dissonant/distorted), and instead pursues the course of what is right in meaning as defined by a symbiosis between humans and nature. This collaboration occurs both in practical terms, and in that most amorphous of descriptions that covers "spirit," meaning that we feel healthiest when our thoughts are arranged in patterns that are coherent with those in nature. This sense of well-being is based upon having both a realistic view of the world, and a sense of striving for an ideal regardless of the costs (suffering/mortality), in contrast to the modern state ideal and the Judeo-Christian ideal which holds that avoiding suffering and death for the greatest number of people is the greatest good.
This sense of striving, and the warlike but sensitive value behind it that corresponds to the ancient European concept of vir, or the virtue of having intuition that knows when to nurture and when to prune both plants in nature and human beings, burst forth in the form of black metal after years of lying dormant under the influence of the Cold War, civil rights and myriad political fears. As the only popular music that still upheld ideas outside of humanist morality, and the only one to oppose the hippie sensibilities upon which all rock since the 1960s excepting punk hardcore and metal have been built, metal naturally branched to stay ahead of its mainstream emulators. After speed metal sold out and became whining about high school, and death metal converted itself from a forboding genre of mortal warning to a clubhouse for idiots chortling out gore lyrics, black metal rose as a more potent antidote to the modern mental virus.
Like his hero Tolkien, Kristian Vikernes desired to create art that "awakened the fantasy of mortals" and joined the ancient spirit of vir with modern knowledge. Artists in European society emerged from historians who coded their verses so as to both remember the past and warn of present dangers by making that wisdom "poetic," or appealing to the emotional state in humanity which loves life and wants a meaningful experience; art does not just warn, but it portrays the path between dangers as a great adventure which can culminate in even higher satisfaction. Burzum upheld this vision in both lyrics and music, throwing down a challenge which those who did not share this vision not only could not master, but did not understand. This was the ending of black metal, in that its first generation had come full cycle from the beginnings of a vision to its fulfillment, and it remained to be seen whether newer generations could carry this on.
In many ways, Burzum also ended the early era of metal by bringing the initial concept of Black Sabbath from a rough offshoot of rock to different ideas to a fully developed vision that had more in common with the ancient philosophers such as Socrates and Arminius than it did with the modern logic of rock bands. Modernity, after all, is the idea that we can control people externally much as we use technology and Christian morality; metal's Romanticism is the opposite principle, which suggests that we must look within for meaning to control ourselves, and that those who cannot... might not only be extraneous, but destructive in their passive tendency to curdle into
Crowds that demand
vengeance against their superiors in the name of "freedom" and "liberty," which are thinly disguised pleas for a sharing of the wealth from those who create it to those who cannot unless instructed by creators. Burzum brought metal from being a mainstream genre which disliked modern society to being an outlaw genre completely opposed to it.
When we speak of the significance of Burzum, it is this change we refer to: Burzum legitimized metal by making it an artistic genre with a unique statement in a world full of popular culture repeating essentially the same thing. The modern mythos is that of the Crowd, or individuals united together to preserve their equality so they may partake in the dream of wealth that modern society represents. The problem is that modernity cannot control itself, and threatens to consume the world with selfishness, and only a few (who are not of the Crowd) can understand an opposition to something that like a poisoned gift is on the surface good. Who could be against everyone having life their way, with freedom and equality and opportunity for all? Burzum suggests that not only is that vision practically unstable, it is also bad for our spirit.
Through this vector we see what makes Burzum and metal music distinct from other genres. Individuals, depending on ability, view life as one of two extremes: either it is a continuity ("When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see reality as it is, infinite") between human ideals and a natural world, or we relapse into being individuals alone with only our comforts and desires. We feel best when given a chance to help others and do creative, positive things, but in us there is also a fear that engenders this relapse, by which we lack the confidence to do more than please ourselves and develop a masturbatory ideology of individual freedom and equality to justify it. Some have said there was perhaps no legitimate protest movement of the generation that matured in the late 1980s, but the truth is that it was both a new kind of protest movement and its most ancient form: black metal was art that stood for the continuity principle, and not the shallow individualism of modernity.
Many of course will claim that these assertions are mere fantasy of the author's mind, but looking practically, we can see that the ancient Greeks and ancient Germans upheld a similar vision and that thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Ted Kaczynski have resurrected it in a modern time. We know -- going about our daily lives in ugly cities full of tedious tasks -- that there is something afoot here which is wrong, on some level which is invisible beneath the potential of personal profit, the empowerment of clueless millions, and the new technologies we see. It forms a sublimated dread with which we live daily. We sense that this way of life will not turn out well, but we lack a tangible reason to oppose it, a justification. Black metal cut past the waves of this neurotic confusion and found a single metaphor for our desire, which is that of the lonely spirit desiring a more "real" existence than the plastic world offers, and Burzum crowned this vision with an articulation that remains popular to this day. It is hard to find a greater importance than this in any genre, or a voice more clearly heard by the generations with which it grew, and the hope of better future it suggests.