Hunter Hunt-Hendrix - Epilogue lyrics

1. Black Metal represents the self-overcoming of Counterculture and the rise of Aesthethics. 2. The Aesthethic could be a third modality of art alongside the comic and the tragic. Neither saccharine nor ironic, concerned neither with ineffable truth nor the all-too-obvious. It would be a directly neural art fostering joy, health, resonance, awakening, transfiguration and courage. 3. The Aesthethic is aesthetic, ascetic and ethical. 4. The ancients identified the True, the Good and the Beautiful. After the dust settles, and the work of modernity and postmodernity is done, and the divisions between high culture, ma** culture and counterculture have been obliterated, what is left? A single, shining Culture which is True, Good, and Beautiful. 5. In the age of information culture has traveled down from the superstructure into the base. Stripped of coercive power long ago, culture has now been granted unprecedented economic force, which enhances its spiritual power, power over minds and hearts. The question remains of what its function should be. 6. The murder of Euronymous by Varg Vikernes appears as the founding gesture of the tradition of black metal. In fact, it is a mere origin myth, foreclosing the real founding gesture. The real gesture, though it is less notorious, is the suicide of Dead. Compare Cobain “I betrayed the counterculture” to Dead, “I betrayed myself to the counterculture”. Dead's d**h secretly inaugurates the birth of black metal and the d**h of counterculture as such. Just as the absence of Dead's voice haunts De Mysteriis, so Attila's recent return to Mayhem signifies that we are ready to explore the implications of Dead's suicide. 7. Aesthethics is a resurrection of the aura and an affirmation of the power of meaning to mean.