It is quite shocking that there are still some black metal bands who haven’t been greatly confronted about their nazi tendencies even 30 years after, but that seems to be the case with Impaled Nazarene, one of the bands with the vilest lyrical content ever in metal music, full of homophobia, racism, misogyny, glorification of nationalism and nazism, anti-leftism and direct calls to violence to minorities and immigrants. In the past weeks, there was a call for the cancellation of Impaled Nazarene at the Eindhoven Metal Meeting which was signed by many people, until the venue Effenar which hosts the festival decided to indeed cancel the band. But this was followed by texts from both the venue and the festival (which of course directly supported the band and protested against the cancellation) mentioning misplaced cliches about “artistic provocation” and “challenging conventions” and in turn blaming local media and people on social media for “not conducting thorough research“, “misinformation” and being too fast to condemn the festival, which is supposedly all-inclusive and LGBTQ-friendly values.

It’s obvious that all this rhetoric is nothing but defensive reactions of some organizers that clearly knew what kind of band they had invited, but did not expect to be confronted about it. After all the festival states that the band “has previously performed at Effenaar multiple times without any complaint“.

So the problem is not that they were not familiar with the band, but that some people started caring. Of course, the focus was on Impaled Nazarene‘s known anti-gay hateful song “Zero Tolerance” which famously states that “you fucking homo boys, your time has come, and if you are a lesbian, you still got a cunt to rape” a song that Impaled Nazarene apologists try to present like a kind of adolescent mistake. But even a cursory look at the lyrics of the band shows a multitude of songs that contain misogynistic rape songs such as “Something Sinister” and “Contempt” (from Pro Patria Finland), many songs with homophobic and Aids-phobic content (“Zero Tolerance“, “Cancer“) and also songs with some not so subtle hints towards racist violence, such as “Ghettoblaster” which its calls towards genocide and “kill them all before they kill you” (in fact, in a 2011 performance Mikka Luttinen in an introduction to the song used the opportunity to talk about immigrant areas in Finland, making it obvious that this is a racist song that calls for violence against immigrants) and “Cancer” which mentions that “you think you have samba in your blood, In fact, you have H.I.V.“. Not to mention the random nazi shoutouts in the style of “SS Law”, “SS control” and stylized “Heils” in Ugra-Karma, the borrowing of Boyd Rice’s “Total War“, not to mention the also well-known anti-communist and anti-leftist songs. As a bonus, according to some reports,s the singer of Impaled Nazarene was seen doing a nazi salute in a previous Eindhoven Metal Meeting.

 

It’s mentioned in the festival’s announcement that “the band has made a point of challenging and offending basically everyone“, but it’s pretty obvious that this is a lie. Impaled Nazarene only seems to have an issue with gay people, minorities, and leftists while also being fiercely nationalist, elitist and misanthropic, as if all these aren’t the exact building blocks of fascism. In fact, they seem to like to offend everyone EXCEPT racists, fascists, bigots and misogynists. It’s as if some humour and nihilism/satanism cancel all the above cause heavens forbid, fascists can’t have a bit of fun, right? But what this band truly believes and stands for can’t be hidden behind their “apolitical” stance and self-presentation as some kind of transgressive provocateurs. It’s pretty evident when they’re talking seriously. “To create an elitist world, for we have given the power. And we will exterminate”.

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