“Pissing on the long dead corpse of an irrelevant genre” may have been a more appropriate title for the lecture I attended last night at the Scandinavian House.  Patrizia Mazzuoccolo, the moderator for “A Blaze in the Northern Sky: Norwegian Black Metal & the Culture that Spawned it“, went an hour over her scheduled time, and discussed the legacy of black metal in a way that made me think of a community college T.A. falling down a k-hole — except with far less interesting results.

In the two hours I spent hearing her babble and generalize about Norwegians being “extreme” and the “awesome” church burnings that are synonymous with bands like Mayhem, Burzum and Emperor (I kinda agreed with her on that), I realized I haven’t actually bought a true Norwegian black metal album in a few years, and to be honest, I’ve had my fill of hearing about the whole thing.  Walking out of the Scandinavian House, I thought of taking a magic marker to a white t-shirt and writing:  “I wasted 2 hours of my life at a black metal lecture and all I got was to see Mortiis via Skype.”