Black metal, one of the most extreme subgenres of metal, has been a part of Turkish underground culture since the early 1990s. Since the genre’s inception in Europe during the 1980s and particularly the 1990s in Norway, its esthetical and lyrical focus has revolved around blasphemy, satanism, violence, and a critical stance towards Abrahamitic faiths. Despite this, it was not until the mid-2000s that references to Islam started to emerge within the Turkish black metal scene cultural production. This presentation will focus on why this change has occurred.
Douglas Mattsson (Södertörn University, SE)
Douglas Mattsson is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Religious Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden, and a board member of the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS). He has held senior scholarships from the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul and the Orient Institute in Istanbul, for his research on the Turkish black metal scene. He is a prolific writer and has published many academic articles on the Turkish black metal scene, amongst his most recent publications is “Spreading VX-Gas over Kaaba: Islamic semiotics in Turkish black metal” in the anthology The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Turkey (2022) and “The Enemy Within: Conceptualizing Turkish Metalheads as the Ideological ’Other’”, in Living Metal: Metal Scenes Around the World (2022) together with Dr. Pierre Hecker.
