Whitman's Compost: The Romantic Posthuman Futures of Cascadian Black Metal

Abstract

This essay draws parallels between the adaptation of the originally European genre of Black Metal in the USA in the 21st century and the transformation of European to American Romanticism about 150 years earlier. Black Metal has always been concerned with Romantic topics such as individualism, rebellion, irrationality, spirituality, nature, etc.; like Romanticism, this has also led Black Metal to politics of nationalism, elitism, and essentialism. American Cascadian Black Metal, however, espouses leftist ideologies paralleling those associated with the varieties of non-conformism in American Romanticism, foregrounding especially ecological issues. My essay is concerned with two bands in particular, Wolves in the Throne Room and Skagos. I argue that their lyrics invoke a sense of a futurity that parallels that of Walt Whitman's poems. They expand his philosophy of "compost" to include apocalyptic tropes, invest his largely optimistic view of futurity with contemporary issues of (un)sustainability and environmental (non)conservation, and imagine a posthuman future ecology.