Devil Is Fine, Devil Is Kind: Slave Spirituals, Satanic Black Metal, and Cultural Appropriation in the Music of Zeal & Ardor

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between cultural appropriation, musical protest, and African American history, as foregrounded in the music of avant-garde metal band Zeal & Ardor. Under the leadership of mixed-race Swiss-American multi-instrumentalist Manuel Gagneux, the band gained prominence in 2016 for combining the influences of Satanism and Scandinavian black metal with African American spirituals and blues. Such a combination has allowed Zeal & Ardor to creatively engage the violence of African American historical experience and sonically and conceptually explore the possibilities of an alternative account of African American experience under the influence of individualism and self-determination as promoted in Satanic philosophies. This proposition becomes complicated, however, when the Satanic worldview espoused in Scandinavian black metal articulates not only an aggressive critique of Christianity, but also, in a number of instances, the promotion of white supremacist and national socialist worldviews. The resultant combination of these clashing influences is a complex interlinking of musical traditions and ideological positions through which Zeal & Ardor explores cultural appropriation as a form of protest, and ultimately embraces jarring juxtapositions and messy fusion as a necessary mode of artistic expression amid the racial tensions and culture wars of the early twenty-first century.