Folklore as a Resistance Identity Tool in Extreme Metal: case of Latvian pagan band Skyforger
Creators: name: Daugavietis, Jānis
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: pagan metal
extreme metal
folk metal
folklore
Latvia
post-soviet

description: Abstract [submitted]
The use of folklore in Latvian professional music has been present since its beginnings in the 19th century (Klotiņš, 2020). In different times and political regimes, authors of academic music have turned to Latvian folk songs for various reasons, but one of the most important was always the work of constructing and nurturing ethno-national identity, while in regimes unfriendly to this identity (during the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union), it was also an instrument of masked resistance (Braun, 1983; Kudiņš, 2020). One of the strongest subcultures of cultural resistance in late socialism was the so-called 'folklore movement', which set as an ideal the maximally 'authentic' performance of folklore (Klotiņš, 2002; Muktupāvels, 2016). In the mid-1990s, the post-Soviet Latvian extreme metal underground scene saw the emergence of Skyforger, who are now recognised as one of the classic beginners of the pagan / folk metal genre. What are the reasons that led metalheads to turn to a use of specific religion – paganism – when a secular and highly anti-religious state collapsed? How to understand and interpret this turn to 'a regressive utopia with a strong religious component' (Melucci, 1980), at a time when free market and neoliberal ideologies and practices are beginning to dominate the post-Soviet space? Statistically analysing data from 'Encyclopedia Metallicum', Deena Weinstein found that pagan / folk metal genre groups have the highest proportion in northern European and post-Soviet regions (2014). This suggests that the identity created through folklore served as a symbolic resistance of metal musicians from these relatively deprived regions to the new regime – the expansion of the neoliberal market. The empirical material of the paper consists of semi-structured interviews with band founding members (2019-2020) and other published and unpublished archival materials.
Keywords: folklore, pagan/ folk metal, post-soviet, Skyforger, Latvia
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