One Year Later

Collected musings on running a metal club

The Internet is Not Real

The Black Metal Book Club exists in a few places online. We use Instagram for promotion, and Discord for discussion. Obviously Substack is in play as well. Meetup is what got us started, but my attention there has dwindled. We even have a website. However, none of these elements are what I'd consider the club itself. The club occurs every time we meet in-person. For that reason, I've started denoting our online followers as passive members and our attendees as active. Our subscribers here on Substack are more than appreciated, but I would consider them passive members.

The whole of followers, channel members, and subscribers are still valuable insofar as they are aware of the group and nonetheless help evangelize to potential active members, but at the end of the day we aren't advertisers (or influencers, as our namby-pamby verbiage of today calls them). We are musicians, collectors, enthusiasts, and writers. That requires that we actually get together and do something.

Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Discord would love for people to think otherwise. That's because it services their bottom line. The reality is that staring at your screen is about as productive as staring at the wall.

Loose Formats are Better

A lot have wondered about the name “Black Metal Book Club”. It's mostly a joke, but there is actually an origin to the name. I had recently acquired a copy of an album by A Forest of Stars, A Shadowplay for Yesterdays. This was a special issue of the CD release that came in a storybook case. As I amusedly thumbed through the pages, I found myself wishing that I had somebody to share it with, or even to discuss black metal with at all. I had been living in Savannah again for a couple of years but had yet to connect with anybody else of the same musical proclivities. I then decided that I would need to take the initiative to do so, and I set upon creating a black metal discussion group on Meetup. Silly black metal book fresh in mind, I decided to give it a book club format. Members would submit their favorite bands, and we would all spend the month listening to the associated discography. Thus, the Black Metal Book Club was born.

For the first eight months, we adhered to the book club format. We hosted at my favorite local watering hole, White Whale Craft Ales, where I had developed friendships with the staff. There, we were able to drink quality beer and play our music of choice. All was going well. By the eighth month, our numbers had grown and challenges emerged.

Firstly, wrangling together a large group of drunk people into a roundtable discussion is… challenging, to say the least. Some people got bored, some people hogged the floor, and, of course, some didn't even listen to the band of the month.

Secondly, it became apparent that the most impactful elements of the club were everything around the discussion format: the conversation, the learning, and the relationships. For that, I decided to drop the discussion format altogether in favor of simply hanging out, drinking beer, and listening to metal. Doing so also allowed us to move from monthly sessions to weekly, now known as Metal Mondays. Since then, the club is more lively than ever, and we all see each other enough to keep it fresh in everyone's mind. For myself, this weekly format is much easier to administer, even if it's more frequent.

Pulling back on the structured format also allowed room for more events, each of a focused topic. We have a record club at Two Tides Brewing on Sundays, and jam sessions on Tuesdays and Saturdays. This gives everybody a variety to choose from, based on their availability and their preference. When looked at altogether, we have something going on at least four days a week. Going from one or two events a month to around fifteen in the same timeframe has stricken me with complete awe. My first post on this blog mentions having hosted fifteen events in the span of eight months. I can’t imagine ever going back to meeting so scarcely. It really feels like this club is running itself now.

Embrace the Ridiculous

All-in-all, black metal is pretty stupid. It's a self-serious genre popularized by angsty idiots who thought people actually cared if they killed each other, killed themselves, or burned down churches. They changed nothing about the world we live in beyond giving us something to laugh at while listening to their surprisingly-good-while-intentionally-bad music. For that, there's no harm in us acting a bit ridiculous ourselves.

Many of us have had truly bad experiences in our lives, some even horrific. We count among us victims of torture, rape, and abuse. We have veterans. We have people of color, immigrants, queer folk, and other marginalized groups. None of us really asked for these experiences, unlike the pampered Scandinavian punks of yore, but we do our best to make the most of it. Sometimes that means being a bit ridiculous.

Our most usual outlandish behavior is simply playing our music loud and proud in local bars. We're lucky that the White Whale and Two Tides are so accommodating to us, as it's a regular occurrence that clientele walk in, hear our music, and turn right back around. Of course, we are consistently paying customers, so I do believe it's in their interest. However, other Metal Mondays have failed to really get off the ground for the same reasons. (Looking at you, Whitaker's - we would have been valuable clientele. Maybe not enough to keep the bar from going under, but who knows?)

Of course, there's also the corpse-painted pub crawls (corpse crawls, we call them) or all the… uh… sharp objects. There's the spike bats and lighting them on fire at neighborhood parties. The medieval weapons, skulls, and taxidermy set up at bars. The raiding of abandoned churches. The stand-offs with people who’d presume us Neo-Nazis. The hauling of boomboxes blaring blast beats down the sidewalk. The jam sessions that echo down the street. It’s all ridiculous, and all worth it. What matters is all it inspires in onlookers. One member's first encounter with the group was walking into our record club, during which I was adorned in war paint and far too many knives. He's been a steadfast member since — a valuable one at that, overflowing with musical and production talent, and great connections to boot. One moment of ridiculousness can go very far.

Embrace the Ridicule

You’re not going to act out the way we do without pissing off a few cowardly nobodies. They don’t matter individually, but the optics of how the matter is handled do matter. This goes doubly for preserving the belligerent spirit of black metal.

The bar crawls dressed as various spooks have earned us some delicious hate in the cesspit of lonely, pseudointellectual losers otherwise known as “reddit”, which may be my favorite case of our group being ridiculed. Never engage the halfwit horde directly, but at least harness their hate. To this day, the most traffic we’ve ever achieved on this blog in one day came from redditors piling in to learn more about us. Of course, most of them are simply looking for ammunition with which they can make themselves feel better about their pathetic existences, but a few may actually like what they find.

Of course, an occasional sad sack on Instagram wanders into our comments for an attempt at bullying our members. My personal policy on this is to never block them, but to make them block us. I’ve always seen blocking as something of a cowardly move. What’s more, it’s not really in the spirit of black metal to turn tail and hide. So whenever some idiot appears in our comments, I reply in as provocative a manner as possible and lure them in to replying. Rinse-and-repeat, with increasing belligerence on each cycle. Sometimes, I go to their page and mirror their behavior. Eventually, they get exasperated and block us, after which, I clean up their comments on our posts. To this day, we have never blocked anybody harassing our group, but we have been blocked several times.

Rebuke Power

In my time in the corporate world¹, one concept that I’ve seen proselytized more than practiced is the idea of servant leadership. (I have seen it practiced before — just rarely.) It’s a disarming concept to believe that a higher-up is a servant to you and not vice versa, but it doesn’t change the experience in any meaningful way. Unlike a business, a club is actually conducive for such a concept, because everyone participates in a club for some sort of benefit. The role of the organizers of a club is to ensure that everybody continues to benefit from their membership.

A club works best when one person does not have all the power. At times, it’s advantageous for the group to have a person or persons having the final say on big decisions, but in the day-to-day sense, everyone gains the most when certain responsibilities are left to the most able or willing. This ensures that those responsibilities are done to the fullest, improving the quality of the club for all. The added benefit for the organizers is that they aren't spreading themselves too thin.

This is largely why I have passed off responsibility for some of our events. Jam sessions are handled by a member who had the space for gear, the desire to keep the sessions going, and trustworthiness for the responsibility. The torch for our record club is being carried by the most avid participant — the one with the most motive to keep it going. I already have a few members chosen to hold down Metal Mondays in the event that I can’t make it.

Self-Publish, Hire Your Friends

The Black Metal Book Club relies on very little for it to continue. There are certain elements that rest in the hands of large companies but none that are essential. As mentioned before, our group chat is hosted on Discord and our social media on Instagram. Sure, if any of these sites went out, there’d be some confusion and difficulty, but these platforms aren’t what make the club. If we really needed to, this club could exist solely through word of mouth and phone calls.

In contrast to the services we use, our website was built by me and cloud-hosted on Digital Ocean. No Wix or Squarespace. No Wordpress. If Digital Ocean were to implode overnight, we could simply move along to another cloud provider and keep it going. So long as the website is in place, we have a mouthpiece for reaching anyone with an internet connection.

Everything else about the club can be done in person. Clubs are people. They aren't screen names, profiles, emails, or statistics. Followers are not friends, and a “like” isn't an action. Get away from the phones and the feeds, and dive into a hobby or craft of your own. Afterwards, get out and meet those who do the same. You’ll find that everyone has their own skill to bring to the table, and once enough are in a room together, you’ll have a means to accomplish things that you never would have been able to on your own. In regards to the club, we not only have enough talent to start at least a few bands, but we could likely get our own production company off the ground. (All in due time, of course.)

Continuing to lean on businesses for something a friend could do only gives up your power to do things the way you’d truly want. Once you have effective people around you of a like mind, the empowerment such a network creates is a unique force. It’s in such a network that you'll find your real friends. If your experience is anything like mine, you might find a family there as well.

1. For those unaware, the intersection of data analysis and software development is my professional wheelhouse. You should be seeing this cropping up in some posts very soon.