THE MEN WHO STOOD BEFORE ME on the stage looked like warriors that had just come up from the Underworld. Their leather vests were cracked and aged. They wore chains and collars around their necks etched with the sigils of demons carved into them.
Their faces were hidden beneath layers of white paint. Lines of coal surrounded their eyes and lined upside crosses on their foreheads. Their mouths were painted in eternal scowls. They wore their hair long, covered in dust, so that in their entirety they were no other colors but black and white. Behind them, incense burned from the tops of giant sheet metal crucifii, turned upside down.
The band logo was emblazoned on a sheet of red velvet: a black and white pentagram entwined by a horned serpent. I was lost in the mass of the metal show before me, witnessing the work of the priests of Satan.
Since I was 16 I have been going to black and death metal shows all over New England. Themes of death, decay and Satanism are redolent at these events as are, strangely enough, brotherhood, equality and the search for love. In that manner, these events are no different from any other.
The men on the stage are the vocal pieces of emotion, of rebellion and integrity. Conductors of ceremony to the forces of darkness, they are like uncles to me. They have raised me emotionally and aesthetically, providing me with an arena to explore my loner side, while at the same time supplying me with the images of successful rebels; an image that a starving outcast like myself needed to survive the onslaughts of conformity that many young people are bombarded with throughout their upbringing.