Last week, rapper JPEGMAFIA posted a photo of himself on Instagram with the artist formerly known as Kanye West. Other than JPEG’s own tormented relationship with Ye, metalheads were quick to point out that West was wearing a Burzum shirt. Because one way to make your lackluster apology to the Jewish community feel even more hollow is by having the face of an antisemitic murderer splashed across your chest.
For those blessedly unaware of the reactionary ghouls lurking in heavy metal’s most rancid corners, Burzum is an infamous Norwegian black-metal band fronted by Varg Vikernes, a pagan neo-Nazi and convicted killer whose early artistic contributions to the genre have long been overshadowed by his virulently racist, antisemitic, white-supremacist views, which he shares freely via his blog. After serving nearly 15 years of a 21-year sentence for first-degree murder and arson, Vikernes was released from prison and moved to France, where he has devoted himself to releasing terrible ambient albums under the Burzum moniker and continuing to spread his hateful views. In 2014, he was arrested for “inciting racial hatred†against Jews and Muslims, and he counts Norwegian neo-Nazi mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik among his admirers. In short, he’s a real piece of garbage, and Burzum’s legacy as a musical project is inextricable from his own as a racist hatemonger. (JPEGMAFIA had the right idea on his 2014 track “ALL CAPS NO SPACES†when he said, “Heard you like Burzum / Bitch, not me! … I heard you fucking metalheads looking for some beats / I wish Varg would come to B’more, we gon’ see …â€)
Given Ye’s own ugly history of antisemitism, it’s hard to chalk all this up to a new appreciation for black-and white graphic tees. Burzum is about as well-known as it is possible to be for a black-metal band, but you can’t exactly buy one of their shirts in Walmart or in whatever high-end boutiques Ye patronizes. In order to acquire one, you’d need to go out of your way to find it. Plus, in 2016, Ye appeared on Gucci Mane’s “Pussy Print,†which samples Burzum’s “Rundgang um die transzendentale säule der singularität†(taken from 1996’s Filosofem), so he certainly can’t claim ignorance like other artists who’ve made similarly boneheaded sartorial moves. We can also add the cover of Vultures, Ye’s upcoming album with Ty Dolla $ign, to the rapper’s likely Burzum fandom. The artwork is unnervingly similar to that of Burzum’s 1992 self-titled album and is based on Paysage de tombes, a landscape painting by 19th-century German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, whose work was associated with nationalism and Nazism during the 1930s (Hitler was a fan).
So why is Ye, a born-again Christian, so enamored with the work of a neo-Nazi church-burner who’s been dropping the N-word in interviews since the ’90s? And why is he so determined to let us know about it? Considering Kanye’s growing list of antisemitic statements — his DEATH CON 3 tweet, his “I love Hitler†moment, his decades-long fascination with Nazis — the most obvious explanation is the most distasteful: that he’s a genuine fan of everything Burzum represents.
Meanwhile, Vikernes is not interested in linking with his new high-profile fan at all. When his followers on Twitter alerted him to the photo, he dismissed it with a cold “I don’t know her,†typing, “I know very little about him or what he says or does, and I kind of have very little incentive to ‘find out.’ it is better to spend time on something more fruitful.â€
If Ye is still planning that rumored 40-minute antisemitism-apology video, he’s certainly picked a weird way to tease it.