Norway is the ancestral home of some of the darkest, loudest, and most frightening music in the world: black metal. (It’s way heavier than regular heavy metal.) That contingent of the Norwegian population is finally being represented in the political sphere…even if it doesn’t want to be.
The musician known only as “Fenriz” is a major figure in black metal. As half of the Norwegian duo Darkthrone, he’s mostly a drummer, but he’s also played guitar and sang for the band. Darkthrone has released more than a dozen albums, all of which have totally metal titles like Sardonic Wrath, Ravishing Grimness, Total Death, Under a Funeral Moon, and the forthcoming Arctic Thunder. Fenriz doesn’t live in a dungeon or on top of a mountain one would think a Norwegian metal star would reside. Nope: He has a home in Kolbotn, a quiet town of about 9,000 people just outside the Norwegian capital city of Oslo.
Earlier this year, political organizers in Kolbotn called Fenriz to ask if he’d be willing to put his name on a list of backup candidates for city council. Fenriz thought that this meant that he’d be a last minute backup should one of the real candidates drop out at the last minute. So, Fenriz allowed his name on the list (just because you’re metal doesn’t mean you can’t fulfill your civic duty). He didn’t think anything would come of it: “I said yeah, thinking I would be like 18th on the list and I wouldn’t really have to do anything.”
But Fenriz wasn’t a backup candidate—his name wound up on the ballot as a candidate to be a backup. This means that those in Kolbotn who checked his name on their ballot were voting for him to be an official backup councilman should some other city council member not be able to attend a meeting. So just to make sure that he didn’t get elected to that position, Fenriz did some anti-campaigning: He released a photo of himself, holding his cat, Peanut Butter, along with the message asking the people of Kolbotn to not vote for him.
The picture backfired. Fenriz is a celebrity, and in his photo he was holding a cat. Of course he wound up getting elected to the Kolbotn council as a “backup.”
“Basically, I have to step in when the usual people who go to the big meetings are sick or something. Then I have to go sit there and feel stupid,” Fenriz told reporters. Or, rather “Councilman Gylve Fenris Nagell” (his real name) told reporters.