"Mon gosier de métal parle toutes les langues":

Translations and Transformations of Baudelaire in Black

Metal Music

Helen Abbott, Caroline Ardrey

L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 58, Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 130-143 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2018.0010

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/688601

Access provided by Universitaetsbibliothek Frankfurt a.M (2 Jan 2019 04:17 GMT)

 “Mon gosier de métal parle toutes les langues”:
Translations and Transformations of Baudelaire
in Black Metal Music

W
Helen Abbott and Caroline Ardrey

HAT DOES BAUDELAIRE’S POETRY sound like? How do

other people make Baudelaire’s poetry sound? These two inter-
linked questions remind us that as poetry goes from the page to
performance, it is reliant on the voices and sounds of others. Baudelaire’s
poetry is constructed from sound patterns and thematic networks that afford
the text a particular set of characteristics and influence particular performance
genres. Attributes of Baudelaire’s poetry, pervaded by dark imagery, give rise
to distinctive performance responses that exploit alternative vocal and sonic
techniques. As Baudelaire makes other people—and objects—speak and
sound within his poetry, he invites us to explore the source and the nature of
these voices and sounds. In the verse poem “L’horloge,” 1 Baudelaire
famously makes the clock speak, calling it a “dieu sinistre.” The warning
voice of the clock lists all the things that the poet should remember, making
grandiose claims about its own impressive powers. In an off-hand hyperbolic
parenthesis, the clock proclaims that it is capable of speaking all languages:
“(Mon gosier de métal parle toutes les langues.).” The clock describes the
source of its voice as coming from its “metal throat,” using seemingly direct
language to describe its mechanism as it menacingly ticks “Trois mille six
cents fois par heure.” Yet this ‘metal throat’ of “L’horloge” takes on a different
hue when it is set against new contexts in which Les fleurs du mal poems are
reused and reworked. What do Baudelaire’s ‘sinister’ poems sound like in
these new contexts? How do other people make Baudelaire’s ‘sinister’ poems
sound? These two questions will be the focus of this article, which examines
settings of Baudelaire’s poetry in metal music genres.
Baudelaire’s use of the term “sinistre” is shaped by his interpretation of
“le mal” as the dark but enticing side of humanity, which today is widely
interpreted as the ‘gothic’ side of a poet who finds beauty in things that others
find dark. Other interpretations of Baudelaire’s dark side have been shaped by
shifting concepts of satanism. In the late 1880s, Paul Verlaine characterized a
dominant mode of reception of Baudelaire’s poetry that was shaped by a
satanism understood as “le haut et douloureux spiritualisme, l’exquisement
amère sensualité” by a wide reading public (“la masse de lecteurs”), thanks to

© L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2018), pp. 130–143

 HELEN ABBOTT AND CAROLINE ARDREY

the work of the then popular poet Maurice Rollinat whose Les névroses (pub-
lished in 1883) was heavily inspired by Baudelaire’s dark side.2 This mode of
reception marks the first in a series of phases of interpretation of Baudelaire’s
poetry. Where a late nineteenth-century readership focused on the satanic as a
spiritually-inflected aesthetic mode, more recent perceptions of Baudelaire’s
poetry, notably through musical settings, are shaped by fresh versions of a
satanism myth that is more overt in its counter-cultural rebellion.
Musical settings of Baudelaire’s poetry have played a key role in cement-
ing his ‘mythical’ status. Classical music’s interest in appropriating Baude-
laire’s words is well known, with famous mélodies such as Henri Duparc’s
renowned 1870 setting of “L’invitation au voyage” and Claude Debussy’s Cinq
poèmes de Baudelaire, composed in the 1880s. Baudelaire’s poetry has also
been taken up by many musicians in popular and alternative musical genres,
though this aspect of the poet’s reception history has often been overlooked. As
the analysis below uncovers, the ‘gothic’ aspects of Baudelaire’s poetry (and
the related perceptions of his persona) have sparked significant interest
amongst key cultural groups, manifested especially in rock and metal music
and over a wide international spread. Black metal music is one of a number of
extreme sub-genres of heavy metal music, which also includes death metal,
thrash metal, and doom metal. Although there is significant cross-over between
these heavy metal sub-genres, broadly speaking, black metal is characterized
by musical, performative, and thematic traits that include rapid tempi, scream-
ing and ‘death growl’ vocals, and an emphasis on satanic themes. Baudelaire’s
poetry has had a particular influence on black metal, which weaves his lan-
guage into lyrics concerned with satanic and apocalyptic themes. International
metal bands such as Gorgoroth, Necromantia, Rotting Christ, and Trans-
metal—all well known in the field of black metal—have set his poetry to
music, with examples from the 1990s to the present day. These Baudelaire set-
tings feed into an ongoing interest amongst sub-groups of popular and youth
culture in the key themes of death, satanism, and decay that are prevalent in the
poet’s œuvre, as evidenced by Patrick Eudeline’s 2005 book Goth: Le roman-
tisme noir de Baudelaire à Marilyn Manson.3
The relationship between canonical authors and others who reuse their
works in different adaptation contexts is always fraught, particularly when the
adapted work seems to be somehow far removed from a text’s original con-
text. However, as Robert Walser reminds us in Running with the Devil, heavy
metal musicians have long drawn on the work of canonical classical com-
posers. Their reuse of established works tells us something about metal’s rela-
tionship with cultural tradition in terms of creative design. Using the example

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of Johann Sebastian Bach, Walser asks, “if we don’t understand his influence
on the music of Ozzy Osbourne or Bon Jovi, do we really understand Bach as
well as we thought we did?” 4 In this article, we pose the same question
regarding Baudelaire and heavy metal, exploring the way black metal musi-
cians have appropriated Baudelaire’s words, and examining how his work is
opened up afresh by black metal settings. When black metal musicians appro-
priate Baudelaire for their own creative output, they exploit particular facets
of the poet-persona and his work. To understand how they do this, this article
will begin by exploring the thematic traits that make Baudelaire’s poetry par-
ticularly amenable to black metal. It will then go on to analyze how these
aspects have been foregrounded in four settings of “Les litanies de Satan” in
French and English. “Les litanies de Satan” (OC 1:123–25) offers a particu-
larly rich case study because it has become a reference text for experimental
and fringe musical genres. For example, avant-garde electronic composers
Ruth White and Diamanda Galás both set the poem to music in the 1960s and
1980s respectively, transforming Baudelaire’s poetry through electronic voice
distortion and experimental vocal techniques.5 Galás’ performance in particu-
lar has taken on a cult status, influencing other musical interpretations includ-
ing some by black metal bands.6
Whatever the musical style that emerges from setting “Les litanies de
Satan” to music, the way Baudelaire’s words are fused with music needs to be
examined under an appropriate critical lens. Kofi Agawu’s theorizations on
the semiology of song are a helpful starting point. Agawu notes that

the conjunction of two independent sign systems, music and words, creates a third, song. [...]
[T]he resulting alloy should be understood in a multiplicity of ways: how the resulting com-
pound structure signifies and how its two inputs signify, both singly and in conjunction. A
semiotics of song prescribes neither a text-to-music nor a music-to-text approach; its sole
requirement is that the enabling conditions of each approach be made explicit.7

Varied “enabling conditions” shape the different black metal settings of Baude-
laire’s “Les litanies de Satan” under consideration here. The four settings of the
poem differ in terms of language choice, performance techniques, and the way
they approach the fusion of words and music in song. A key focus for this
analysis is the role of the vocalist, who may be performing in a language that
is not his or her own, presenting the text in translation or using spoken-voice
techniques or highly distorted (and often inaudible) vocalizations of the text.
This focus on vocal techniques extends Agawu’s approach to the semiotics of
song which denies agency to the performer by considering song itself primarily
as a text or score with a “compound structure.” The “resulting alloy” of song

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is, in our view, never stable or permanent because the agency of the singer is
necessarily inscribed in the fabric of the song, resolutely and essentially a part
of its formation. The same words and music can always be performed in dif-
ferent ways, as the existence of numerous different settings of “Les litanies de
Satan,” and of sampled or cover versions, indicates. Our analysis recognizes
that, unlike many mainstream musical genres, the unstable relationship
between the “alloy” of words and music in black metal settings means that we
need to focus precisely on those instances where the poetic text is inaudible,
performed in a strange accent or suppressed altogether. These aspects are an
inherent feature of the black metal aesthetic, involving not just vocal tech-
nique, but also an encouragement to conceptualize otherness and alternative
ways of interpreting our relationship with the world.
Black metal is bound up with a mythology that draws on the darker
aspects of certain literary, cultural, and artistic traditions. Its themes typically
include spirituality and the occult: a Biblically-informed but anti-Christian
stance is characteristic of black metal bands. There are some obvious reasons
why black metal musicians, in particular, might have taken an interest in the
darker side of Baudelaire’s œuvre, in which he explores the relationship
between the lyric voice and the Devil. We might expect such musicians to
foreground the demonic and occult aspects of Baudelaire’s œuvre, tapping
into the poet’s mythologized ‘Satanic’ persona. This casting of Baudelaire as
an occult figure is taken only in part from his poetry; much of this poetic iden-
tity is a construct of his reception history. Casting Baudelaire as ‘other’—as
flâneur, melancholic or Satanist—is, however, to forget the multifaceted
nature of his poetic persona and to overlook the diversity of experience and
the experimentation that he brought to creative practice. Although “Les lita-
nies de Satan” in black metal music seems to play into one of the obvious
clichés surrounding Baudelaire’s reception, in fact the creative reception of
Baudelaire’ s poetry by other people does not always conform to expectations.

“Les litanies de Satan”

Of all known song settings of Baudelaire’s poetry, three poems appear most
frequently: “La mort des amants,” “Recueillement,” and “Harmonie du soir.”8
This trend in musical adaptations of Baudelaire’s poetry is borne out in clas-
sical art song settings; however, in the case of rock and heavy metal settings,
the distribution of poems is rather different. It is in rock, alternative, and
extreme metal genres that we find less common choices such as “Au lecteur,”
the heavily visual sonnet “Une gravure fantastique,” and the four “Spleen”
poems.9 This difference suggests that rock and alternative musical genres

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exploit different thematic agendas from those favoured by classical com-

posers. Of the thirteen song settings of “Les litanies de Satan” identified to
date, seven are performed by black metal bands, with lyrics in a range of dif-
ferent languages, which points to the popularity of the poem with musicians
in this particular sub-genre of extreme metal. Four of these settings will
receive particular attention in this article because of their linguistic common-
ality: two settings are in French, by Theatres des Vampires and Rotting Christ
(Italian and Greek bands, respectively), and two are in English, by Ancient
Rites and Necromantia (Belgian and Greek bands, respectively).10 The
remaining three black metal settings (which, for reasons of space, will not be
analyzed in detail in this article) are in Russian, Norwegian, and Spanish (by
Russian, Norwegian, and Mexican bands, respectively).11 The international
coverage of each of the bands—both geographically and in terms of language
choice—is significant. Among those groups taking on a provocative text by a
canonical French poet, there is not a single French band.
The poem “Les litanies de Satan” was first published in 1857, as part of
the first edition of Les fleurs du mal. Although the title of Baudelaire’s collec-
tion plays ambiguously with the dual meaning of ‘mal’ as both pain and evil,
the typical translation into non-Romance languages such as English (Flowers
of Evil) and German (Die Blumen der Bösen) suggests a general tendency in
Baudelaire’s reception to foreground ideas of evil, satanism, and moral
deviance in his work. Perhaps surprisingly, when Baudelaire was put on trial
for Les fleurs du mal on the grounds that some of the poems in the collection
constituted an affront to public decency, “Les litanies de Satan” was not
among the six poems that were censored. Through his direct address to the
devil in “Les litanies de Satan,” Baudelaire confronts the problem of evil.
Damian Catani argues that there are three different strands to the presentation
of evil in Baudelaire’s work, as identified by Walter Benjamin: satanism,
crime, and social marginalization.12 All three of these aspects are present in
“Les litanies de Satan,” albeit to differing degrees. Satanism is heavily fore-
grounded in the title, in the “O Satan” refrain repeated fifteen times, and in
the closing “Prière” in which the devil is named. In the sixth stanza, Baude-
laire also references those other aspects of evil, crime, and social marginaliza-
tion through a supplication to the devil on behalf of the “proscrit,” a figure
understood as both criminal and outcast. Yet this is a poem that also goes
beyond an examination of evil. “Les litanies de Satan” is inherently based on
translation and transformation, and it appropriates thematic, linguistic, and
structural traits from the Christian liturgy. The poem is made up of fifteen
pairs of alexandrines, in rimes plates, alternating with the refrain “Ô Satan,

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prends pitié de ma longue misère.” These verses are followed by a six-line

coda—a prayer addressed to Satan, also in alexandrines. On a structural level,
the poem has an incantatory quality because of the repeated refrain. Baude-
laire’s familiarity with, and ambivalence towards, Christian liturgy emerges
clearly in the way the refrain adapts the Kyrie Eleison. In the black metal set-
tings of Baudelaire’s poem, elements of religious chant re-emerge as an
important point of reference (especially in Necromantia’s and Rotting Christ’s
settings). The incantatory supplication of the refrain is not simply a subver-
sion of the Christian tradition as expressed through Baudelaire’s own
response to religion, but also a means to (re)integrate tradition into an alter-
native or non-mainstream creative imaginary. The appeal of Baudelaire’s text
for these musicians, then, is not just that it addresses and glorifies Satan and
evil, but that it does so in ways that hark back to long-held (and problematic)
spiritual traditions which, in turn, resonate with the black metal aesthetic.

Settings in French
French-language settings of Baudelaire’s poetry in black metal call into ques-
tion the relationship between language and cultural identity in performance in
a variety of ways. Neither of the singers performing the French-language set-
tings of this poem is a native French speaker, and the delivery of the French
text is heavily accented in both cases. In some respects, this alienates the text
from its Frenchness and canonicity, lending it a quality of otherness that
removes it from a stable cultural identity. Theatres des Vampires and Rotting
Christ exploit a different linguistic tradition, bringing the French text into
contact with their own cultural contexts.
Theatres des Vampires—Theatres des Vampires is an Italian black/
gothic metal band formed in 1994 and, while some of their songs appear in
their native tongue, much of the band’s output is in French and English. Their
choice of band name signals a preoccupation with vampirism, hinting at a fas-
cination with conventions of ritual and performance. The absence of diacriti-
cal features—in this case an acute accent and a circumflex—in the word “the-
atres” is an anglicism pointing towards the linguistic and cultural shifts that
characterize the band’s musical output. The group’s setting of “Les litanies de
Satan” appears as track 11 on their 2001 album Bloody Lunatic Asylum. Their
interest in nineteenth-century French poetry and its treatment of themes of
Hell and corruption is reinforced by the presence of track 3, “Une saison en
enfer,” which is a homage to Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poem of 1873. Although
typically seen as a black metal / gothic rock band, Theatres des Vampires also
draws extensively on a symphonic soundscape. Their setting of “Les litanies

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de Satan” is stylistically different from the other tracks on the album because
the poem is recited, in an incantatory style, over Beethoven’s Moonlight
Sonata. The track is therefore more a juxtaposition of words and music than
a fused “alloy” (Agawu) of the two components. Experiments with the inter-
section between classcal music and heavy metal are commonplace in sub-
genres of metal, although the way this link is achieved, through a superimpo-
sition of words onto music, with little apparent reference to common traits of
heavy metal (power chords, drums, thrashing bass), offers an alternative
approach to exploring the relationship between classical music (in Adornian
terms, high art) and heavy metal (low art). Theatres des Vampires’ super-
imposition of mid-nineteenth-century French poetry over early nineteenth-
century piano music, within the context of a black metal song, can be read in
light of what Walser has called a “discursive fusion” which crosses the “sacro-
sanct boundaries” between classical and popular music (xv). Walser considers
the interaction between classical music and heavy metal as a process of “defa-
miliarisation through cross-cultural juxtaposition”; it can also be read as an
act of inscribing permanence and stability into an ephemeral musical form
(xiv). Taking a staple of the classical music repertoire (which is written with-
out words) and appropriating it for other purposes is a common device in pop-
ular music. (Fauré’s Pavane is used, for example, by Little Mix and Britney
Spears.) What is particularly striking in this case, however, is the borrowing
not only from a musical tradition (German) but also from a literary tradition
(French), opening up a transnational and transmedial dialogue through this
word-and-music pairing that exploits otherness and alienation.
The theme of alterity lies very clearly at the heart of “Les litanies de
Satan,” as the exiled poet figure appeals to an unlikely saviour in the devil.
Theatres des Vampires’ song setting of Baudelaire’s poem thus plays on ideas
of otherness through the musical and linguistic elements of performance,
notably through the soft incantation of the text which is both disjointed and
‘othered’ by its performance in unusually accented French. There is limited
correlation between the rhythms of the female vocalist Sonya Scarlet’s spoken
delivery of the text and the regular pulse of the Moonlight Sonata underpinning
the words. The lack of correlation is heightened by a two-layered voice—the
audible spoken voice is anticipated by an almost inaudible whispered-voice
version of the poem, out of sync with both the main vocal track and its accom-
paniment. This rhythmical disjuncture contributes to the setting’s effect of
seeming different or other. The vocalist deploys a limited mid-range tessitura
for her spoken delivery, though the clarity of the words is distorted by this echo
effect. Moreover, to a native Francophone listener, the performance of the

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French text with an Italian accent creates a further unsettling effect, overtly
reinforcing how Baudelaire’s poem is mediated through another mouthpiece.
Scarlet opts to pronounce most of the latent final consonants, such as the “s”
on “angoisses humaines.”13 There are instances, however, where the liaisons
and/or pronunciation of a latent final consonant are technically incorrect, such
as including the final “t” of “la Mort” and the “s” on the end of the definite arti-
cle “les hauteurs,” which further disrupt the Frenchness of the text.
The band have also made some changes to the poem, notably omitting
every instance of the refrain. This structural omission makes a significant dif-
ference to the interpretation of the poem; from being a direct vocative expres-
sion in Baudelaire’s poem, in this song setting Satan is addressed as “toi,” “le
plus savant et le plus beau des anges,” and the “Prince de l’exil,” but is never
explicitly named (other than in the song title which is itself not sung). This
restructuring has a number of effects: first, the second-person pronoun “toi”
establishes a strong sense of proximity between the speaker and a devilish
figure who remains shrouded in mystery because he is not named. The
removal of the refrain also denies the poem the very characteristic that makes
it overtly ‘musical’ in its structural design; its suppressed musicality is
replaced by a well-known pre-existing piece of music, which bathes the text
instead in the programmatic tones of the sombre moonlight with which
Beethoven’s sonata is inextricably associated. Theatres des Vampires have
thus ‘othered’ the poem in multiple ways.
Rotting Christ—Appearing on their 2016 album Rituals, Rotting Christ’s
setting of “Les litanies de Satan” is the most recent black metal adaptation of
the poem. The album prizes linguistic diversity with songs in Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, French, English, and Sanskrit. There is a strong religious dimension
to the album, with almost all tracks discussing themes of God and Satan,
heaven and hell. In the original CD release of Rituals “Les litanies de Satan”
appears as track 4, standing between a song entitled “Elthe Kyrie” (Come
Lord), which invokes Christ as well as a number of the gods of Greek mythol-
ogy, and “Apage Satana” a perverted setting of The Lord’s Prayer, again in
Greek. This religious referencing, within an album focussed on satanism and
devil-worship, subverts Christian practices, directly reinforcing the satanic
nature of Baudelaire’s poem but in a way that undermines the spiritual, moral,
and psychological complexities of the poem. On the 2016 vinyl re-release the
order of tracks is slightly different, with “Les litanies de Satan” appearing as
track 5 on the B-side, in between “Apage Satana” and “O, For a Voice like
Thunder,” which questions the wrath of God. Like Theatres des Vampires,
Rotting Christ engage extensively with other people in their discography,

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from William Blake and Baudelaire to the Greek prog rock band Aphrodite’s
Child, weaving these into their aesthetic identity by foregrounding ideas of
satanism and the occult.
Structurally speaking, Rotting Christ’s setting of “Les litanies de Satan”
differs from the published version of Baudelaire’s poem in a number of ways.
First, the song ends at the ninth couplet—“Toi dont la large main cache les
précipices / Au somnambule errant au bord des édifices.” Rotting Christ does
not follow each couplet with the refrain, opting instead to repeat it three times
after the seventh and ninth couplets, reinforced by the repetition of “O Satan.”
The song unites the lyric voice and Satan against God and against the treach-
erous fate that, within the context of “Les litanies de Satan,” brought about the
downfall of this “plus beau des anges.” In ending the lyrics with the image of
Satan’s great hand which “cache les précipices / au somnambule errant au
bord des édifices,” the song refuses closure on a narrative-textual level.
However, Rotting Christ’s setting of “Les litanies de Satan” is also accom-
panied by a video, mostly in black and white, which presents an image of a
winged figure standing on a fiery mountain. This depiction, which invites us
to take account of the visual semiotics of performance, adds an additional
layer of interpretation to Baudelaire’s poem that goes beyond the truncated
lyrics and modified structure. As the text becomes inaudible in places,
drowned out by the thrashing guitars and synths, the visual comes into play
instead; the music video participates in the meaning-creation of the setting
because it also displays the poem text as subtitles, enabling the audience to
read what they cannot hear. This official lyric video also closes with an
acknowledgement that the poem is Baudelaire’s, clearly signalling the other-
ness of the text, as lyrics which are not their own.14

Settings in English
Other international metal bands opt to set Baudelaire’s poem in English trans-
lation, rather than French. In appropriating the French text through linguistic
transformation, both Ancient Rites and Necromantia signal a refusal to con-
form, privileging linguistic otherness.
Ancient Rites—Ancient Rites is a Belgian band, based in the Flemish
region of Brabant, and their song lyrics draw on a variety of languages and
linguistic traditions. Their song “Exile” is an English-language adaptation of
Baudelaire’s “Les litanies de Satan,” which appears as track 2 on their 2001
album Dim Carcosa. The online heavy metal resource Encyclopaedia Metal-
lum lists the band’s main themes as “paganism,” “satanism,” and “European
history,” which perhaps indicates why—of all Baudelaire’s poems—“Les lita-

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nies de Satan” appealed to the group as a source of lyrical inspiration.15 The

emphasis in Ancient Rites’ setting is placed on marginalization and the notion
of exile, rather than on satanism per se. In opting to use the title “Exile,”
Ancient Rites also signals that their use of Baudelaire’s poem interprets the
text through a particular lens for which the band uses only loosely translated
lyrics. The song in fact begins in French, citing the refrain twice before shift-
ing into English, sending the French text itself into exile. The emphasis on
exile is reinforced by the repeated exclamation “Exile! Exile!” at the bridge
section half-way through the track. The bridge section also introduces a new
refrain, “Oh Thou fallen angel of gloom, joyfully I join thy side / Even if this
means eternal fire, I embrace thy kingdom of night,” which is then repeated
three times at the end of the song. This remodelling of the refrain restructures
the poem, creating a bipartite song that relies on repetitive elements other than
the refrain itself. The song starts with symphonic synths, before the drums
enter, heralding a frenetic guitar solo that prepares the soundworld underpin-
ning the vocal entry twenty-two seconds into the song. In the first half of the
song, the vocalist Gunther Theys alternates between two different vocal
styles, performing one line in a clear, shouting tone and the other in a death
growl. This vocal technique distorts the human voice and obscures the words,
deviating from accepted norms of vocal production typically used in song to
convey the text. It is a performance of otherness and difference. The death
growl here has profound implications for the marginalized speaker/singer,
presenting a figure who petitions to Satan as, himself, exiled other.
The translation and re-formulation of Baudelaire’s poem in English also
establishes an uncertain relationship between the speaker and the devil, which
means that he does not straightforwardly identify with Satan. Ancient Rites’
reworking has recourse to archaic language, using the familiar second-person
pronoun “Thou” to refer to Satan, upholding a sense of intimacy created by
the informal “toi” in the poem itself while also privileging tradition over
modernity. The subversion of religious ideology is reinforced by the fact that
the English lyrics are also subversive, By refusing to translate Baudelaire’s
poem directly, Ancient Rites casts Satan as a conscious reprobate who is
reminded of his (social) exclusion in a mocking tone: “God only judges mild
/ Those who chant songs to his praise / Oh, Prince of Exile.” Later in the song,
Satan is described as “a patron saint of / Heaven’s rejected souls,” which calls
into question the nature of sainthood in ways that are inferred from, but not
directly present in, Baudelaire’s poem.
Theys changes vocal technique with each line, reinforcing an interpreta-
tion of the poem as enacting a dialogue or duel between good and evil or

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between Christianity and satanism. This alternation of vocal styles establishes

a dual-faceted nature to the vocalist’s persona and presents him as being,
simultaneously, self and other.16 It also establishes a strange relationship
between poetry and corporeality: through his vocal performance the singer is
both the body that hosts this errant soul, and himself, revelling in the precarity
of self-alienation. The shifts in vocal style also allow the new poetic voice (in
the voice of the singer) to inhabit the fringes of popular culture, albeit in a dif-
ferent way from Baudelaire’s poet-flâneur. This ability to slip into the guise
of the other—and to take on deliberately distorted voices such as the death
growl—distances the singing self from what is being said in the text/lyrics,
allowing the musical soundscape of distorted thrash and growl to take prece-
dence over clarity of diction and line.
Necromantia—Necromantia is a Greek band whose songs take inspiration
from subversions of orthodox Christian traditions. Necromantia’s setting of
“Les litanies de Satan” comes from the 1993 album Crossing the Fiery Path.
“Litanies de Satan” is the only song on the album that uses lyrics from another
source, and the vocals tend towards speech instead of the death growls used on
the rest of the album. Necromantia’s English-language reworking uses two
voices, which anticipate and echo each other at various points in the song. After
a short choral “Alleluia” chant, the song begins with a distorted guitar solo. The
first voice to enter is a whisper with a raw quality, anticipating the short burst
of death growl with which the song ends. The other voice is a spoken,
declaimed voice in accented English which is present for the majority of the
song. Screams and laughter are also used at various points to punctuate the song
and introduce the repeated direct address to the devil: “To thee, O Satan....”
Unlike Ancient Rites’ interpretation of the poem, Necromantia’s English-lan-
guage adaptation follows the words of the original text quite closely, although
they shift the position of the refrain. The ninth couplet is omitted from the trans-
lation, and lines 34 and 40 are moved, appearing only in the repeated lines after
the refrain. Lasting just over 10 minutes, this is a long track, which reuses much
of the textual and musical material to extend its canvas. In so doing, Necroman-
tia presents a complex reinterpretation of Baudelaire’s poem, interspersing sec-
tions of music-only interludes, and gradually increasing the intensity of the
vocal delivery through the shift from whispering and declamation to death
growl over fast-moving drum and guitar accompaniment to close the song.
Necromantia’s engagement with Baudelaire is not a one-off. They return
to Baudelaire almost fifteen years later with a song entitled “Litanies de
Satan: Act II—From Hell,” which appears as the final track on their 2007
album The Sound of Lucifer Storming Heaven. This second Baudelaire-

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inspired song uses musical and vocal features which are more typical of
extreme metal and stylistically in keeping with the rest of the album. On this
track, Necromantia makes extensive use of death growls and screaming
vocals throughout, which make the lyrics almost entirely unintelligible. In this
second word and music pairing, musical and sonic features take precedence
over textual-verbal ones, while in their first Baudelaire setting, the lyrics are
given prominence. The alternative reworking of Baudelaire’s poem by the
same band showcases the depth of Necromantia’s engagement with the text,
an engagement that is open to fresh interpretations at different points in time.

Conclusions
The voices of black metal may speak in many tongues and use a range of
vocal techniques, but each of the bands discussed in this article appropriates
Baudelaire as an established spokesperson for satanism, offering an updated
version of the nineteenth-century view of the latter as an oxymoronic form of
beauty. The aesthetic ideology of satanism resonates strongly with the black
metal scene because of its privileging of otherness. Just as the speaker of “Les
litanies de Satan” aligns himself with Satan as the “Prince de l’exil” and the
friend of “parias maudits,” so do these bands align themselves with Baude-
laire, presenting him as a kindred spirit and a champion of those marginalized
by faith, moral stance or aesthetic preferences. In engaging with the aspects
of Baudelaire’s work that resonate with the black metal aesthetic, these musi-
cians simultaneously carve out a space for themselves as other and develop a
collective community of engagement with the poet and his work. Black metal
treads a fine line between assimilation and alterity by exploiting the poetry of
a canonical writer so as to perpetuate the dialogue between sameness and oth-
erness by questioning the significance of tradition.
The different transformations of Baudelaire’s “Les litanies de Satan” point
to the continued and far-reaching significance of his work in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, across a range of languages and cultures. The ways
black metal bands engage with tradition establish Baudelaire’s place within a
range of culturally rich aesthetic identities, offering listeners a mythologized
poetic persona with whom they may themselves identify. The translations and
transformations of “Les litanies de Satan” in black metal music show the dif-
ferent kinds of interpretations that open up when words are set to music. In the
examples we have examined here, the bands have repositioned or suppressed
the refrain, altering its use as a repetitive structuring device and changing the
emphasis of the poem. In casting Baudelaire as other (and as a figure of other-
ness to whom they can relate), these settings often undermine the dualities or

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oversimplify the complexities that are central to his poetic œuvre and to its
reception, complexities that are reduced to a cliché of satanic rebellion fash-
ioned to cohere with black metal ideology. Theirs is not a permanent recasting
of Baudelaire as simply a satanic figurehead, but rather a repeated and reiter-
ated one, which reminds us that we need to be open to ways in which other
people have appropriated his work in other formats and genres.
Even one hundred and fifty years after his death, there is still much to
understand about Baudelaire and the implications of his poetic œuvre. The use
of Baudelaire in black metal is not a marker of innovation or originality, but
highlights the gradations of difference that are possible in setting a ‘sinister’
text to metal music. The language of black metal music itself is diverse, incor-
porating different approaches (including sampling classical music such as
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata) as well as retaining many of the common sty-
listic traits of a dark or threatening atmosphere and using heavy distortion of
both instrumental and (often spoken or growled) vocal lines. Baudelaire’s
own image of a metallic throat speaking all possible languages—as figured in
“L’horloge”—is transposed to new aesthetic contexts and soundworlds. On
the one hand, black metal settings of Baudelaire’s “Les litanies de Satan” may
seem to be obvious interpretations of his text, yet on the other, the variety of
stylistic decisions taken by each of the bands shows that Baudelaire’s poem
does not simply inspire other people to react to his language in the same way.
Baudelaire himself may have claimed in his analysis of Wagner’s music that
“la véritable musique suggère des idées analogues dans des cerveaux diffé-
rents.”17 What this analysis has demonstrated is that seemingly analogous
responses to Baudelaire’s poetry, through black metal music settings of the
same poetic text, generate subtly different aesthetic outcomes shaped by the
varied linguistic and cultural contexts in which they emerge. Black metal set-
tings of Baudelaire’s poetry resist categorization as straightforward alloys that
fuse words and music because of the distinctive vocal performative tech-
niques that they exploit, giving rise to a diverse and multi-layered Baude-
lairean soundtrack.

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Notes
1. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Claude Pichois, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975),
81.
2. Paul Verlaine, “Maurice Rollinat,” Œuvres complètes, vol. 5 (Paris: Vanier, 1905), 356.
3. Patrick Eudeline, Goth: Le romantisme noir de Baudelaire à Marilyn Manson (Paris: Scali,
2005).
4. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal (Mid-
dleton, CT: Wesleyan U P, 2013), 63.
5. For a detailed comparative reading of Ruth White and Diamanda Galás’s settings of Baude-
laire, see Helen Abbott, “Baudelaire and Electronica: Strange Voices in Ruth White’s 1960s
Experimentations,” Comparative Critical Studies, 12:3 (2015): 357–76.
6. Diamanda Galás’s performance has become a reference point for alternative settings of
Baudelaire’s poetry, with the band Ordo Templi Aeternae Lucis using her vocals over a dif-
ferent backing track in the first three minutes of their song “Litanies de Satan,” before shift-
ing to an extreme, thrash metal backing with death growl vocals.
7. Kofi Agawu, “The Challenge of Semiotics,” in Re-thinking Music, Nicholas Cook and Mark
Everist, eds. (New York: Oxford U P, 1999), 157.
8. The number of settings is confirmed by the extensive research collated in a new Baudelaire
Song database funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council 2015–19 AH/
M008940/1. The full dataset is scheduled for release in 2019 on www.baudelairesong.org.
9. For example, Rotting Christ, one of the bands examined in this article, includes the track
“The Four Horsemen” on its Rituals album, which is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s “Une
gravure fantastique.”
10. A schematic analysis of these songs is available online at https://www.baudelairesong.org/
data-tables.
11. A summary analysis of these settings by Black Obelisk, Gogoroth, and Transmetal is avail-
able online at https://www.baudelairesong.org/data-tables/.
12. Damian Catani, “Notions of Evil in Baudelaire,” The Modern Language Review, 102:4
(2007): 990–1007.
13. Diamanda Galás, another non-native French performer, also pronounces the “s” at the end
of the verb “régnas” (in the closing section of the poem which comes under the sub-heading
“Prière”).
14. Rotting Christ, “Les litanies de Satan” (official lyric video): https://youtu.be/ZGveqSjmz18.
15. Encyclopaedia Mettalum, https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Ancient_Rites/28.
16. In “Les foules,” Baudelaire himself characterizes the poet in the crowd as enjoying an
“incomparable privilège,” the unique ability to be “à sa guise [...] lui-même et autrui.
Comme ces âmes errantes qui cherchent un corps, il entre, quand il veut, dans le personnage
de chacun” (OC 1:473).
17. Charles Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris,” Œuvres complètes, vol. 2,
Claude Pichois, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 797.

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