White riot

You know how it goes: you come across a new favourite band, one who somehow manage to combine classic hardcore punk with No Agey noise, Gang Of Four, Joy Division and goth; you enthuse about them in writing and also in person to all of your friends; and then you discover that they may be fascists.

This blog post accusing teenage Danes Iceage (not to be mistaken for Ice Age) of "chic racism" seems to have stirred up a lot of interest and comments for both the prosecution and the defence. It's even got to the point where one of their mothers has waded in (despite appreciating it's "not cool" to do so), to stand up for her offspring and his bandmates: "Iceage bandmembers from when they were 12, 13 years of age have been teargassed and beaten by the police while defending the 'Youth Cultural House' – and that battle included young people of all colors."

So what does the evidence against them amount to? Some potentially dodgy imagery of the sort favoured by Scandinavian white supremacists and far-right metal bands; videos featuring lots of people in Ku Klux Klan-style outfits; a professed admiration for Absurd, a neo-Nazi black metal band. While it's not enough to condemn them, you have to say that, even at that tender age, they should know better than to be playing with fire.

Of course, there is a tradition of bands without far-right beliefs appropriating far-right imagery and iconography. The aforementioned Joy Division, for example, took their name from the concentration camp brothels and suffered accusations of being neo-Nazis themselves. The Sex Pistols before them used the swastika to provocative effect, while Lemmy of Motorhead is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia.

So in a way what Iceage are doing - and the accusations they're facing - aren't really anything new. But even if it's only cheap posturing to be provocative rather than anything more serious (which I hope is the case, naturally), recent Scandinavian political and musical history would suggest that it's a very risky business to assume that that's how it'll be interpreted and understood.