Black Metal Through the Eyes of the Philologist: An Attempt to Define the Term Linguistically

The main purpose of the article is to present a new definition of an extreme music genre, namely black metal, based on the linguistic theory of prototypes. This necessity eventuates from its expansion, as a result of which the genre (specifically: its forms) is blowing up from within. In the face of diversity of black metal songs and the fact that all of traditional black metal’s main features could be invalidated by the opposing work of one of contemporary bands, a new, more capacious model of a definition is needed. The presented model is a prototypical categorisation derived from a postmodern linguistic paradigm