According to Necrobutcher, Mayhem's bass player: "It wasn't anything to do with the way Kiss and Alice Cooper used makeup. Early vocalist of Mayhem Per "Dead" Ohlin started wearing it in the late 1980s. Early corpse paint was meant simply to highlight an individual's features and make them look " dead."īands of the early Norwegian black metal scene used corpse paint extensively. However, Necrobutcher insists that his band Mayhem was the first to use corpse paint and credits the band's singer Per "Dead" Ohlin with coining the term. Brazilian band Sarcófago also pioneered the look, being dubbed by Metal Storm magazine as the first band with "true" corpse paint. Other groups soon followed suit, including Hellhammer's later incarnation Celtic Frost. Per "Dead" Ohlin was the first to explicitly associate stylized face paint with an attempt to look like a corpse according to Mayhem drummer Jan Axel "Hellhammer" Blomberg. In the 1980s, Hellhammer and King Diamond of Mercyful Fate (who used face paint similar to corpse paint as early as 1978 in his band Black Rose) were among the early metal groups to use corpse paint. On seeing shock rock pioneer Arthur Brown performing his US number two hit "Fire" in 1968, Alice Cooper states, "Can you imagine the young Alice Cooper watching that with all his make-up and hellish performance? It was like all my Halloweens came at once!." Later that decade, shock rock and heavy metal influenced punk rock bands like the Misfits and singer David Vanian of The Damned. The earliest rock groups to wear makeup similar to corpse paint included Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Arthur Brown in the 1960s Secos & Molhados, Alice Cooper, Kiss and guitarist Zal Cleminson of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band in the 1970s whose makeup, colorful clothes and menacing demeanor evoked the evil clown trope. Outside of black metal, face-painting and black and white makeup has been used by a variety of other public figures such as shock rock artists (notably Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper, members of Kiss, and members of the Misfits) and professional wrestlers (e.g. Other colors are seldom used, yet there are notable exceptions, such as Attila Csihar's use of neon colors and the bands Satyricon and Dødheimsgard experimenting with color as well. Musicians will often have a trademark style. The makeup is used to make the musicians appear inhuman, corpse-like, or demonic, and is perhaps "the most identifiable aspect of the black metal aesthetic." Ĭorpse paint typically involves making the face and neck white and making the area around the eyes and lips black. Enzifer of Urgehal wearing corpse paint with the spiked armbands and inverted crosses commonly worn by black metal musiciansĬorpse paint is a style of black and white makeup used mainly by black metal bands for concerts and band photos.
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