One of the things that has always fascinated me is the absorbtion of extreme music into the American mainstream. It happened to death and thrash metal long ago, when bands like Metallica and Megadeth exploded, Earache Records releases got distributed through Columbia and Morbid Angel signed with Giant. Styles that were once reviled by the populace at large somehow found their way into the bins at Best Buy. Some styles have taken much longer to achieve this, particularly black metal. One could argue that Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir (and possibly Satyricon) have long been commercially acceptable black metal bands here in the states, but I would argue that those bands strayed very, very far from their BM roots in order to become accepted and “marketable”. It has only been in recent years that traditional black metal bands have come to sign with more “mainstream” metal labels here in the USA, and a perfect example of this is California-based Prosthetic Records releasing the new albums from 1349 and Ov Hell.

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