Music

You can buy Burzum T-shirts from Walmart

by Jeremy Mersereau

If you tried to put 2016’s general sense of anxiety and despair over the regular absorption of appalling fringe viewpoints into the mainstream into a sentence, you’d probably get pretty close to ‘Walmart is selling Burzum T-shirts.’ Well, that, or maybe this.

Now, granted, the retail megacorp isn’t selling the Burzum merch as a first-party; even in the dark days of 2016, openly supporting every white nationalist’s favourite one-man black-metal band would be a little beyond the pale (and Varg Vikernes knows a thing or too about paleness). Instead, third-party seller Rockabilia is the source of the t-shirt, but that doesn’t change the fact that the shirt made it past Walmart’s internal verification process, when even eBay has known what’s up since 2014.

OK, yes, it’s not like ‘Burzum’ or ‘Varg Vikernes’ are household names outside of, or even within Norway and the metal community, and no one can really begrudge Walmart’s verification system for not going deep on the history behind every single band whose T-shirts pass through its digital gates. Still, though, it’s worth calling this kind of thing out whenever it crops up, especially now, when alarming elements formerly relegated to the fringes are finding new encouragement and support thanks to 2016’s political climate. It’s doubtful an esteemed establishment like Walmart wants to be tarred as a organization that sells white nationalist band merch like some kind of far-right Interpunk, but hey, at this point nothing is surprising.

[h/t AVClub]