Join Me: The Mystique of HIM
(Photograph: Razorblade Romance album shoot [1999] | Jouko Lehtola)
There have been many notable genre-blending music acts over the last 35 years: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Primal Scream, Radiohead, Beck, and Outkast, to name a few. But for Finnish band HIM, their name–perhaps because of their status as a metal act–gets lost among the list of innovators. They are the first and only Finnish rock band to have a gold record in the United States. Their 1999 single “Join Me in Death” is the 15th best-selling Finnish single in history. They have played alongside Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, and Metallica; sharing fan bases with metal-heads, goths, and emo kids alike. They are, undoubtedly, the most accessible metal band in the genre’s history. So, what is the allure towards HIM?
As a young group of friends getting together to create a band, HIM’s early history, according to singer Ville Valo, included playing jazz and funk music, before finally, in the early 90s, honing in on the main genres that influenced them and their future sound: metal, and goth. It was Valo’s love of melodic singing, bands like The Doors, Type O Negative, and Fields of the Nephilim, and Linde Lindström, Migé Paananen, and Mika “Gas” Karppinen’s love of classic rock, glam rock, and heavy/hardcore metal that became the soundtrack to HIM’s major lyrical theme: the dichotomy between love and death.
Society’s curiosity towards the macabre, and obsession with love are tapped into. Think Romeo and Juliet, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There is a seductive element in the subject of death. Love can become so involved, so life-altering in a person’s life that it leads to obsession. This is where crimes of passion, and double suicides are born. To die, is for a love to be forever cemented in history, before it ever turns sour. This also plays into the concept of immortality; love and youth being immortal. Valo’s overtly hopeless-romantic confessions give greater appeal to a band who otherwise would have been dismissed long ago, for satantic and religious themes within the metal genre had already been well exhausted by the mid-90s. His wide vocal range allows him to flawlessly transform himself from David Bowie, to Jim Morrison, to Peter Steele in a single note. Laced into the dark, hard musicianship of the rest of the group, this confuses and dazzles listeners. HIM takes the strongest parts of their various influences, and from them blossoms new, and innovative approaches to a once unrelenting genre. They are goth, without going into parody, and heavy metal without its hyper-masculinity. They are at once, both gentle, and harsh, like the audital embodiment of love itself.
The other key factor in HIM’s success (perhaps as equal as the music), is the band’s image, which centers around Ville Valo. Tall, thin, pale, and Scandinavian, with long, dark hair, understated wardrobe, and a propensity towards femininity, he’s never looked the part of the front-man for a metal band. He is vampiresque, while also channeling the softness of a romantic poet, and the androgyny of artists like Bowie. The result is sensual, alien, and slightly morbid. With his eyes, and his body language, the message is clear: “Join me.”
This theme has existed since the beginning of the HIM’s career. The sleeve of the band’s debut E.P., 666 Ways to Love: Prologue, features Valo’s mother, of which he bears a startling resemblance to. Their debut album, Greatest Love Songs Vol. 666, features a side-profile of Valo, like that of the photo of his mother. He wears makeup, his arms positioned behind his back, baring his chest in a sacrificial way to the viewer. And while the colour scheme and dark features he sports (as well as the album title) prompted accusations of satanism, there is a very evident Jesus-on-the-cross vibe the photograph gives off, and a vulnerability that would be drawn out further once one listened to the lyrics on the CD.
(Left to right: 666 Ways to Love: Prologue [1996], and close up of Valo’s face on Greatest Love Songs Vol. 666 [1997])
HIM are again playing into the Yin and Yang approach. It is this dichotomy, between Valo’s feminine image, and the masculine drive of the music, between love and death, light and dark, good and perceived-evil, that has intrigued and hypnotized the music press and fans for decades. Within this formula, it has allowed their music to go harder or softer at their will; more commercial, or more doom-laden, within reason. And it is a formula that will eventually earn them all the accolades they deserve.
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