Industrial music’s pan-revolutionary streak isn’t just fond of extreme imagery; it relies on it. The Debordian tyranny of the spectacle, with its aligned control machines and hegemonies, is perceived as so all-encompassing that industrial music often takes neoliberal moderation as useless. In particular, the genre’s imagery of totalitarianism is pervasive enough to have rightly become a recurring topic of curiosity, caution, prurience, and debate within industrial music’s communities of fans and commentators. Graphically in videos, performances, and on record sleeves; sonically in the music’s unforgivingly quantized march rhythms and samples of political events, news, and films; and discursively in bands’ lyrics and interviews, industrial music borrows from, enacts, mocks, documents, and embraces signifiers of political and ideological extremism from seemingly every corner of human belief. This makes a certain sense given that the purported enemies on whom the genre fixes its crosshairs take so many forms. Instead of surveying and cataloguing industrial music’s extremist rhetoric, this chapter looks deeply at how and why musicians use these signs (both theoretically and functionally), as well as how audiences have interpreted them.
Throughout its entire history, the industrial music scene has been home to socialist ideologues, Randian libertarians, anarchists, academics, mistrusters of western intellectualism, utopian mystics, racial purists, nihilists with nothing to lose, and a substantial crowd who either hold aestheticized and underdeveloped ideologies or deny any interest in politics, culture, and the discourse thereof, and who just want to dance. With this apparent variety in mind, it’s useful to turn to Slavoj Žižek, a savvy theorist of extremist politics and mass culture, who says, “The fundamental conflict today is no longer Left versus Right, but rather, liberal openness versus neoethnic closedness.”1 This perspective helps us move past some of the picky distinctions between one band’s particular brand of sloganeering and another’s. Nearly all industrial music falls to the “open” side of Žižek’s new division, advocating for collective transparency and individual free action, if not always for ideological fluidity and open-mindedness. Indeed, Jon Savage’s assertion that industrial is concerned with “access to information” rings true across the genre’s history. From Throbbing Gristle’s insistence that the cut-up reveals hidden truths behind cultural texts to the 1990s’ glorification of the hacker figure within cyberpunk and beyond, the music deals with exposing secrets hidden by the powers that be.
Industrial music resists these powers, and it prioritizes resistance above the particulars of politics, a sentiment illustrated by Fifth Colvmn Records’ oxymoronic and only slightly tongue-in-cheek 1996 compilation album title Fascist Communist Revolutionaries. Industrial groups’ reactive resistance has frequently made them slower to offer solutions than to point out problems—most notably that authoritarian powers of any stripe exert more control over us than we realize. It’s true that some unambiguously leftist acts call for specific political engagement: the band Consolidated springs to mind, with their vegetarian advocacy, their use of second-wave feminist Barbara Kruger’s art on the cover of their Business of Punishment album, and their featuring of African American separatist rapper Paris on 1992’s “Guerillas in the Mist.” But Consolidated are the exception to the rule here, for two reasons. First, on the theoretical level, any positive alternative to a totalitarian regime or a commodity-based economy risks being superficially appropriated and defanged by the system—recall Debord’s phrase “the recuperation of the spectacle.” Second, on a practical level, industrial audiences have historically rejected preachiness; Consolidated’s album Play More Music kicks off with a recording of an audience member angrily declaring to them at a live show, “If you don’t like fascism, don’t play industrial music.”
Despite the actual antifascist beliefs of most industrial musicians, then, how is it that a fan could conclude that “Industrial Music is Fascism,” as Consolidated’s track title suggests? How is it that at a 2001 VNV Nation concert in Montreal, a fervent skinhead fan saw fit to offer the hardline leftist lead singer Ronan Harris a Nazi salute in a mistaken presumption of solidarity (to which Harris responded with a communist salute)?2 The first part of the answer is in the aforementioned tendency of most industrial music simply to critique and tear down authority rather than to verbalize a utopian replacement for it. The second part has to do with the fact that this critique comes coded in industrial music’s now familiar and often intentional language of ambiguity. We’ll return to the first issue in some depth, after this question of ambiguity has been addressed.
In an essay on industrial music videos, Jason Hanley expresses concern that fans might sometimes misunderstand musicians’ uses of totalitarian imagery. Specifically, Laibach built their reputation by declaring themselves to be a nation (Neue Slovenische Kunst—New Slovenian Art) and then staging their concerts and videos as unblinking state military rallies, driven with tactics that were all too familiar in Cold War Yugoslavia, such as constructivist graphic design, formation marching, and domineering one-way demagoguery.* The band’s embodiment of an oppressive regime “makes no attempt to subvert this image [so] it has the aura of authenticity.”3 According to Hanley, as a result, “Many Laibach fans began to revel in the evils of the band and to take their stage act at face value.”4
Hanley grants, “Perhaps that is what these bands are hoping for, that the origin of the sign is so powerful that it immediately connects with the audience, shocking them, awakening them, violently attacking them. Then once the image has grabbed the audience, the band can do its work.”5 But as we’ll explore more thoroughly in this book’s final chapter, the fact of shock gives way to the content of shock with near inevitability—especially upon its less shocking repetitions—and so we oughtn’t fall prey to Artaud’s error of treating shock as an end unto itself. The uniformity of Laibach’s provocation seems to insist that we grapple with fascism specifically—or at least with the way that pageantry itself can dress up fascism and democracy with identical ease.
Taken literally, “provocation” means inciting a verbal response; it asks questions. Laibach, for example, is referred to as an “interrogation machine” by scholar Alexei Monroe because their actions target the tyrannical and demand a response—to the degree that this reply (whatever it is) can be seen as part of the artistic work itself. The nationalism they stage is so extreme as to become overidentified, and it effectively calls a bluff: for example, the Yugoslav government in the 1980s either had to take a position affirming the band’s obviously dangerous national zeal (aligning themselves through silence or advocacy with unambiguous tyranny), or they could denounce it, thus revealing nationalism (and thereby the state itself) as limited and flawed. It can duly attempt to dismantle any patriotism born of listeners’ unspoken (even unrecognized) desire for totalitarianism by “traversing the fantasy,” preemptively exorcising that longing.
The context of industrial music’s extremism can ask other important questions too. Noise journalist Mikko Aspa convincingly argues that social shock is no more the goal for acts like Whitehouse or Brighter Death Now, who sing about murder and pedophilia, than it is for murderers or pedophiles themselves—which is to say not really at all.6 Rather, this extremist music instead asks the question of how ordinary people become such monsters, suggesting an underlying paranoia that it could happen to anyone, that our free will is illusory. In a way, that’s what’s going on with Throbbing Gristle’s commentary on normality in “Very Friendly,” as discussed in Chapter 4. And if we listen carefully, we might hear that this music answers its own question, musically portraying oppression and evil as the unforeseen fallout of a technologically modern, (post) industrialized world—a claim supported by the violence that pervades Futurism, the obsession with virus and addiction in the work of Burroughs, and the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv’s argument that mental illness is a symptom of capitalism.
But it’s rare for industrial music actually to verbalize questions and answers of this sort. And moreover, the music almost never takes the step of suggesting what we might productively do about tyranny or the postindustrial political condition.
Here’s why. Hanley worries that “audiences can still interpret [fascist] signs in many ways,” leading him to argue that the music shouldn’t merely insinuate questions about the roots of violence and control, but in the name of discouraging real totalitarian politics it should ideally clarify its stance.7 “Education is so important to Industrial music,” he insists, effectively siding with the outward partisanship of bands like Consolidated and Test Dept.8 But this is easier said than done, for reasons that both underlie and supplement the avoidance of preachiness and the diversity of specific politics across the genre’s breadth.
First, direct attempts at “education” are frequently misinterpreted; recall Genesis P-Orridge’s recognition that “revelation and education” reach only a fraction of the industrial audience. For example, at each concert on their 1990 tour, American industrial rock juggernauts Ministry launched into a rant against George H. W. Bush’s government before performing their classic “The Land of Rape and Honey”—a song that contains a “sieg heil” sample from the 1979 film The Tin Drum. Hanley singles out this onstage rant as good education, but even explicitly moralizing gestures like this get lost in music’s noisy reality: Ministry’s concert footage shows sweaty fans deliriously singing along to their songs’ ironically sampled dialogue, which raises the question of whether a “sieg heil” is really successfully détourned when the audience joins in without visibly distinguishing it from earnest lyrics. (Certainly Ministry’s record company didn’t “get” their politics when they shipped the band’s CDs to Desert Storm soldiers who used them as psych-up music for bombing raids on Baghdad.9*) In short, there’s a conflict between the verbal intellectualization of industrial music and its desire to bypass conscious thought.
Second, and more importantly, dictating the social meaning of one’s music not only renders the music redundant but goes against the individual autonomy that industrial music so privileges in its directive for people to “think for themselves.”10 The fact that telling an audience to think for itself is paradoxical and offers a pithy but effective summary of why so many industrial acts resist both utopian proposals and self-explanation. An artist who instructs audiences in the imperative becomes another authority to behead, which is certainly one reason why industrial vocals are traditionally cloaked with distortion: singers reject the signal clarity that aurally identifies authority.
The endgame of didactic preaching is dogmatic tyranny, and any ideological specificity becomes a fixed point to be pinned down and coopted by control machines. In the name of individual liberty, then, industrial music’s ambiguity risks misinterpretation; hence we get situations like the gay, leftist Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft in 1981, hot on the heels of the success of “Der Mussolini,” accepting a gig in Middlesbrough UK only to discover at showtime that they’d been billed as a neo-Nazi act—and had drawn an audience of more than a thousand amped-up skinheads.** However, not only do these risks diminish bit by bit over time as the music insinuates its subversion, but to the pan-revolutionary frame of mind they are outweighed by the ambiguity’s vital rewards: an apparently airtight consistency of ideology and a resistance to assimilation.
Some would say that audiences’ conscious misinterpretrations of industrial music are hardly the biggest problem of its flirtations with extremist symbols—that the real political troubles are more complex. This makes sense, because although 1980s audiences sometimes identified certain bands as fascist (often incorrectly), since that time such controversies have become more the stuff of press releases and scene boasting than of reality. After all, industrial music is historically contemporaneous with—and in its small way, part of—the trickle down of popular postmodernism, in which mass audiences over the last several decades have become at least dimly aware that a sign’s past use and its present interpretation need not bear a one-to-one correlation. Willful public misreadings of Laibach’s rally-esque concerts, of Skinny Puppy’s staged animal testing (on a stuffed dog named Chud), and of Rammstein lead singer Till Lindemann’s emphatically pronounced rolled “r”—reminiscent of Hitler’s mannerisms—have all become part of those bands’ purported danger: fans get off on the music’s supposed political extremism because they feel safe in their belief that these bands are secretly on “the right side.”
This kind of enjoyment presumes that the music bearing quasi-totalitarian imagery doesn’t in fact promote totalitarian beliefs. There are a lot of questions to ask about this presumption, though. It’s useful to bear in mind the long communicative chain that a piece of music is a part of: an artist has a set of subconscious beliefs about the world, which feeds into a conscious identity, which feeds into an impetus to create a song, which feeds into a piece of packaged music, which is then heard and seen by innumerable individuals who all bring their own political identities and unspoken beliefs to its interpretation. And chains like this aren’t just lateral; they run parallel and they intersect in webs. Amidst the multitudes of artists and songs and identities and images, people assemble repertoires and genres, and they congregate into subcultures, and all the lattices in this web connect back to the individuals, their politics, and their silent fundamental worldviews, mutually reinforcing, coaxing, or uprooting them. It’s how culture works, and it’s why we can’t reduce a discussion of totalitarian imagery in music to a game of spot-the-fascist.
Certainly very few musicians publicly and un-ironically advocate genocidal totalitarianism (though some in the White Hardcore and National Socialist Black Metal scenes do, as 2012’s Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin soberly reminds us). However, a hoard of industrial acts—particularly in the offshoot “martial industrial,” “dark ambient,” and “neo-folk” genres that first arose in the mid-1980s—present what scholar Anton Shekhovstov considers a more insidious cultural threat than bands like Ministry or Nitzer Ebb, who stage totalitarianism as pageantry to expose how western culture and economics still use fascist control techniques. The artists that Shekhovstov writes about instead insist that their music is apolitical and spiritual (often invoking elements of northern European paganism). Calling it apoliteic, he explains that this music “does not promote outright violence, is not related to the activities of political organizations or parties, and is not a means of recruitment to any political tendency”; nor is it a direct critique of modern government per se.12 Instead, apoliteic music saturates its surrounding culture with, and accustoms its audience to, what many consider an aesthetic and poetic core that fertilizes fascism.
This makes sense when we consider that fascism isn’t just an authoritarian form of government; it’s genuinely rooted in and inseparable from aesthetics. As many theorists conceive of it today, rather than explicitly referring to Mussolini’s Italian regime in which government, corporations, and the military operated in lockstep, fascism can indicate broader alliances of cultural, media, military, and commercial powers—the techno-paranoid specter incarnate. Political historian Roger Griffin asserts that fascism’s “mission is to combat the allegedly degenerative forces of contemporary history (decadence) by bringing about an alternative modernity and temporality (a ‘new order’ and a ‘new era’) based on the rebirth, or palingenesis, of the nation,” where “nation” may be ethnically or culturally imagined.13 Fascism, then, like industrial music, is resistant by nature. It exists to exert itself against an other; it exists to discipline. Žižek puts it more plainly: “Enough of enjoyment, enough of debauchery: a victim is necessary.”14
Therefore, when we see an instance of fascist aesthetics—like the straight unambiguous lines of military uniforms, parading social and athletic demonstrations, or in the case of industrial music’s appropriations the architectural cleanliness of EBM—we can start to reconstruct and thus identify the purported decadence to which these aesthetics respond. Fascism invokes the spirit of corporate manufacturing, technological reproduction, and military enforcement to issue an ethical mandate, via aesthetics, against alternative ways of being. Musicologist Sean Portnoy goes deeper into this:
Fascism stridently foregrounds the inherent aesthetization of politics (rather than destroying the gap between the supposedly separated spheres of art and politics), [so] there is no such thing as a “fascist aesthete,” instead merely a fascist, and this fascist does not “borrow” from the aesthetic realm but sees the intrinsicness of that vocabulary in politics.15
In fascism, aesthetics are the necessary, visible means by which the conspiratorial unification of force, technology, and commerce is culturally endorsed and maintained. Through their purity, fascist aesthetics socially safeguard fascist politics by instantly singling out deviance, squelching resistant attitudes before they can become resistant action.
To this line of thinking, then, it’s not much of an excuse to embrace only the fascist aesthetic while claiming to be apolitical—indeed how else would a world saturated with supposedly nondoctrinal imagery “spontaneously give way to the spiritual grandeur of national reawakening,” in the plan of postwar fascist philosopher Armin Mohler?16 As Shekhovstov says, “Fascism is definitely not confined to the realm of politics. One can be a metapolitical fascist without being drawn directly to politics.”17 As such, he observes:
Significantly, all the movements and groups that, in one way or another, turn to Neo-Folk/Martial Industrial bands in an attempt to infiltrate certain youth subcultures are metapolitical, rather than political … these New Right groups focus on the cultural terrain in their attempt to influence society and make it more susceptible to undemocratic and authoritarian ways of thinking.18
The reasons for this boil down to a disdain for sullying the perceived purity of the spiritual and national—ethnic—ideal with the dirtiness of modern practical politics, as well as an understanding that one can’t be vocally pro-fascist today without severe social repercussions. Nazi sympathizer and philosopher Ernst Jünger thus explained the need after World War II for fascist ideologues to “retreat into the forest” to safeguard, in Shekhovstov’s words, “‘a secret Europe’ … hidden in the interregnum, while the Europe of the ‘deadly’ liberal democratic order and of ‘homogenizing’ multicultural society triumphs.”19 As such, there are very few open neo-fascists in the industrial scene, but rather than assuage antifascist worries, this points to a useful extension of Shekhovstov’s argument: recalling the weblike nature of people, politics, music, and meaning, it’s not so much that we ought to worry about the self-declared fascists and racists. Instead we should question the effects of fascist symbolism on our own instinctual, unvoiced oppressive urges.
These apoliteic tactics of symbolic bombardment in the absence of stated politics are evident in some industrial music. For example, consider Boyd Rice’s choice of the wolfsangel rune as the logo of his band NON.
Rice insists that the symbol’s runic origins represent a balance between death and life, overlooking the functional reality that the symbol has also been the emblem of the Wolf’s Hook White Brotherhood, and that regardless of its history, the wolfsangel’s visual similarity to the swastika is unmistakable.20 Inasmuch as meaning is a process that involves human interpretation, words and symbols mean what people interpret them to mean, and thus the wolfsangel is de facto a racist symbol.* A charitable interpretation of NON’s logo is that Rice is reclaiming the wolfsangel from the perceived racism that it predates, but his glee in provoking listeners is well documented and teeters on the abusive. (To offer but one example, 1975’s “Hazard Music” is a conceived but never performed piece that involves heating bullets on a grill until they explode, firing in all directions through suspended plate glass, and into the audience—“It wouldn’t give them time to run, just maybe time to know it was coming.”21)
Rice, who can be disarmingly charismatic and charming, personally rejects clear political interpretation of his own music. Asked directly if he would go on record stating that he is not a Nazi, Rice’s reply—notably not “I am not a Nazi”—is that “there’s no such thing as Nazis. If you think people with jackboots are going to be kicking in your doors, it’s going to be a long fucking wait.”22** Indeed, in his book No, Rice relegates Nazism exclusively to its original historical context, claiming that the term “has lost its specific meaning, becoming instead a word applied to any person with whom one disagree[s].”23 Rice justifies his position by asserting that using the word Nazi ahistorically disrespects the real victims and survivors of the Holocaust, but this line of reasoning also conveniently offers plausible deniability to any rebranding of Nazi aesthetics. Additionally, it self-righteously defangs the vocabulary of those who would critique aestheticized extremism. This is particularly useful to the likes of Rice, for whom aestheticism is a tradition and a way of life—a little reminiscent of such bygone dandies as Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall. Indeed, Rice tells us today that he’s more concerned with his own immediate happiness than with politics. He has written for Modern Drunkard magazine and he is blasé in his dismissals of public opinion: “I don’t care about a lot of the things that people care about. If I were upset every time someone did something that I thought was wrong or ugly or misguided, I’d be a nervous wreck.”24 Might this detachment serve as part of a Jüngerian “retreat into the forest?”
Through these tactics, Rice asserts that his interest in Nazism, for example, is strictly an intellectual and spiritual one. It was a revelation to him when as a young man he read Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s The Morning of the Magicians, which probes the curious fact that Hitler had merely been “some weird artist who lived down the street” but within a few years somehow became “the most powerful man in the world, through his use of occult imagery and strange ideas.”25 Notions like this are undeniably compelling, if prurient, and they’re in keeping with the idea stated earlier that industrial music questions how such monstrosities come to be. But there’s hardly a case to be made for inquisitive detachment or ironic reversal when it comes to Rice: he is the self-appointed head of the mostly defunct Church of Satan (which advocates hedonism and personal gain, rather than devil worship or intentional evil), and as such, a study of Hitler’s acquisition of power stinks less of “how can we prevent this?” than “how can I do this too?”
Rice rightly complains that few reviewers really address his music. His lounge-inspired spoken-word recordings are at times poignant and funny, and his noise-based NON material is often sonically appealing in its tape-loop sensibility, where colossal roars of din form long rhythms that refuse to subdivide rationally. The largely undifferentiated nature of NON’s sound can often turn the audience’s attention, in their grasping for the work’s identity, to Rice’s lyrics and imagery (he is a visual artist too). In fan favorite “Total War,” a military drum pattern provides a soundbed over which other musicians might choose to scream, but Rice instead interrogates his audience with calm, serious authority; the song’s muffled, lo-fi patina situates the affair not in a recording studio but at an outdoor political rally, where a Socratic sermon of eternal violence becomes a listener’s reward for actively straining to hear. Sonically difficult or cloudy music seems to demand listeners’ exerted engagement, investing them in its meaning.
Verbal declarations of “Might Is Right” and symbols like the wolfsangel make it hard to interpret NON’s whole package purely aesthetically. The mythic and political vocabularies that this and nearly all martial industrial noise draws from is so uniformly one-sided that through most lenses it simply doesn’t hold up as a general critique of power itself. Beyond that, its participants’ real politics impede an ironic reading; neo-folk singer Tony Wakeford (of Sol Invictus), for example, was once a member of the National Front.*
Ideally, to artists like Boyd Rice, an audience’s difficulty in experiencing this supposedly apolitical music as purely aesthetic ideally becomes a critique of listeners’ political assumptions and indoctrinations—Laibach’s old trick of provoking a response that completes the art work. But it’s hardly a fair move for crypto-rightist music, a little like saying that a driver who stops at a red light is a slave to authority signs. If indeed these artists want to challenge the fundamentals of cultural semiotics, then why do symbols linked to racism occupy so specific and central a role in so ostensibly broad a critique?
Appraisals like this can also apply to acts that pervasively invoke a mythic imagery of pre-modern Europe, as with Von Thronstahl, Blood Axis, or Der Blutharsch—this last group having been blocked from performing in Israel by government officials in 2004. Within more popular industrial circles, Feindflug, This Morn’ Omina, and even Wumpscut have all been dogged by similar political suspicion. None of this is to say that any band invoking Euro-pagan imagery or reappropriating military aesthetics is unwittingly fascist; indeed if that were the case, then practically the whole industrial genre would be guilty by association. As Shekhovstov argues persuasively, though, a lot of music that treads this line of controversy acclimates its fans, scenes, and surroundings to an aesthetic whose dominant twentieth-century use was in creating an ethic of exclusion and oppression, and many musicians doing this may be more aware of the potential role they play in Mohler’s “interregnum” than they let on.
Let’s look more specifically at the roles industrial music plays in laying an aesthetic and political groundwork for oppressive attitudes and behavior. Hanley quotes a Laibach fan responding to a 1989 concert: “I felt pride in a country I did not belong to. … I liked it, I just want to know if they are serious or not.”27 But beyond the fact that Laibach’s tactics surpass mere ironic reversal, their “seriousness” is almost a foregone conclusion if the fan has already felt the swell of aesthetically induced pride in a content-free, spurious nation.
There’s an unexpected flipside to the fan-level interpretation of fascist signs in music, though. On the Stormfront messageboards, the internet’s central meeting place for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, the user “English Celt” witnesses the undermining of real fascist expression by the industrial music community’s familiarity with détournement:
I went to a Blutharsch gig in Camden a couple of years ago. The audience consisted of a good handfull [sic] of blatant homosexuals, a couple of ethnic goths, the Nazi memorabilia fetish brigade (some very Jewish looking) and a couple of Nationalists in the corner wondering if we where [sic] in the right place or not.
Like NSBM [National Socialist Black Metal], another weirdo genre designed to attract freaks to a once honourable movement! Why the hell would patriots want to associate themselves with “industrialism” anyway? I thought these Evolian types rejected the modern world?* Not that you have to be an Evolian to revolt against the modern world of course.
Sorry to say all of that, I just can’t understand why we’d want association with that crowd?28
Just as “English Celt” questions his own native belonging (or at least Der Blutharsch’s belonging) when confronted with the possibility of its ironic cooption, the confused Laibach fan is upset with the possibility of earnestness; optimistically, he might now know that the next time he feels such pride as Laibach inspired, it’s potentially the product of yet another imposed aesthetic political theater, and not of any native belonging. (Certainly no one has ever accused Laibach of expecting too little from their fans.)
Ultimately, Shekhovstov’s concern isn’t that audiences will misinterpret anti-fascist bands’ cutting-up and recasting of fascist symbolism as hateful; as discussed, audiences don’t really do this very often anymore. Instead, a greater danger might be that fans will assume the motivations behind actual fascist displays to be harmless. Despite the potential victory of “blatant homosexuals” and “ethnic goths” overtaking white nationalist space, Shekhovstov would worry in the case of Der Blutharsch’s concert that the band’s message and iconography have become less politically shocking and are thus more naturalized, one aesthetic step closer to becoming acceptable ethics.
One of the west’s most important public intellectuals of the late twentieth century, Susan Sontag, says, “Shocking people in the context also means inuring them, as Nazi material enters the vast repertory of popular iconography usable for the ironic commentaries of Pop Art.”29 Sontag focuses on the aforementioned idea that fascist aesthetics are indelibly linked to fascist ideology, and as such she believes that even an ironic recontextualizing of this imagery contributes to this naturalization, and ultimately to oppression. Through her lens, even bands such as Ministry or Front 242 who are decidedly advocates of liberal openness give power to evil by fetishizing it: in her influential 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” she comes out swinging against the day’s semicomedic genre of Nazi exploitation porn, among other enemies. She points out that in these films the aesthetics of fascism are beautiful, appealing, even sexy.
Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.30
Sontag’s last sentence applies as easily to industrial music as it does to Nazi propaganda. (Needless to say, it also reasserts industrial music’s connection to BDSM—as she says of Hitler’s rapturous hold over his audiences when speaking, “The expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy; the leader makes the crowd come.”31) The extension of her argument is that neither artists nor fans can meaningfully criticize fascism while reveling in its aesthetics and values (which Sontag, like Portnoy, argues are one and the same). Black, leather, beauty, honesty, ecstasy, and death: regardless of whether the genre’s telemetry of this constellation was originally intended ironically, one can’t deny the embraced vitality of these aesthetics in such songs as Neuroticfish’s “Black Again,” My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s “Leathersex,” and Laibach’s anthem “Smrt za Smrt” (“Death for Death”), which was among the last of the band’s songs with original vocalist Tomaž Hostnik prior to his December 1982 suicide.
Beyond these specific signifiers, to Sontag the very act of aestheticizing power is itself a fascist gesture. In light of this, the only industrial musicians who might escape the fascist trap are those like Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions, who tried scrupulously to avoid even hinting at totalitarian imagery; with grave doubt, Ayers rhetorically asks in a 1992 letter to the industrial zine Electric Shock Treatment, “At what point does the imagery ‘turn around’?”32 Can industrial music, in its central discourse of control and technology, avoid serving the goals of its authoritarian enemies? The chant of “Smash this fascist racist bullshit” by the 1990s Seattle-based industrial act Kill Switch… Klick swaggers to a decidedly unwhite shuffle beat—a smart musical call, considering—but ultimately it comes across as naïve and easily appropriated. This sort of explicitly antifascist disclaimer rings especially ineffectual when we take to heart Ministry’s Burroughsian belief that capitalism and democracy—often purported as an antidote to totalitarianism—merely privatize the role of a fascist state.
So if “Everything Provokes Fascism,” as Slavoj Žižek and coauthor Andrew Herscher assert, then is any attempted revolutionary move by industrial music doomed to be rejected by its own community, to champion either intentionally or “apolitically” a regime of punishment, or to fuel the machine against which it rages with even more power still? This question, decidedly central in industrial music’s iconography and politics, is directly connected to the old problem of assimilation that Marx, Adorno, and Debord all grappled with, wherein revolution’s grand duty is to be endless and ever-changing, even amidst the potential futility of any single revolutionary act. Did industrial music misstep at some point, as some purists such as Jon Savage believe? In the isolation and insularity that, as we’ll see, the genre takes on in the late 1990s, does it play the deluded soldier, clutching his gun in the jungle decades after the war’s end? Let’s consider what it means to say yes or no to these questions.
Remember that fascist aesthetics by nature identify and seek to reprogram the decadent and the degenerative, confining social expression until, in Sontag’s words, “Masses are made to take form, be design.”33 Imagine a narrative in which an ever-assimilating economic and cultural fascism succeeds in regimenting industrial music like this—a history that compels us to answer yes to those questions of whether industrial music’s political game a losing one:
The amorphous strangeness of the early music—Throbbing Gristle, Chrome, Cabaret Voltaire, Z’EV—lost a degree of its effluent sonic variety when its second wave—Laibach, NON, SPK—started to militarize their image and sound. The media industry named the genre and began to market it in an attempt to bring it under epistemological and economic control. This wasn’t just the result of big business descending on the music—the musicians themselves took on the form and image of business and government in détournement and protest, but that ultimately served only to inure industrial music to the language of the controlling economy. As the dance beat became more standardized, the limited space on club playlists and record label rosters enforced simultaneous competition among bands where there had previously been a communal ethic. Even as the music attempted organizational autonomy and informational warfare, the foisting to popularity of the most verse-chorus-centric acts of the 1980s illustrated that industrial music as a whole was being sculpted to the rigid patterns of pop, despite—or perhaps because of—EBM’s preemptive efforts to inoculate industrial against pop cleanliness by exposure. What’s more, these popular acts became the public faces of industrial music (as we’ll see in the coming chapters), marginalizing the uncategorizable degeneracy of acts such as the Hafler Trio or Muslimgauze. Today, even the shape of the industrial scene is a fascist confining of force—a subculture with formulaic music whose military aesthetic goes beneath the surface, informing not just the stomping of dancefloors but the homogeneity of output. The whole movement is thus known, replicated, and sold. Ultimately its power to upset—once extending to the British parliament and the RIAA—is now contained culturally by its size, by its circularity, and as far as the arbiters of youth culture are concerned, by its cyclical uncoolness. Industrial music has over time gone beyond subscribing to an aesthetic of fascism and now instead can “take form, be design.”
This is of course just one way to tell the story, but it’s a sobering one. A more complete and honest narrative would (and will) note that from the musicians’ perspective, some creative developments within the broader genre have suggested new if less bombastic ways for industrial music to explore resistance. From the audience’s perspective, not every approach to industrial music’s totalitarian borrowings lies on the Hanley-Shekhovstov-Sontag continuum. It is still thankfully possible to read the dialogue of power in redemptive ways that ultimately can help us answer no to the questions asked a few paragraphs ago.
To this end, Žižek is not so quick as Sontag to assume that if it looks like fascism, it must be fascism. A fan of some industrial music himself, Žižek has written a fair amount on his fellow Slovenians Laibach, and in his 2010 book Living in the End Times he turns his attention to the German act Rammstein. Rammstein is not strictly industrial by most definitions, but the style of metal they play (the German press call it Neue Deutsche Härte) couldn’t have happened without the likes of Laibach, Die Krupps, and Ministry.
Of Rammstein’s flirtations with Third Reich aesthetics, Žižek writes, “Not only are such mass performances not inherently fascist, they are not even ‘neutral,’ waiting to be appropriated by Left or Right—it was Nazism which stole them from the workers’ movement, their original home.”34 From this perspective, first, it’s merely an empowerment of Nazism (or whatever -ism last appropriated a given sign) for an audience to align those symbols with evil; by doing so, listeners vindicate their own paranoia, effectively carrying out their enemies’ dirty work. Second, by demanding a moratorium on using certain symbols (either legislatively as the German government has done with the swastika, or artistically as Nigel Ayers has), people effectively leave these symbols unquestioned in the hands of the bad guys. This type of reasoning also contributes to why Žižek has been critical, for example, of political correctness. Giving new meaning to an old cliché, he says of the political panic that Rammstein set off in Europe, “The only thing we have to fear here is fear itself.”35
And some even insist that the point of it all lies well beyond fear or reclamation or acceptance. SPK argues in an early manifesto, for example, that besides “completing” the provocative artistic act, any kind of audience response at all is freeing because of its incited visceral honesty: “To use overpowering force is not, in itself, fascist. Fascism is the lack or limitation of choice; so to use intensity/confusion as weapons to actually force a choice (instead of leaving pre-coded rationalism intact) is necessarily anti-fascist.”36 They mean here that when a reaction to art is instinctual and not premeditated, it’s not subject to the limited behavioral options preselected by culture. (What they don’t acknowledge here is the link that some see between this honesty and the revelation of a supposedly “true nature,” which all too often devolves quickly into social Darwinism.)
Going backwards from Žižek’s point, though, if it’s the do-gooder leftist critics of (and within) industrial music who are actually empowering fascism by fearing its presence and signs, then it’s no surprise that some figure the purpose of industrial music is not just to reveal the fascist in and among us, but additionally to reveal the prejudiced fascist hunter. From this point of view, think again about NON’s wolfsangel logo: a response to the accusation that Rice’s use of it is racist would be that it’s in fact the sensitive neoliberal who’s reaffirming the symbol’s racism, that the accuser is the real threat to equality. As Lisa Crystal Carver, Rice’s ex-partner and the mother of his child, sums up, “It’s everyone else who’s sick. That’s always his art piece.”37
It’s worth saying, incidentally, that the people who feel most shafted in these disputes are the fans who merely like how the music sounds. Out of all this theoretical debate, they’re effectively asked to justify their own pleasure from a selection of hopelessly flawed political positions.
Because both fascism and industrial music are resistant by nature, their relationship is in some ways a constant back-and-forth where the reversal of signs’ meanings can become dizzying. The strange misapprehensions of Ministry, Laibach, and Der Blutharsch in this chapter are testament to that. The very nature of these overlapping political reclamations emphasizes an element of truth in both Žižek’s and Sontag’s positions: we can indeed subvert the signs and methods of tyranny, but we can’t whitewash the fact that in doing so we become desensitized to (or even drawn in by) the aesthetic seeds of casual bigotry.
Consider UK-based Pauline Smith, whose mid-1970s mail art appeared alongside the work of industrial VIPs Cosey Fanny Tutti, Genesis P-Orridge, Monte Cazazza, and Vittore Baroni in Vile. In 1974 Smith launched a mail art project called the Adolf Hitler Fan Club. As she explains, “All the hostility encountered during the time of the ‘Adolf Hitler Fan Club’ was part of the event and where-ever possible incorporated into it.”38* Unambiguously prefiguring Boyd Rice, Smith considered the retaliation against her work to be the real art: a display that the enemies of tyranny were the ones responsible for its persistent power. By packaging Hitler into a teenybopper “fan club,” she may have succeeded to some degree in critically emphasizing how mass culture cares more about celebritizing than it does about what sort of people it celebrates—a compelling statement, for sure, and one well within Rice and Žižek’s territory. But Smith’s project also ultimately validates Sontag’s concerns about abyss staring.
As Smith explains, she began ironically aestheticizing Hitler as a figure of provocation in 1970,
but I did not read Mein Kampf until 1971. At that time I was struck by the way Hitler’s description of decadent Austrian democracy prior to WW1 could equally well suit the last few British governments. In 1971 ruthless destruction of the community in which I lived was being carried out by commercially minded people whilst those who had the power to stop this happening stood by like reeds in the wind.40
The frustration that Smith vents on her 1983 CV should look awfully familiar:
I am preoccupied with Adolf Hitler’s involvement in the occult, the mediumistic nature of his public speaking and the mystery of his charismatic appeal to the multitudes. He may have been a bad man but he knew very well that people do not live by bread alone—a fact our leaders seem to have forgotten, and probably forgotten precisely because Adolf Hitler thought so deeply about meeting a people’s need for inspiration.41
By criticizing those whom her project shocks, Smith seems on one hand to mock audiences for spending too much energy thinking about Hitler, but at the same time she plainly suggests that England would be better off if its leaders paid closer attention to him. Somewhere in the reasoning behind Smith’s provocation, she seems to stop focusing on the public’s enslavement to its own fear of tyranny, and instead she starts recommending tyranny to them, insisting that it should be embraced, not feared. What may have begun as a détournement of propaganda’s dictatorial voice becomes a mere echo of it. In Smith’s work, fascism ceases to be a mere bogeyman the moment she casts accusations of decadence and proclaims the virtues of inorganic rigidity by comparing her enemies to reeds in the wind; her words tellingly drip dangerous disdain when she pouts, “It seems that Jewish people in this country had become worried that the ‘Adolf Hitler Fan Club’ may be a front for some kind of pressure group building up against them.”42
Similar to Smith’s provocations, industrial music’s extremism is a screen on which grand struggles are acted out in shadow. Stepping back, we can explain the genre’s ironic use of fascist imagery by (at least) two verifiable models that, significantly, don’t actually cancel each other out. One indicates the power of the artist to repossess the images of tyranny while the other points to the simultaneous power of tyranny to diminish the impact of any artwork that takes up its symbols.
This dual action is especially clear when we move beyond theory and look at some actual events within industrial history. In 1988, Nurse With Wound released the track “A Precise History of Industrial Music,” which is little more than the sound of a dot matrix printer’s whine, presumably as it spits out the song’s titular narrative. By offering just the noise of machines while suggesting that all of the genre’s history can be inked in forty-two seconds, Nurse With Wound snidely asserts the genre’s reducibility. In 1990, the Killer Tracks series of generic radio advertising jingles published Power/Industrial, a synth-plus-guitar collection of instrumental ditties for high-tech tough guy commercials. Two years later, the Evolution Control Committee released “The Industrial Polka,” affirming the commodity attributes of a style as only parody can do.
Now, these events aren’t condemnations of industrial music, but we might consider them as battle scars. As part of what Chapter 3 calls the revolutionary class, industrial music has never operated alone politically but has assembled at the front lines of little revolutions. It’s therefore no surprise that industrial music has lost some nuance and taken some symbolic damage. As part of a duly resistant multimedia (sub)cultural effort, it has helped to deal a kamikaze blow by weakening the signs of authoritarian control machines through overidentification and exposure to unresolvable debate. By agitating the dialogue over totalitarianism outlined in this chapter, industrial music has helped to belabor certain cultural tools of tyranny into blandness and affixed permanent red flags to others. In this narrative, industrial music’s imagistic language has indeed forged progress, helping to render strong-arm politics and authoritarian censorship neither effective nor culturally tolerated anymore.
Some of the cultural and technological changes to which industrial music has contributed are hard to see today because they’ve become normalized. Think, though, of the giddiness with which industrial-aligned magazines such as Mondo 2000 fetishized the near future in the early 1990s. The promise was one of a free, anarchic, grassroots society in which technology would level the playing fields of gender, appearance, language, location, and disability. The dizzying, aggressive collages that hip-hop created before the advent of sample clearance lawsuits, those few years of endlessly experimental online self-presentation in the mid-1990s before the web’s social networking lock-in, or Napster’s pirate free-for-all in the summer of 2000—these were brief moments of victory for technology-driven “liberal openness,” harbingered by the anti-authority victories of the tape scene long ago. Inevitably, the desire of copyright holders, governments, entrepreneurs, and lawyers to control and monetize these situations ended the celebrations, but that’s simply how power responds when threatened. It assimilates.
The back-and-forth volleying of meanings or accusations between a resistant culture (like industrial music) and a resistant controlling force (like fascism and its analogues) serves to reify extremist signs and their contexts into mere commodity attributes. In other words, the historical moments just mentioned above reveal the game of resistance and recuperation that industrial music and its enemies both play, chipping away at one another’s armor, with the overdetermined signs of fascism a weapon on both sides. Just as a musical gesture such as vocal distortion can be reduced over time from an ideological claim to a mere advertisement for a genre, the propaganda techniques of media politics are understood by the public through increasingly savvy and cynical lenses.
It’s more useful and correct to think about industrial music and totalitarianism in this way than as an either-or proposition. To the question of whether, in tragic self-deception, industrial music ultimately serves its enemies, this deeper understanding affords us a productive way to answer no. Whatever the punishment, stepping out of cultural ranks to assume degenerate victimhood under fascism exposes its tyranny. It’s therefore fitting with the genre’s thematic proclivity for self-destruction that the whole of industrial music behaves as a suicide commando.
Here the question posed by neo-folk act Death In June takes on new poignancy: “What ends when the symbols shatter?” Writing about Survival Research Laboratories and their giant robot demonstrations, technoculture scholar Mark Dery says, “The problem of SRL-inspired fantasies of a techno-revolution by garbage pail kids is that they’re underwritten by an incongruously Weathermenesque faith in the power of a well-placed bomb to ‘strike at the heart of the state’ as the Red Brigades put it.”43 In general, though, industrial music doesn’t seem to expect a lasting victory. A single bomb—COUM Transmissions’ Prostitution exhibit or Einstürzende Neubauten’s riotous “Concerto for Machinery and Voice”—can’t explode eternally, although Marinetti’s Futurist fantasies resonate with Survival Research Laboratories’ hope to the contrary. Instead, Front 242’s directive “Never Stop!” applies: industrial music is most effective and vital as a program of revolutionary work, continuing the back-and-forth of assimilation that Guy Debord and the Situationists pioneered. Both as an historical reading and as advice to today’s musicians, this ceaselessness is necessary not just to the existence of the music but to the hopes of the pan-revolutionary.
Interpreting industrial music’s use of extremist imagery as part of this ultimately productive struggle against authority doesn’t serve as a blanket justification of its every artistic gesture. The genre’s extremist flirtations call into question our preconceptions about propriety, the functions of music, and our internalizing of institutional signs, but recall how they spur what Shekhovstov and Sontag see as the preconditions of prejudice. Despite the genre’s purported antihegemony, its unchecked battle wounds weaken its already shaky stance on some key social and political grounds.
As previous chapters mentioned, industrial music has had gender problems. Skinny Puppy took some important steps toward opening the genre to women, and we’ll see that Nine Inch Nails did too, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that many people started asking questions about industrial music and sexism. Examples of this questioning include the Diva Ex Machina compilation series organized by Kim “X” Nguyen of Cop International Records, which highlighted female industrial musicians, and more recently the label machineKUNT Records was founded on a policy of signing only female artists. The gender-dissolving Pandrogyne project has also raised awareness of the issue, but even as of 2012’s Kinetik Festival, the year’s largest industrial event in North America, troubles persist. Taking the stage as Ad•ver•sary, Canadian rhythmic noise musician Jairus Khan used video projection to issue “a public service announcement regarding the use of racist and sexist imagery by two of tonight’s performers,” juxtaposing Marie Shear’s definition of feminism as “the radical notion that women are people” alongside the band Combichrist’s lyric “All you feminist cunts, you know that you want it. Give head if you got it.”44 Khan’s screen declared, “We are not offended by this toxic language. We are contemptuous of it,” and after reinforcing the industrial credentials of his antibigotry politics with a quote from Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle and Coil, he concluded, “Reject Sexism … We demand better.”45 The genre still largely works under the assumption of maleness. At least some are asking why.
The audience at Kinetik had been primed for half of Ad•ver•sary’s message by decades of liberal voices within industrial music addressing and inviting gender difference—albeit with slow progress. But it was a bigger surprise when Khan also seized the moment to criticize Combichrist’s use of the Confederate flag. He effectively revealed just how infrequently the topic of race comes up among the community; indeed, industrial musicians and fans mostly see themselves as socially progressive, and direct racism in industrial music’s most trafficked corridors is exceedingly rare. Instead of calling out any one band, then, the question we should ask is how race had become such a blind spot within the genre that using a Confederate flag seemed like a good idea to anyone—especially in a context apparently devoid of any attempted détournement. Within this broad discussion of how industrial music has handled politics, the upcoming chapter asks why the particular issue of race reveals an incongruous glitch in the genre’s supposedly omnidirectional mission of radical empowerment.
It’s no doubt tempting for some to declare, exasperated, that race has absolutely nothing to do with industrial music. There are two important reasons, though, why it should.
First off, whether or not one shares Shekhovstov’s concerns about Euro-pagan themes incubating fascism, to reveal this kind of blind spot is absolutely in keeping with—even necessary to—the industrial idea of questioning hegemonies. The spectrum of genders, abilities, and sexual orientations in industrial music communities means that even though there is certainly attitudinal work yet to be done, these differences are not invisible. Race, on the other hand, is basically unplumbed in the genre, owing in no small part to industrial music’s near homogeneity of whiteness.
The other reason is because despite the tactics of ambiguity that industrial music embraces, its wide-angled revolutionary politics can significantly benefit from the specificity that certain nonwhite musics have voiced. It’s an obvious springboard for industrial music’s thematics of enslavement and liberation. Let’s move forward, now.