By the mid-1980s, industrial was selectively crossing over into other genres, including more widely popular ones. A notable moment was Fad Gadget’s 1984 single “Collapsing New People,” in which singer Frank Tovey teamed up with Einstürzende Neubauten to make an attractively off-kilter pop song. Other bands adapted industrial imagery or production techniques to dance and rock music; for example, Anglo-French synth brooders Hard Corps landed a deal with Polydor, and Germany’s Belfegore layered hair metal vocals and guitar atop oildrum banging and big analogue keyboards on their 1983 and 1984 albums. Similarly, established bands such as Shriekback, who’d had an indie hit in 1982 with their funky “My Spine (Is the Bass Line),” began introducing industrial elements into their music. The sampling and percussion that fills their 1985 Oil and Gold album makes the record a clear sonic predecessor to the likes of Nine Inch Nails.
Probably the most high-profile act to graze the edges of industrial music during this time was Depeche Mode. The flagship act of Mute Records, they were labelmates with Liaisons Dangereuses, Mark Stewart, and Fad Gadget (and by the end of the 1980s, Nitzer Ebb and Laibach would join the family too). Depeche Mode had begun as a lite synthpop act, but when guitarist Martin Gore took over songwriting duties after founder Vince Clarke left the group in 1981, they developed a progressively darker and kinkier tone. The Synclaviermade albums Construction Time Again (1983) and Some Great Reward (1984) are both packed full of sampled junkyard banging and quasi-socialist themes; their song “Pipeline” is the most blatant example of this, built around the literal sounds of construction and pitched percussion on metal pipes. On stage, the group would dress in bondage garb and clang hammers on noisy percussion rigs, taking a page directly from the Test Dept. playbook. Rumors eventually circulated that Depeche Mode was using second-hand samples and loops that Einstürzende Neubauten had created in the studio, although Gareth Jones, who produced both bands during this time, convincingly denies this.1 Nevertheless, the change in the band’s sound and the ascent of industrial music seemed no coincidence; one writer points to Depeche Mode’s November 1983 TV gig with SPK as a particularly important cross-pollination. In any case, Depeche Mode has been enduringly popular—every studio album of theirs has reached the UK top ten—and in the 1980s this popularity gave mass audiences a reference point for industrial music’s clear influence, even if they’d never heard the genre’s name.
At the same time, some industrial acts had gone pop, with Cabaret Voltaire being probably the most significant example beyond SPK. Despite making small inroads toward mass appeal (check out the Micro-Phonies poster in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), they managed to lose almost all their original fans while picking up middling numbers of new ones with their brassy, quasi-house music of the middle and late 1980s; their biographer Mick Fish writes a bit cruelly, “Perhaps it’s best to stick to what you’re good at. Maybe if over the years the Cabs had obliged a few more people with that version of ‘Nag, Nag, Nag’, who knows?”2 And as we’ve discussed a few times, some selective elements of popular styles had worked their way into industrial music’s dominant strains.
Recall that popular music and its genres are defined as much by their consumption as by their production. Concerning the conversation between industrial music and popular audiences in the second half of the 1980s, it’s much less interesting and useful to speculate about influence or selling out than to address the real fact that industrial music—and not just its secondhand borrowings—was acquiring increased public visibility, to the point where the occasional savvy suburbanite could find records and share them with friends. Some of this spread has to do with the swelling quantity of the music: industrial acts were popping up around the world, in small towns and nonwestern cultures alike. Fans and musicians of a certain generation also frequently assert that the music made during this time was of especially high quality—a golden era. Opinions aside, it’s certainly true that far more industrial records made in the second half of the 1980s have endured in subcultural canons than those from the genre’s first ten years.
But these considerations are only part of the reason that the genre gained so much popular ground. Cultural proliferation is about successfully distributing images, messages, and ideas so that people care about and respond to them. Although this chapter does deal with music itself (especially the band Ministry), arguably the biggest stories in industrial music during these years belong to record labels, distributors, dance clubs, radio, and finally the audiences whose participatory engagement inadvertently gave the music new possibilities. This chapter doesn’t catalogue every step in the scene’s growth during this time, but it uses a few particular instances of this growth to show the many ways that industrial music and its audiences mutually empowered one another. Starting with a short history of the U.S.-based label WaxTrax! Records and one of its figurehead musicians, Al Jourgensen, this history of the 1985–1988 period looks at how participatory culture in Europe gave new purposes to industrial music and then concludes by revisiting WaxTrax! and Jourgensen at the decade’s close.
At least in America, WaxTrax! Records was the most widely beloved operation within industrial music’s cultural expansion during the late 1980s. When industrial fans and musicians think of WaxTrax!, most recall a time when as a label it was feverishly hot and the culture it purveyed was at its most contagious and thrilling. But WaxTrax! was more than a record label; it represented a particular sound, and to kids in Denver and Chicago, it was a bricks-and-mortar store. At the heart of WaxTrax! were the people behind its brand—and their story starts well before the company’s high point in the late 1980s.
Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher met in 1971 at Gage Park in Topeka, Kansas, a popular cruising spot for young gay men—though initially neither knew the other was gay. They quickly formed a deep bond that was both enduring and perpetually risky: Nash, twenty-three at the time, was married and had two children. “I didn’t want anything to do with breaking up a family,” Flesher insisted, but after Nash came out to his wife, she gave him her blessing to be with Flesher.3 The duo moved initially to California and then to Denver, where they could more easily live uncloseted. After three years, their love of psychedelic and strange music drove them to open Wax Tracks, a used and new record store on Ogden Street. They funded the store with money from working in carpentry and occasionally dealing drugs. Tom Nash, Jim’s brother, also helped to manage the business in its earliest days.
As Jim’s daughter, Julia Nash, has carefully documented, the pair honed their tastes and aesthetics through a correspondence with UK glam scenester Mike Smyth.* After a visit to London left Nash and Flesher disillusioned by its lack of grassroots fan-driven gigs and events, they and Smyth envisioned that the Denver store could be more than a place to buy records: it could be a venue, a hangout, and a recognizable name that meant something was happening.
This was a prescient ambition in light of the DIY ethics of punk’s emergence in 1976 and 1977. After they attended a Ramones concert in January 1977 (also witnessed by Ministry’s Al Jourgensen and Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, none of whom knew each other yet), Nash and Flesher enthusiastically did everything they could to immerse themselves in the punk scene, even if it meant regular road trips to California and Texas. In 1978, though, they ultimately decided that Denver’s geographic isolation was holding them back from centrally participating in the cultural and musical energy of punk and new wave, so they sold the store and moved to Chicago, opening their new location at 2449 N. Lincoln.
In Chicago, Wax Trax (as it was now called) quickly became one of the country’s premiere spots to buy postpunk and experimental music. A 1980 issue of Billboard Magazine said the store “probably carries the Midwest’s largest stock of independently produced 45s.”4 The ceilings and walls were plastered with press photos of obscure bands, televisions blared bootleg punk shows, and the clerks were infamously snarky in their hipster elitism. Continuing the vision that Nash and Flesher first tested in Denver, the store emerged quickly as the daytime hangout for Chicago’s counterculture and a nighttime sponsor of films, clubs, and gigs.
As Nash said in 1985, “We got involved in the label not because we’re great business people but because we’re really enthusiastic.”5 In fact, he and Flesher were notoriously loose with their bookkeeping, and they paid little attention to licensing and legality; their first record release was a totally illegal re-pressing of Brian Eno’s “Lion Sleeps Tonight” single in 1979.
Julia Nash recalls, “Jim had one of the most infectious and charismatic personalities, while Dannie was the strong quiet presence that would do anything for you. With a true Southern work ethic, Dannie wasn’t afraid of working hard to get things done.”6 Together, Jim and Dannie (everyone used their first names) made Wax Trax as much a family as it was a hangout or a brand. As onetime employee Sean Roberts remembers, “They really had a very Mom-and-Dad approach to the label,” adding that “Dannie was more Mom.”7
The store itself—and by extension the label, whose headquarters were in the back rooms—was a party, an R-rated love-fest. The smile-and-a-handshake practices made for artistic collaboration, not competition. As Michael Toorock (lawyer for Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, and others) has said:
These artists have a sense of community that is unprecedented.… Not only are they not suffering by going into and out of each other’s projects, they seem to be rejuvenated by it, to become better musicians. The rest of the industry, which says you live or die as a band, would be aghast.8
A lot of the congenial attitude was coded into the physical space at the store. Revolting Cocks singer Chris Connelly writes, “The WaxTrax! aesthetic, or rather Jim Nash’s aesthetic, was a celebration of 50s & 60s Americana, his domain was filled with gorgeous furniture, lamps, mirrors and knick-knacks from another era. His walls were covered with Communist propaganda posters, and his television ran 24 hours-a-day, fed on a diet of unusual and bizarre video tapes.”9
With ever-adventurous taste in music, Nash and Flesher had begun helping out some of the young artists who frequented the store. “I feel it’s sort of a civic duty to carry a lot of local product,” said Nash, and indeed the store stocked dozens of Chicago-made records. But the two wanted to go further; they wanted to make new records happen.10 Most of the first releases that WaxTrax! put out were indeed locally recorded, like Strange Circuits’ 1980 “Industrial Living” and Ministry’s 1981 goth-tinged “I’m Falling,” but soon the label widened its net, landing a deal to put out the campy disco of cross-dressing icon Divine, with 1981’s “Born to be Cheap.” Of the label’s output prior to 1985, Nash said that most of it sold “in the area of 5,000 records.”11 A few releases were disappointments in this regard; the Blackouts’ debut, recorded, at the Cars’ Synchro Sound Studios in Boston, sold only three hundred copies, for example. (It was produced by Ministry’s Al Jourgensen, at the insistence of the Blackouts’ manager Patty Marsh—the future ex-Mrs. Jourgensen.) At the other end of the scale, though, Ministry’s “I’m Falling” moved well over ten thousand units.12
Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher also brokered licensing deals with European acts because, amazingly, they were selling so many import titles that it was cheaper to reprint them stateside than to pay for shipping. The company’s ability to move so staggeringly many foreign releases has a lot to do with how adeptly Nash in particular straddled the line between Chicago’s postpunk scene of mostly straight white kids (at venues such as Metro and, for the underagers, Medusa’s) and its growing house music scene of mostly gay and African American clubgoers (based foremost at the Warehouse, later called the Muzic Box), which orbited around pioneering DJs Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy (“Quite simply the world’s greatest DJ,” according to a popular book on clubbing history).13 Through the alternately familial and bacchanalian ties that WaxTrax! fostered with every racial, sexual, and subcultural corner of the city, Nash and Flesher made sure that both scenes were hearing the likes of Front 242.
The history of the band Ministry is closely entwined with WaxTrax! and as a symbiotic pair they’re best understood in the context of one another. When frontman Jourgensen first came to Chicago (from Denver, like Nash and Flesher), he was an unstylish rock fan with a humble, pliable personality. The earliest Ministry recordings had an occasionally grim anger to them, but they were decidedly pop music; Jourgensen was immersed in disco as a DJ at Club 950 and as a musician for hire; an early gig had him singing a jingle for Shasta soda.
In 1981, Nash had paid for Ministry to record at Hedden West studios in Chicago after hearing a demo of “I’m Falling”—a boppy Killing Joke-esque number that Jourgensen had made at home with an ARP Omni, a drum machine, and a reel-to-reel. The song’s B-side, “Cold Life,” was the real success, though; it took off on UK dancefloors, did well on college radio, and topped the charts in Rockpool magazine (whose editor Andy Dunkley would later work for WaxTrax!). Riddled with jazzy bass slaps courtesy of session player Lamont Welton, “Cold Life” was about Jourgensen’s experience living in a Chicago neighborhood that “was about one per cent white—[a] very low, low class depraved neighborhood… all my friends and everything else were black.”14
Though Ministry variously branded themselves as funk, electro, and politically aware goth pop, Jourgensen was in those early days basically willing to become whatever it took to have a hit. “Everybody is striving to have a #1 record … anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is either a fool or they’re lying,” he told a reporter in 1982.15 In his quest for success, he landed a six-figure, two-album deal with Arista, after which his music and persona became a degree more powderpuff. In interviews he namedropped ABC and the Cars and proclaimed, “I’m petrified of humiliation… I’m basically pretty sensitive.”16 He was also quick to tell reporters how distasteful he thought drug abuse and public misbehavior were. Jourgensen has long since disowned this entire phase of his career (especially the Arista album, With Sympathy, which is a pretty good New Romantic record, actually), but the claims that his record label was to blame for his image as an American Howard Jones don’t sit easily with how earnestly he threw himself into the affair.
By late 1984, however, Jourgensen and his music were at odds. A review of Ministry’s October 12 gig at the Ritz in New York (opening for APB) declares:
The band’s hits, generated from last year’s debut album for Arista, were very familiar to the crowd, which was as enthusiastic for them as for APB. Lead singer Al Jourgensen made it tough for the fans, however, as he kicked refuse off the stage into the crowd, hurled his mike stand dangerously close to the front row, and threw cups of water over the audience. Jourgensen played the tough-guy stance to the hilt.…17
The following year produced the moody, antiauthority dance club hits “All Day” and “Everyday is Halloween” for Jourgensen, now accustomed to wearing black nail polish and hanging out with Siouxsie Sioux in Europe. By 1986, when he first met Chris Connelly (who was at the time in a Scottish dance act called the Fini Tribe), “Al was still trying to earn his bad boy image, and build this new Al that ate children and injected drugs into his eyeballs.”18 Connelly recalls that their first impromptu recording session together outside the little London office of WaxTrax! at Southern Studios was mostly “an excuse to go out drinking at 11 in the morning.”19 Before long, Jourgensen’s drug-crazed egomania would become the predominant identifier of his personality. Sometime collaborator Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails recalls, “He was always the last one standing.”20
Jourgensen’s retrofitting has turned out to be a functionally earnest metamorphosis, and it’s one with a clear musical component. Few have ever called Ministry’s pre-1985 music “industrial,” but Jourgensen was nevertheless networking within the scene at the time; in between tours, he was a buyer and co-manager at Wax Trax!, meeting Front 242 and other bands the label distributed. In 1985, when he first collaborated with Belgians Richard 23 and Luc van Acker on Revolting Cocks’ debut single “No Devotion,” Jourgensen had begun to identify a sound and a community through WaxTrax! that enabled his musical aggression to match his growing personal brashness.
We can hear the first footsteps down Ministry’s path to industrial-metal hybridity in the transformation of the 1985 WaxTrax! single “All Day” to its remixed version released a year later on the album Twitch, co-produced by Adrian Sherwood. Between the two versions of “All Day,” plenty remains the same. Lyrically, the song takes up what was fast becoming standard industrial subject matter: a man toils thanklessly within an inescapable machine, “Break[ing] his back without nothing to gain while the boss man sits around and drinks champagne.” Reminiscent of Nitzer Ebb, Jourgensen layers the song with heavy breathing that thematically centralizes the body at work, and just maybe suggests the possibility of sex. Harmonically, the whole song is just one transition between E-flat minor and D-flat major, repeated endlessly, synth bass and faux analogue strings lushly voicing the chord succession. But while the 1985 single keeps time with a constant quarter-note hi-hat—a choice unambiguously indebted to disco—the remix omits this timekeeper, leaving the song’s tom-tom fills to clatter starkly in syncopation, demanding that the listener work at a constant rhythm to understand their pattern within an unpunctuated temporal grid. The absence of the hi-hat allows us to hear the remix’s opening clapping sound—now exposed—not in the context of a funky drumbeat but with reference to the sample of a barking drill sergeant: the sounds become the loading of rifles, the stamping of feet, the noise of war. In addition to this change and to the general thickening of the musical texture (essentially by turning up the bass, even to the point of distorting the kick drum), the later version of “All Day” uses constant distortion on Jourgensen’s vocals. Crucially, this mechanizes him, its square waveform gives the impression that he is screaming (and thus it makes him aggressive), and it taps into a developing trope within industrial music: the distorted vocal today, despite being pioneered by late-1960s psychedelic bands, is more associated with industrial music than with any other style. Taken together, these subtle changes show a clear set of strategies by which Ministry parlayed their 1985 sound into something identifiably, even vitally, industrial.
A lot of this new industrial sound came from Adrian Sherwood’s production work. Luc Van Acker recalls,
Al stole some of Adrian’s ideas when Twitch was mixed, and took them to Brussels to ICP studios and mixed [Revolting Cocks’] Big Sexy Land. It is very funny because I was in the studio with them and Al would go to the toilet and write on the toilet paper the setting of the effects. His pockets were full of toilet paper. Then we’d go back to the hotel and he’d dictate to me: “Yea, 6.1, 7.4,” but they wouldn’t make any sense. “Was that the delay time? Was that the reverb?” I don’t know. “Just write it down! Just write it down!”21
Indeed, the brightly equalized slapback delay of the kick drum on Ministry’s “Isle of Man (Version II),” “Stigmata,” and Revolting Cocks’ “We Shall Cleanse the World” is a veritable signature of the WaxTrax! sound—a timbral act of commercial branding.
Given that Ministry’s studio albums of the era all came out on major labels (after Arista it was Sire and Warner Bros.), it may seem a little strange to tie the band so closely with WaxTrax! But Jourgensen maintains that although major labels helped with sales—from 1988 to 1992, Ministry was awarded three gold records and one platinum record by the RIAA—his affection, trust, and loyalty lay with Nash and Flesher. A 2008 exchange with Pitchfork Media’s Cosmo Lee went like this:
PITCHFORK: You’ve been on Arista, Sire, Warner, and Sanctuary. Did you have positive experiences with any of them?
AL JOURGENSEN: No. None. They all suck.
PITCHFORK: Did you know that when you went in?
AL JOURGENSEN: No. But I should have known… Which is why I did Wax Trax.…22
And Jourgensen was literally at the center of their operations, working at the store’s sales counter even as the Twitch album was on the shelves. He also fed the label a continuous stream of new material in its initial moment of expansion. Nash and Flesher had only released seven records from 1979 through 1984, but in 1985 alone they released nine, of which six were by Ministry, the Blackouts (from whom Ministry would acquire bassist Paul Barker and drummer Bill Rieflin), or Revolting Cocks, who were initially launched in part because Jourgensen was busy wresting the Ministry name free from Arista Records, whom he still technically owed a second album. Jourgensen’s numerous side projects and pseudonymous releases have acquired canonic status on industrial playlists and mixtapes; in addition to Ministry and Revolting Cocks, there’s 1000 Homo DJs, Lard, Pailhead, PTP, and Acid Horse, to name just a few. Nash recalled, “Every time Al sneezed in the studio, he wanted to put it out.”23
The rate at which this music came out was tremendous. Each of the projects mentioned above managed to put out at least one release in the 1988–89 period alone. Jourgensen and bassist Paul Barker—by this point his comparatively even-keeled musical primary partner—achieved this prolific rate by constantly recording grooves, basslines, and beats, then farming them out to a given project depending more or less on who was around that day to cut vocals at Chicago Trax Studios (not officially related to WaxTrax!).* Barker recalls, “Al and I encamped there, so we would just work on tunes. We would have rhythm section songs.”24 For some collaborations, such as Pailhead (with Minor Threat and Fugazi’s Ian McKaye), they wrote songs dedicatedly, but their working style was more often such that “we could have a couple of different sessions cooking at the same time,” as Chris Connelly says. This was also enabled by the layout at Chicago Trax: there was one main recording and mixing area and another smaller studio for MIDI sequencing and overdubs, which together made the twenty-four-hour-a-day sessions into free-for-alls where partygoers would wander between rooms, playing a bassline here or sequencing drums there. Albums took only two weeks to record, and in many cases songwriting credits and royalties were divided evenly in part because it was nearly impossible to piece together who had done what on a given song.**
Another reason behind the rapid output was that Jourgensen’s personality was domineering, if still affable. There was little doubt about who was in control socially. This power was both a cause and an effect of his being the most successful of the musicians who hung around WaxTrax! throughout the 1980s. It meant he was in constant demand, and that others tolerated—and often enjoyed—his wild swings from slacker to slavedriver. Beyond this, the steady intake of cocaine and speed (among many, many other drugs) meant that records were made in a desperate blur, though Connelly notes that despite the wild stories, “If everyone had been completely bananas, nothing would have happened.… There were several level heads around who managed to keep a lid on things.”25 There are outrageous stories of Jourgensen bringing livestock and motorcycles into the recording studio, and much more sobering ones about his proximity to others’ overdoses, but he maintains:
If I really did all of the things that I’m given credit for, I would need a 48 hour day. There’s no way I could have gotten all that shit done and still chased skirts and been the biggest junkie in the world since fuckin’ Lou Reed and William Burroughs times 10. That’s giving me credit as if I’m some superguy, and I’m none of the above.26
Regardless of how specifically depraved the recording process was, the output was a stream of records that all bore slightly different permutations of the same dramatis personae. Chicago-based rock critic Jim DeRogatis recalls, “You’d get this image in your head of some satanic cult at night all mixing and merging.”27 The sense of mystery was kindled further by the arcane pseudonyms Jourgensen and Barker took: Hypo Luxa and Hermes Pan. The collective cultishness was apparent from the inside too: Luc Van Acker declares, “At WaxTrax!, everybody lived on the same block. We were like a religion.”28
The collaborative dynamic of the label’s musicians in the second half of the 1980s closely mirrored the subcultural sense of family that the store’s patrons had nurtured under Nash and Flesher. Specifically, Jourgensen’s rising star at the center of these collaborations was one of the two most prominent factors behind WaxTrax! exerting a dominant force on industrial music. The other part of the equation is less glamorous, but certainly every bit as important: it has to do with the development of their licensing agreements.
As mentioned, Nash and Flesher had been licensing a few European artists’ releases from overseas labels in the early 1980s, but their foothold in pressing and distributing import industrial music got a big boost when Belgian indie powerhouse Play It Again Sam started distributing (and eventually bought) Front 242’s European label, Red Rhino Europe (owned by Englishman “Tony K” Kostrzewa, an old tech-junkie friend of Chris Carter’s and the manager of the Cartel independent record distribution network). In a 1997 interview, Flesher recalled, “When we heard Front 242 we tried to get it into the record store. We got two or three copies and it was like, Shit… let’s start pressing this ourselves.”29 Front 242 had effectively allowed this to happen by turning down a lucrative but potentially soul-sucking offer in the mid-1980s from ZTT Records, who’d just had a mega-hit with Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax.”
In negotiating with Nash the details of Front 242’s continued verbal contract with WaxTrax!, Play It Again Sam boss Kenny Gates opened up the distribution channel to more European artists such as Switzerland’s the Young Gods. As Nash said, “One thing led to another, and other stuff developed.”30 This other stuff included deals with Third Mind Records to distribute music by Front Line Assembly and In the Nursery, as well as arrangements to license stateside releases by Laibach and Belgian EBM act A Split-Second. A band’s newly recorded album would usually cost Nash and Flesher a $3,000 advance, but oftentimes the only up-front expenses in licensing these ready-made releases was the printing cost.
In addition to licensing (which meant the record got a WaxTrax! catalogue number and logo), the company also manufactured, marketed, and distributed an additional sixty titles for Play It Again Sam, including much of their Belgian EBM and bands such as Borghesia, Slovenia’s “other” great industrial act. In turn, European labels began licensing Nash and Flesher’s American signees. Further spreading the label’s geographic reach was its mail-order business, which had begun with a one-sheet catalogue in 1983; by the end of 1987 WaxTrax! had issued forty titles of their own and distributed many more through a variety of companies and channels. The imprint was a recognized player in Europe and America alike. Though Nash and Flesher were focusing their efforts primarily on the label by 1987 (moving its headquarters to 1659 N. Damen Ave.), the store was also picking up speed, gaining the reputation as a Mecca worthy of pilgrimage among American industrial fans. Whatever coziness it lost was made up for in sales. Julia Nash remembers, “They were having upwards of $20,000 days.”31
Into 1988, the numbers kept growing, despite Flesher’s increasing unease with being at the helm of an empire. Front 242’s “Headhunter” single dropped just a few weeks into the year, and it became a breakout success with a strange video that received regular MTV play (directed by Anton Corbijn, photographer for U2 and Depeche Mode). A thoroughly tuneful number, the song’s quirky production detailing was initially a serendipitous accident: the band loaded the wrong sound diskette into their sampler, and suddenly the sequence they’d designed for a punchy bass sound took on a strange new character, as if played on a cello made of scrap metal. “Headhunter” is sung from the perspective of a bounty hunter, and its catchy countdown chorus helped it to become the most famous EBM track ever recorded. The album it supported, Front By Front, racked up ninety thousand sales through WaxTrax!—their highest numbers ever—and eventually sold an additional half million through Play It Again Sam and a later rerelease on Epic/Sony.
En Esch recalls that 1988 was the year that, at least in America, the genre label of “industrial” moved from the underground into common parlance. WaxTrax! that year effectively doubled the size of their catalogue, putting out thirty records. The label welcomed new artists quickly, a few of whom are worth naming here. KMFDM, whose debut had gotten a European issue in 1986, released their 1988 WaxTrax! album Don’t Blow Your Top, a reverb-drenched samplefest of sparse beats and odd loops; within a year or two, they would find their groove with unabashedly saucy guitar-driven songs. My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult was an intentionally tawdry industrial act from Chicago (complete with pinup-esque backing singers the Bomb Gang Girls), and their 1988 debut captures an entertaining Rosemary’s Baby-esque faux gothic. Pig was the project of former KMFDM member Englishman Raymond Watts, who had run a studio in Hamburg during the mid-1980s, where he recorded Abwärts, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Psychic TV; Pig’s debut LP layered colossal orchestral samples over sneered baritone vocals and spacious dance beats. Nash and Flesher also managed to score new releases by longtime electropunk veterans Suicide and by a reinvigorated Clock DVA.
Although by 1988 WaxTrax! had become the most visible and successfully branded of any industrial record company—essentially responsible for introducing industrial music and America to each other—there were other record labels in the game too, notably Nettwerk, KK Records, Play It Again Sam, Third Mind, and Antler Records, to say nothing of the noisier, perhaps more authentically “industrial” distributors such as Tesco Organisation, Dossier, Staalplaat, ROIR, and the upstart Cold Meat Industry. But while the smaller labels got their music to those hardcore industrial fans who sought it out, Nettwerk, WaxTrax! and the higher-profile industrial dance brands worked to reach more casual fans, and in many ways the music they released served as a gateway to more esoteric fare. It’s hard to imagine that a fan of Dirk Ivens and Marc Verhaegen’s Belgian industrial dance act the Klinik would not own a Front 242 record, but one can’t suppose the inverse. Big independent labels helped pay for music videos for their bands, which would air on MTV’s late night alternative show 120 Minutes. They had the budget to distribute promotional copies of their releases to hundreds of DJs and radio stations. Smaller outfits, on the other hand, might only press a thousand copies of a release, making that kind of promotion financial suicide. These smaller labels, regardless of the quality of the music they released, generally had to make safer bets with their money, advertising in industrial music magazines and servicing a smaller pool of more reliably devoted DJs.
A big boost to large and small labels alike in the late 1980s was the industry-wide shift toward CD sales. Staalplaat Records, for example, switched to the CD format in 1988 with the release of Muslimgauze’s album Iran. As label head Geert-Jan Hobijn recalls,
All of a sudden this whole flood of CDs came and then cassettes dropped. It was a balloon that popped and it was gone, and no one bought cassettes. It stopped. This was 1987 or 1988. For us it was quit or shift, so we shifted. And besides, in those days, releasing CDs was like printing money. It was easy and it would sell like hell because everyone dumped his whole collection and they started rebuying what they already had.
It’s important to keep things in perspective, though. To a boutique imprint such as Staalplaat, a record selling “like hell” still meant fewer than five thousand copies. Even so, this was enough to keep these labels in business as operations with one to four employees. Hoping to cash in similarly, it’s no surprise that in 1987 the first CDs that WaxTrax! released were reissues of Front 242’s early work. There were no costs for recording advances, and sales were all but guaranteed by the success of the records the first time around. One of the only significant drawbacks of the shift toward CDs it that it effectively sounded a death knell for the cassette-based indies that had endured since the early 1980s. The tape scene continued (even to this day, for a devoted few), but it atrophied into a circle of willfully stubborn ideologues.
As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, a big part of the story behind industrial music breaking into cultural consciousness at large was the network that supported it, and this network extended beyond record labels. Young listeners who fancied themselves as nonconformists found this music through the boom of college radio stations in the United States adopting alternative music formats and an uptick in urban UK pirate radio (due to the new affordability of movable transmitters).
In cities, nightclubs were constantly opening and shifting formats, and as the genre’s musical catalogue grew with every release, these clubs grew more able to draw from industrial, goth, and techno than had been previously possible. Rhys Fulber remembers that one of the top industrial clubs in the world at the time was Hard Club in London, which was held on Wednesday nights at Gossips in Soho: “The Hard Club was it. It didn’t get better.… The guys from Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb would come down there. I remember hanging out with the guy from Pop Will Eat Itself. It was happening. It was a happening place.”32 Industrial music found a welcome home at other clubs across the United States, Spain, Germany, and the UK.
The role that industrial music played in clubs like these was more social and sonic than overtly political; it’s hard to ponder a confrontational ideology when you’re dancing and drunk, and though it’s true that some industrialists were concerned with the subliminal and the subversive, the DJ’s flow from one song to the next recast any individual political message as merely one in a parade of meaning. Artists themselves may have had reservations about this carefree blending, but club owners and new, casual fans were happy to employ industrial music as cyberpunk mood setting: an attractive evil twin to the cultish optimism of acid house and techno, a sexier update of pop-concrète acts such as Swell Maps and This Heat.*
In 1986 through 1988, Hard Club DJ Dave Mothersole was in Goa, India’s hippie capital, where pot was cheap. He recalls that at the clubs
the music tended to be industrial and EBM during the night and then Italo [disco], cosmic and new beat as the sun came up. Because of the locations and the drugs and also because the DJs deliberately cut out all the vocals—only disembodied documentary style voices were considered acceptable—the music took on its own life and no one cared if a record was electro-goth or Italo or anything else. You would [hear] Divine, Front 242, Koto, Blancmange, Telex, Tantra, 16 Bit, Poesie Noire, Lazer Dance, Nux Nemo, Depeche Mode, and Alien Sex Fiend all in the same night. It’s an unwritten story.34
The genre-free breadth of these musical selections makes a certain sense given Goa’s uniquely eclectic history. Joining India in 1961 after 450 years of Portuguese rule, Goa buzzed with a distinctly global vibe, and ever since American hippie Yertward Mazamanian (“Eight Finger Eddie”) set up a soup kitchen and party hut in Anjuna Beach in the mid-1960s, it had been a tourist destination, a no-man’s land where partyers from all over Asia and Europe mixed. By the 1980s, Goa was home to eight thousand westerners; as a state, it boasted India’s highest average income and lowest alcohol taxes.
Goa’s clubs have become chiefly known as a cradle for trance techno, but we can also think of them—along with those in England, Spain, and Germany that they directly inspired—as sites of recontextualizing music according to its sound. This sonic consideration especially makes sense in light of the instrumental edits that Goa’s DJs were spinning. This contributes to our social understanding of industrial DJing: just as Kraftwerk’s records in the late 1970s found new life in hip-hop culture when African American DJs in New York heard in them an untapped funkiness, industrial music’s popular expansion in the late 1980s isn’t tied just to the many changes in the music itself, nor merely to the commercial development of brands like WaxTrax! It has to do with the people who singled out the music’s sound for dancing, fluidly riffing on individual and collective identity simultaneously.
The intention here isn’t to situate Goa as a locus of industrial music’s history per se; open musical attitudes had flourished earlier in Europe and America in postdisco clubs, and of course industrial music had blasted in dance venues since Stevo Pearce DJed his Futurist nights—but certain connections can’t be ignored, and it’s important that we see industrial music of the late 1980s as part of a larger shift in clubgoing behavior. First and most directly, DJs such as Dave Mothersole brought back much of what they learned in Goa to the industrial scenes of London and Europe. He notes that his playlists were “mainly stuff like Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, Depeche Mode, Skinny Puppy, ClockDVA, Chris & Cosey, Neon Judgement,” but he and other DJs would spin synthpop, occasional punk records, rap artists such as Big Daddy Kane and Public Enemy, and even pop music with a sonic profile that matched the darker fare. He specifically recalls playing “Land of Confusion” by Genesis, which the crowd danced to even as the club’s management roiled in panic.35
A more important (if less direct) connection between industrial music circa 1988 and the DJ-driven genre-blending sensibilities that Mothersole witnessed at Goa is that the rise of industrial music’s popular profile coincided directly with 1988’s “second summer of love,” fueled by the newly available drug MDMA—ecstasy. Interestingly, one of the players in the UK house music movement was none other than Genesis P-Orridge, who had become enamored with the music in California and who in 1988 recorded an album called Jack the Tab with Fred Giannelli and some of his Psychic TV entourage, which was marketed as a compilation record having each track attributed to a different made-up band name. P-Orridge was among the first to use the word “rave” to describe an electronic dance event, and rock historian Dave Thompson writes, “P-Orridge is generally credited with creating the term ‘acid house’.”36 However, given the amount of important dance music coming to the UK from Ibiza, India, Belgium, Germany, Detroit, and Chicago, it’s probably safe to say that P-Orridge’s savviness with naming and with cultivating quasi-religious sentiment contributed more to the UK acid house scene than his and Giannelli’s music did; indeed, Simon Reynolds calls any claim that P-Orridge jump-started the scene a “self-serving myth,”37 a notion that Giannelli himself has corroborated.38
At any rate, the house music boom meant that new wave clubs and London’s deathrock destination the Batcave came face to face with the steady throb of German and English late-1980s techno. Just as industrial was stylistically blended in Goa (and before that in Ron Hardy’s Muzic Box in Chicago), now audiences heard proto-house music like Rhythim Is Rhythim mixed in with Front Line Assembly at places like the Hard Club in London, while Nitzer Ebb’s “Murderous” would find its way into the rave mix across town at Sunrise and Shoom. It’s not that the edges of genres became more permeable during this time—few mistook industrial records for techno—but rather, the edges of genres appear to have been less mutually repellant than at other times. This can be easily seen on the compilations that alternative music magazines and remix services assembled: a 1988 album by the DJ-only label Razormaid Records boasts the Frankfurt-based EBM act Bigod 20 alongside the industrially flirtatious Shriekback, Israeli chanteuse Ofra Haza, and the soulful onetime Peabo Bryson duet partner Regina Belle.
Industrial music easily partnered with other dance musics beyond England, too. Jeff Mills is a techno producer and DJ who had been a member of the Detroit-based industrial act the Final Cut. He remembers:
It was what was happening in Detroit at the time. Techno and industrial. Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, the more danceable things. Shriekback, Love and Rockets.… At some stage in Detroit they used to mix: the techno crowd and the industrial crowd used to party together. It’s a very segregated city so it didn’t last very long. The club owner got threatened that maybe something was going to happen. The industrial scene was more suburban, more white. The techno scene was predominantly black. We were partying together for a time, so this is where we were integrating, and certain people, certain club owners, certain clubs didn’t like it. They cancelled a lot of nights. They didn’t like the fact that black guys were walking out of the club with white women, and vice versa.39
The musical pairing was much less contested in Germany, where the electronic dance tradition of Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft and Kraftwerk fed into a techno style that toned down the African American influence of Detroit and Chicago house, instead playing up vast-sounding, reverberating minor-key synth textures. The most important club night of this sort in Germany was Technoclub in Frankfurt. Bigod 20’s mastermind Andreas Tomalla (later called Talla2XLC) had started hosting regular techno-industrial Friday nights in 1984 at a venue called Dorian Gray (run out of the basement of the Frankfurt airport to remain immune to curfew laws). After a few sleepy years, its attendance quickly ballooned from 1986 to 1989, so much that Tomalla had to relocate it three times, always in a larger space, ultimately settling on a two-thousand-person-capacity megaplex that he managed to fill for a decade.
As a musician, club owner, DJ, and label head (of New Zone Records and the industrial powerhouse Zoth Ommog), Tomalla exerted an inestimable influence on the Frankfurt sound of the late 1980s. Spurred on by the growing audiences who were happy to dance to nearly any kind of electronic music, he helped to shape a blend of breakdance, techno, EBM, synthpop, and new beat with his bands Bigod 20, Axodry, Micro Chip League, and Moskwa TV. Not unlike Al Jourgensen’s role as the common denominator of the Chicago industrial scene, Tomalla was ever-willing to team up with new cowriters and was astoundingly prolific. Though Tomalla’s label Zoth Ommog (founded in 1989) and his previous distributor Westside Music were home to rotating casts of collaborators, they lacked the debaucherous atmosphere of WaxTrax! So if Tomalla is less venerated in industrial music now than Jourgensen, then it might have to do with his comparatively coolheaded personality. Some of his music was also prone to unabashed poppiness more reminiscent of the day’s Stock Aitken Waterman’s Hi-NRG productions than of Throbbing Gristle. His music during the late 1980s, however, was ubiquitous in Europe’s dark clubs (especially his own). Micro Chip League even managed to score a minor hit in America with their 1988 single “New York” reaching number nineteen on the Billboard dance charts. Other Frankfurt producers, notably Sven Väth, straddled electronic dance genres similarly. Väth’s short-lived band OFF (Organisation For Fun) sounds today like awfully lite fare for industrial audiences, but the song “Zak,” an homage to “industrial kids,” lets slip the couplet “Nitzer, Skinny, and 242—a few examples that speak for you.”
Belgium was home to the most remarkable example of a participatory culture in which audiences and DJs socially and sonically recontextualized industrial records. The innovation here was a style called new beat, which, like Goa trance music, began as a sound discovered within and insinuated by a variety of musics including new wave and instrumental hip-hop B-sides. But most notable among these ingredients was EBM, Belgian through and through. New beat essentially developed out of the DJing style circa 1986 of “Fat” Ronny Harmsen at the cavernous, two-thousand-capacity Ancienne Belgique club in Antwerp, a music selection and approach to mixing so distinctive as to have been called “AB” music after the club’s initials. AB music was also broadcast on an electro radio show called Liaisons Dangereuses (named after the band) on Antwerp SIS, a low-watt radio station (103.9 FM). The music was popular enough that not only was the club full every week, but fans would drive from out of town to come within the broadcast range of Antwerp SIS so they could hear radio personality Paul Ward announce the name of the records that he and DJ Sven van Hees played; that way, fans would know which singles to pick up at USA Imports, Antwerp’s main electronic music store.
What Fat Ronny and DJs at important clubs such as Confetti’s did was to slow down largely instrumental records, smudging their uptempo pulse into a bassy, thick march in the 90–115 bpm range. As Ghent-based DJ Marc Grouls (of the club Boccaccio) explained in 1988, “Here in Belgium we can’t dance to an Acid record on normal speed—we can’t follow it because we don’t take drugs or anything!”40 The aesthetic they sought was an emotionless heaviness, a menacing calm. It was an idea that pointed directly toward industrial music’s fascination with disciplining the body and silencing the mind, but here the idea was less about frantic motion than embodying the unfazeable, the unstoppable.
The debut track “Flesh” by Ghent’s EBM act A Split-Second connotes these values well: a harmonically static bassline bores through the song, a steady kick drum restlessly thwaps, and after two patient minutes of instrumental preparation, lead singer Marc Ickx half whispers a brief lyric about “the duty of the beast,” declaring that “the outcome is always the same.” Aarschot-based Antler Records released it as a single in September 1986, but at just over 130 bpm, the song came across as a bit manic for the tastes of many.
Like Genesis P-Orridge’s debated role within acid house, there’s some disagreement as to exactly how and when “Flesh” set off the new beat craze. But if Marc Grouls was the first to call the sound “new beat” and to emphasize its Belgian-ness nationalistically, it was DJ Dirk “TeeCee” T’Seyen who first slowed down A Split-Second’s song by playing the 45 rpm single at 33 rpm plus 8 percent, putting its tempo at a cool 106 bpm. T’Seyen had been slowing down records with his Technics turntables since 1981, and he recalls:
I wasn’t the only one: several different Belgian DJs had the same kind of idea. The fact we met each other regularly at the USA Import had something to do with it for sure. I can assure you that New Beat wasn’t invented by one particular DJ in a certain club or that one single record started the whole New Beat-movement.41
But nevertheless, when he and DJ PC Patrick were spinning at a club near Ghent called Carrera in June 1987, he dropped “Flesh” and its mood aligned just right with the mean, slow trance that Belgian clubgoers had sought since Fat Ronny first hinted at it. “Everybody important from the Antwerp nightlife was there when I introduced ‘Flesh.’ That’s how the whole thing got going,” T’Seyen says.42 There was real demand for new music that similarly captured this mood. As was the case in both Goa and the UK, DJs and casual fans here saw new potential in industrial music that musicians themselves had not intended.
To some EBM and industrial bands, new beat initially seemed like an opportunity to find wider audiences, and many began carefully to sculpt midtempo grooves for their 1988 releases; Front 242’s “Circling Overland” is a good example. However, a trio of Belgian producers were already marrying the lurching beats of AB music with pop vocals inspired by the breakdance tracks that played alongside the industrial, and as owners of record labels and managers of nightclubs, they had better access to the growing audiences than any industrial band.
Morton, Sherman, and Bellucci (not their real names) flooded the Belgian dance market with hastily made but catchy releases, assuming a whopping thirty-four band names and putting out more than a hundred recordings in a year; they literally released a new single every week, having worked with a variety of quickly erected labels to do so—most notably Maurice Engelen’s imprint Subway, which merged with the musically aggressive Antler in January 1989. (Bellucci, incidentally, was actually Roland Beelen, Antler’s founder and a veteran producer in Belgium’s new wave and industrial scenes).
Their style still used the heavy quarter-note sampled kick drum of EBM and a chugging bassline, often provided by an Oberheim Matrix synth and always of extreme harmonic simplicity, but the blankly undead vocals of EBM were exchanged here for callisthenic entreaties to dance and have sex. Women’s voices became nearly as common as men’s. Among Morton Sherman Bellucci’s most successful new beat singles was “Move Your Ass and Feel the Beat” under the name Erotic Dissidents, which sold more than forty thousand copies in Belgium alone—the proportional equivalent of a million seller in the United States. As the title of the song might suggest, much of the trio’s output (and indeed most of new beat) was lyrically and conceptually concerned with dancing as an end unto itself. Similarly, “The Sound of C,” which was recorded by Confetti’s (now a “band” as well as a club) is self-reflexive, its lyrics inanely stating, “This is the sound of C… this is a new style of music.” That cut sold fifty-six thousand copies in Belgium. Without overstatement, it’s easy to assert that new beat quickly became a genre about new beat. The deluge of tailor-made dance far outsold the industrial attempts at crossover (called “hard beat” by some), and it ultimately led in a traceable way to the technopop of early 1990s European club music. For example, new beat act Nux Nemo was the brainchild of Jo Bogaert, who would later mastermind Technotronic of “Pump Up the Jam” fame.
A 1989 article from the Belgian pop magazine Fabiola is incisive about the music’s edgelessness: “The success of New Beat is therefore undeniable. There’s actually talk about a ‘movement’ that’s being compared to punk, but the one who’s missing completely in this picture is the ‘rebel’. New Beat seems to be quite conservative and very conforming to the established values. No better Yuppie-music than that.”43
It didn’t take long for the industrial musicians whose work had helped to spawn new beat to detest the genre. Though a small handful of lasting acts emerged from the craze, most notably Maurice Engelen’s project the Lords of Acid, new beat was badly overexposed by mid-1989. As Fat Ronny says, “After some time you really had enough of it.”44 The Subway Dance sublabel of the newly merged Antler-Subway folded in 1990, with the scene effectively having run its course (Antler-Subway for the most part went back to putting out industrial records). New beat’s movers and shakers largely split off into pop acts or joined in the growing rave bandwagon, which was much stronger in the UK and Rotterdam.
Let’s return once more to Chicago and grant for a few pages a bit more agency to musicians and music than we have thus far this chapter. An unignorable moment in the industrial boom of 1988 came in October with the release of Ministry’s The Land of Rape and Honey. Jourgensen had been collaborating with Paul Barker, Bill Rieflin, and a host of European industrialists on his WaxTrax!-issued side projects for a few years, but this was the first proper Ministry album with an extended lineup, and even though 1986’s Twitch had moved into full-on industrial territory, Jourgensen’s new bandmates spurred on and facilitated his desire to make even harsher, louder music.
It’s sometimes claimed that The Land of Rape and Honey was the first album to blend industrial music and heavy metal, but this is incorrect; beyond nods to such warhorse progenitors as Suicide and Killing Joke, antecedents include recordings by Swans, the French act Nox, UK-based Head of David, Texas acts the Pain Teens and Butthole Surfers (whom Coil’s John Balance especially enjoyed), and Detroit’s excellent Shock Therapy. But Ministry, by virtue of embracing sample triggers and quantization in addition to reverb-free guitar distortion, imbues EBM’s cleanliness with razorlike precision where most of these predecessors conjured a billowing swampiness. More directly relevant in Ministry’s case were the sound and recording techniques of Swiss act the Young Gods, whose overwhelming debut single “Envoyé,” released on WaxTrax! in 1986, sampled a ferocious guitar lick and looped it over the virtuosic drumming of Patrice “Frank” Bagnoud. Even though the Young Gods—alternately jazzy and Neanderthal in their ecstatic furor—tried to steer clear of the industrial scene, the song was prescient of Ministry’s emerging sound. Lead singer Franz Treichler even traded production notes with Jourgensen: “He invited us out to his place, he was really cool, he had a cool attitude. He wanted us to tour with him last fall with Ministry. But it didn’t happen because they hadn’t finished the album in time.… He liked the fast metal stuff.”45 Also important to note here is Big Black, whose guitar-plus-drum machine formula in the mid-1980s was rooted in an ultramasculine aesthetic; Rapeman was the dubious name of the band that frontman Steve Albini later went on to form. Chris Connelly remembers that as Big Black played shows at Chicago venues across town from WaxTrax! they
threw down a gauntlet of piously heterosexual indie rock to WaxTrax!’s gay dance club overtones, and it had a trickle down effect that never went away, at least that’s the way I read it (one thing is for certain, Albini and Al: not about to go fishing together). Al had something to prove.46
Albini corroborates with his characteristic brand of derision, “I’m pretty embarrassed that Ministry keeps putting out our records.”47
What Ministry had that Big Black and the Young Gods lacked was a major-label deal. The contract that Sire/Warner Brothers had drawn up was with Jourgensen himself—not Ministry—and it granted them first right of refusal on all projects (though a gentlemen’s agreement meant that most non-Ministry recordings went to WaxTrax!).48 Jourgensen in turn arranged with Sire label head Howie Klein to have total creative control over his own music. The big labels didn’t know initially how to market The Land of Rape and Honey, but they nevertheless provided a large promotional budget, and the album landed in the Billboard Top 200 at 164, eventually selling more than six hundred thousand copies in the United States. Most of this was on the strength of its lead track “Stigmata,” a song that skyrocketed the heart rates of pill-popping club kids and metalheads alike on account of its 152 bpm tempo and a snazzy pitch-bending guitar riff—“That’s played guitar, with a sax sample and a didgeridoo sample slowed down really low and bent—portamento. The guitars are real. We’ve never used sampled guitars,” says Jourgensen.49 Many of the album’s other songs followed a similar trajectory. Borrowing neither the postured constructivism of EBM nor the amorphous spookiness of Skinny Puppy, Ministry foregrounded the act of rocking out where previously it had lurked as a secondary, even shameful pleasure within industrial music.
Whether we’re considering the initial boom surrounding WaxTrax! or the role that industrial music played in spawning dance scenes and styles, or its new overtures toward metal subcultures, the cachet that the genre acquired in the late 1980s is rooted in the social process of its creation (e.g., collaboration in Chicago, Frankfurt, and Antwerp), in the music’s centrality at cultural hot-spots (such as the WaxTrax! store or Goa’s clubs), and in the way that casual and fanatic new listeners and musicians heard different possibilities in the sound (its contributions to trance techno and new beat, or Ministry’s adaptation of rock via the Young Gods and Big Black). Simply saying that the music grew in popularity suggests that somehow the music itself exerted its own agency and was acting on the wider public; to the contrary, the music itself was in many cases the object of public action. Industrial music’s cultural role, which its early makers staunchly asserted and attempted to control, was now in the hands of people who sometimes barely knew what it was and who were happy to treat it as just another way to party; hence it’s no surprise that after 1988 some derided industrial music as essentially the sum of techno and metal.
A number of the post-1985 musical changes were indeed connected to attitudinal changes, but the bigger shift during this era was in genre negotiation: as cachet translates to cash and the musicians start to matter less than labels, clubs, and DJs, an artistic genre can exchange the power to shape culture for the popular privilege of being shaped by it. Recall the discussion of genre in this book’s introduction, and how industrial music passed from being an avant-garde genre where aesthetics are negotiated to being a scene-based genre in which social roles within the larger community are at stake. Well, if there was ever a moment when industrial music became an industry-based scene—one that, according to genre theorists Lena and Peterson, appeals to hundreds of thousands of fans, engages with external sponsorship, and is culturally controlled by multinational corporations—then it would be the years that all this led up to, the decay of the 1980s into the 1990s.
Clock DVA – “The Hacker” (1988)
Ministry – “Everyday Is Halloween” (1985)
Ministry – “Stigmata” (1988)
A Split-Second – “Flesh” (1986)
The Young Gods – “Envoyé!” (1986)
ARCANE:
Fini Tribe – “I Want More” (1987)
Moskwa TV – “Generator 7/8” (1985)
Organum – “Horii” (1986)
Pig – “It Tolls for Thee (Pig Breath)” (1988)
Thug – “Fuck Your Dad” (1987)