DESPITE ITS TECHNO-OBSESSIVE RHETORIC, INDUSTRIAL MUSIC IS MADE BY PEOple, which means it has some kind of motivation behind it. The sounds that are satisfying for a musician to create are neither autonomous nor merely the sum of the artist’s record collection or training; instead we can think about the music someone makes as an expression and a marker of who she or he is—or wants to be—at that moment. By definition, this identity stands in relief against and in response to the surrounding world, so in understanding a music in its moment of creation—as the next few chapters on the first wave of industrial music seek to do—three questions in particular arise.
First, what are these musicians responding to? Answering this will help us situate industrial music in time and space, and it will probably tell us as much about its makers’ worldview as it will about their world. Second, how are these musicians responding to that stimulus? The “how” in this question refers to musical, political, and medial methods. Also, in a nonlinear way, this all can help us answer the first question, because an artistic response, when read carefully, can point back at the conditions that originally demanded it. Third, what assumptions underlie and make possible these responses? In the case of industrial music, the basic assumption is technological modernity, the notion that technology is a site of both hope and paranoia, at once able to ease our labor and to render us obsolete. Part I of this book addressed the third question: Burroughs and the Futurists together not only constellate a broad model of this assumed technological modernity but do so in a way that industrial music itself has privileged, reinforced, and explicitly referenced throughout its history.
Focusing then on these first two questions, the following few chapters look at some of the most important figures in the genre’s geographical hotbeds during its formative years of the 1970s and early 1980s. We’ll ask what qualities in the urban geography and cultural history of northern England, Berlin (with a brief excursion into West Germany), and San Francisco allowed industrial music to arise from these three spaces. Each contributed its own voice to the genre’s cacophony, and prior to 1983 effectively no industrial band achieved lasting importance without first passing through either these scenes or the global cassette trading scene (more about that in a moment). Understanding industrial music in this way can serve as a more insightful tool for tracing its motivations, character, and nuances than the boilerplate question of who “influenced” whom—surely the most tired of rock journalism clichés.
With a nod to the late Adam Krims, author of the exceptional book Music and Urban Geography, by looking at these spaces and the foundational industrial scenes that passed through them, we can see how early industrialists charted “a range of urban representations” that by extension can tell us a lot about industrial music’s literal “outlook” on the world.1
Finally, as mentioned, in addition to the musical geography of the era, in the last chapter of Part II we’ll look at how a vast network of musicians outside these cities managed to use technology to lessen the distance between them in building a global, egalitarian music scene with cassette tapes and zines. We’ll also highlight how this technology of placeless virtuality eventually left as strong an imprint on industrial music’s sound and popularization as any cityscape.