THE NARRATIVE UP TO THIS POINT HAS ALLUDED TO A VARIETY OF POTENTIALLY alarming aesthetic and political themes in industrial music without really stopping to offer them fuller consideration. What are we to make of allegedly anarcho-leftist music that takes inspiration from serial killers, from European militarism, from Mussolini-loving Futurists, and from obsession with order, or replication, or disgust? And beyond questions of how we today are supposed to react, what have fans and political ideologues historically made of this music?
Having looked at industrial music through the mid-1980s, we’re at an apt moment in the story to pause and ask these questions, because, as we’ll see in Chapter 15, the late 1980s functioned as a vital period when the genre’s popularity expanded rapidly beyond the urban underground of Europe and the United States. Given industrial music’s use of polarizing and totalizing signs, the mere fact of its public spread is remarkable, and to get more specific, the way that audiences both shape and are shaped by the confounding messages of extremism and détournement makes for a telling case study in music and marketing, in race and resistance.
The following section’s two chapters consider the intentional extremism and inadvertent blind spots of industrial music. Although the genre’s characters and musical tools have changed over time, concerns over its political goals prove perennial. Both to illustrate the continuing centrality of these issues and to address them comprehensively and with relevance, these chapters temporarily step beyond the book’s chronology thus far, opting to include examples from industrial music’s more recent years alongside earlier ones.