Chapter 18 concluded by noting the recurring worry over industrial music’s alleged demise—an accusation that in popspeak means not just that fewer people are producing and listening to the genre but that it’s “irrelevant” to culture at large, incapable of meaningfully commenting on or changing people’s shared experiences. Wholly biased by a personal affection for industrial music, this postscript attempts to frame the book in your hands as a musical reinvigoration rather than a eulogy. To do this effectively, we’ll ask some big questions about noise, perception, and politics, reconciling industrial music’s past and future with these reports of its death.
In the December 2010 issue of The Wire, editor Chris Bohn complains that “Most debates raised by [industrial] music still stall at its purportedly controversial nature.… The first generation claimed to be fighting an information war. Well that war’s over, the underground lost, and it’s high time nth-generation Noise and Industrial artists worked out new strategies for telling unpalatable truths.”1 Chris Bohn knows a thing or two about industrial music, having written in New Musical Express and Melody Maker about the genre since its early days. In 1987, under the name Biba Kopf, he was among the first writers to explore abjection as central to industrial music, and in 2012 he penned the foreword to a book about Test Dept. His 2010 claims ought to give us pause because we can easily see why they might be true: it’s laughable to suppose that a band from the modern industrial scene could ignite the kind of public fury that Throbbing Gristle or Laibach once did, or that critics from across culture would lionize them as they had Einstürzende Neubauten, or that they might outsell Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. As The Wire and a generation of hip journalists celebrate new variations on darkness and noise in hauntology, witch-house, dubstep, and whatever comes next, one is compelled to ask if the legacy of industrial music’s past is all it can offer to the future.
Pointedly reassessing industrial music’s goals will go a long way toward answering this question. If the music and its community have no investment beyond repeated and self-perpetuating pleasure in an unchanging aesthetic devoid of a shared larger politic, then we might as well reduce our discussion to musical formalism and social bookkeeping. But unless the preceding three hundred pages and the countless interviews, performances, and histories they dissect are completely misguided, then granting a consciously political dimension to the music’s creation and consumption is an easy step.
Music is made by people whose motivations and goals differ individually, and in the industrial community there’s of course a concern for sonic, bodily, and social pleasure, but taken broadly, the genre’s revolutionary posturing calls the question: Does industrial music aim primarily to stake out the icy antipode conceptually furthest from complicity, tradition, and beauty, planting its flag atop that noisiest summit climbed simply Because It Is There, or does it seek the tangible, real-world dismantling of tyranny?
Within industrial music, a recurring tendency that we’ve mentioned previously is its nonspecific ambiguity. Whether we’re talking about its attitudes toward technology or its politics, the open-endedness of the music consistently empowers (or burdens) listeners with its interpretation. This is strong evidence for the first of the goals just posited: the annunciation of extremes for their own sake, without regard to their specific practical implementation. One of the important ways that the genre offers up simultaneous extremism and ambiguity is through its pervasive use of noise.
Noise is sonically an extreme: pure white noise cannot get any noisier, and any signal amplified enough takes on qualities of noise. Noise is also shorthand in legal and engineering situations for any unwanted sound or data. Its extremeness and ugly undesirability makes it especially appealing to industrial artists and fans, and because noise is allegedly perceived as primeval, contentless, and random, these people can easily plug their own meanings into it. Noise is a wild card for bold metaphors, and it’s so ubiquitous within industrial music as to be nearly synonymous with the genre. This one of the many ways industrial music lays claim to extremity itself.
If industrial music’s goal is to stake out extremes, then it’s important that noise remain noise, both as a metaphor and as a perceived sound, resisting assimilation into order, beauty, and “music.” Noise as music gains access to cultural and economic legitimacy, fosters traditions and tropes, and can aspire to pleasure as a primary aim, but in exchange it forswears a certain absoluteness of autonomy and a position to critique music from the outside. Noise as noise, on the other hand, aesthetically underlies Genesis P-Orridge’s admonition that “beauty is the enemy.” It is an important strain of industrial music’s resistance.
Artists sometimes attempt to retain noise as noise through sheer Gorgon foreboding, but a more common and successful approach is to use process-based composition to conjure unpredictability, and by extension to evade assimilation. Bond Bergland attributes the unpremeditated excursions of Factrix to “some sort of host situation… we kind of developed an imaginary friend,” not unlike Coil’s encounter with ELpH, or the Burroughs-Gysin idea of the Third Mind.2 William Bennet of Whitehouse is infamous for mixing his albums by maxing out each channel’s volume at every point in the signal chain. Dirk Ivens took the same approach on Dive’s 1990 self-titled album, and to polish it off he slapped “To be played at maximum volume” on the sleeve. These practices fetishize noise as an act and a concept without regard to its sonic qualities.
Perpetually resisting assimilation means staying forever at the avant-gardes of art, which entails constant fluid change. This is in keeping with Chapter 13’s assertion that industrial music’s project is ideally an ongoing one. The spectacle’s recuperation shouldn’t stop artists from combating it; on the contrary, it’s a call to keep up the fight. That’s why Bohn wants musicians to develop “new strategies for telling unpalatable truths,” rather than give up. Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist International, understood the need for constant change. He wrote of the pan-revolutionary struggle, “It must be understood that we will be present at, and take part in, a sprint between independent artists and the police to test and develop the use of new techniques of conditioning.”3
In reality, this is hard to do. Ever-flowing radical change is precisely what Fluxus sought—hence the name—and even that movement receded into an historical event rather than remaining an ever-current project. Fluxus used a panoply of aesthetics, attitudes, and media; industrial noise is both aesthetically confined to darkness—hence the divide between it and friendlier, less confrontational noise genres—and medially restricted more or less to sound and its visual window dressing. Industrial music’s use of noise is basically a fixed, unmoving vision with static connotations of time and place—Europe in the 1980s, specifically. It may be an extreme of sorts, but it’s hardly cutting-edge, nearly forty years on.
What’s happened instead is that industrial noise has come to signify transgression instead of actually transgressing. Monte Cazazza’s “Candy Man,” an ode to serial murderer Dean Corll, may have shocked a few poor souls on its 1979 release, but by the time Pig put out 1995’s “Serial Killer Thriller” the effect of such art relied on a willful suspension of disbelief: it signified shock while shocking nobody. To his credit, Pig’s Raymond Watts knows this well:
As regards to the whole thing about shock value, I haven’t been shocked by a pop band or any kind of whatever the fuck you wanna call it industrial noise terrorist nah-nah-nah-nah-nah vomit-inducing bile-fucking shit-fucking fist-fucking super evil scary satanist fucking fuck band. I get a lot more scared by seeing the fucking National Enquirer than listening to anything on an industrial so-called subversive label. Forget the shock value stuff, I mean you’re preaching to the converted, pal.4
“As much as the use of ‘noise’ in industrial music operates as a tag, so does the historical legacy of provocation,” writes scholar Scott Lewis, affirming the genre’s indication of critique above any critical directness.5 The very notion of an historical legacy within industrial music is at odds with its supposed emphasis on innovation and revolution, encapsulating the central paradox of modernism: when the past has already been destroyed once, destroying it again is in fact reviving it. Philosopher Nick Smith puts a finer point on the issue: “Dissonance itself has become cliché. When the act of transgressing becomes ‘hot’, transgression no longer stands in a critical relation to culture.”6 How many times can we attend the Theatre of Cruelty and still feel properly violated?
Nick Smith makes the damning point that once radical art and protest are assimilated into mass culture, they’re not destroyed but instead boxed into a known, controllable cultural space where they can do their thing, operating under a delusion of radicality. Citing Marxist theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, he writes:
When noise becomes ensconced within commercial culture, it presents only an illusion of freedom and difference. As Adorno warned, where “the public does—exceptionally—rebel against the pleasure industry” it can only muster “the feeble resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972: 145). Crippled protests are integrated in the system and the status quo “embraces those at war with it by coordinating their consciousness with its own [because] what subjectively they fancy as radical, belongs objectively to the compartments reserved for their like” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972: 46).7
Is the noise-as-noise paradigm sustainable on any scale, then? Smith is doubtful, and he in fact criticizes noise culture’s self-importance as fundamentally misguided because of this: “Alternative music scenes and ideological movements have a history of generating delusional subcultures which stake out their territory and go to great lengths to defend their borders from attacks against their status as unique and liminal long after the gig is up.”8 Essentially, both he and The Wire’s editor Chris Bohn are saying that the large-scale process of assimilation bars noise and industrial music from actually doing the political work they lay claim to—and that if indeed the genre ever had the ability to translate its noisy metaphors for anarchic irrationality into real revolutionary moments, it certainly doesn’t anymore.
Derived from the pessimistic, high-modernist “Frankfurt School” of philosophy, Smith and Bohn’s argument is tough to contest. But within industrial music’s project of unseating rationality, the vantage point of this critique has some important blind spots. In Smith and Bohn’s view, noise’s qualities of randomness and ambiguity seem instrumental to its supposedly avant-garde aspirations because they act as a small-scale metaphor for a large-scale sense of revolutionary resistance to assimilation—the logic being that if industrial noise resists any structural or hierarchical understanding when we listen to it, then it can’t be fully grasped on the intellectual level, and hence it’s subject to no expectations other than its own. As Nick Smith writes, “The very process of making sense of noise sterilizes it.”9 Plenty of musicians buy into this notion to varying degrees; it certainly helps explain why Japanese noise legend Merzbow puts out releases like the Merzbox, a truly overwhelming fifty-CD set of grinding, arrhythmic noise: its size practically guarantees that no disc will ever be heard more than once, and hence learned. This also helps explain why some of the most hardcore scenesters insist that noise and industrial music steps in the wrong direction politically whenever it uses a steady beat—after all, what’s more predictable and containable than a 4/4 kickdrum at 120 bpm?
This line of interpretation assumes that antirationality is attempted through confounding the conscious mind; it presumes that listeners are trying to understand and control the music, and that it’s the music’s duty to short-circuit this effort (whether such an attempted understanding is the will of the listener or of some parasitic control machine of hierarchical thought—remember Burroughs’s idea that the virus takes over the host completely).
What if the path to irrationality isn’t by confounding the conscious mind, but instead through submerging it? It’s telling that Whitehouse’s Bennet refers to himself as an Animal Response Technician: he believes that the musician’s responsibility isn’t to outsmart the audience’s consciousness, but rather to stimulate a different mode of listening in which audiences willingly and preemptively disengage their rationality. As Jennifer Shryane writes in her book on Einstürzende Neubauten, “Listening to noise can take the form of a Dionysian experience during which individuality is abandoned and the limits of the senses are exceeded in the heightened state. The noise becomes a felt physical force—a physical phenomenon in space.”10
The fullest political explanation of this idea within industrial music comes from Diedrich Diederichsen, a media scholar who edited the German magazines Sounds and Spex back in his punk days. He argues that with the age of visibly domineering top-down public governance largely behind us, by and large, modern social control is a diffuse and technological game of “forced participation and encouragement to join in.”11 By offering endless stimulation, communication, and distraction, media culture “seeks to produce an intolerable state and a condition of will-lessness.”12 Because it’s much subtler, this advanced kind of control triggers far less resistance than brutality does, and it’s every bit as effective for centralizing power.
The hegemonic function of media and technology is to pull us out of ourselves and into a shared state of responsiveness, where regardless of how we react we’re all reacting to a controlled, external thing; we are summoned by the world’s stimulations. This view discards the specific content of media as being superficial, and so Diederichsen posits that the way media most meaningfully communicate is through the form of the content over time—the rhythms of amplitude and extremity.
Like this model of technocultural media, industrial music privileges extremity and amplitude, both sonically and conceptually. When we also remember how often industrial and noise music claim that the partisan details of its political imagery, samples, and lyrics matter less than their juxtaposition and their visceral kick, it’s easy to see why some artists find making and listening to noise so apt and powerful a commentary on the world today.
Diederichsen writes:
It is no accident that the hard, asemantic aesthetic has been embraced wherever especially marginal, endangered, and dangerous subcultures have sought to establish themselves, from Muslimgauze to Whitehouse, from Hanatarash to the early Laibach, whether their content was politically left-wing or right-wing and whether it involved sexual politics or a “deviant” approach to diet and nutrition: clearly, a relationship exists between the noise of the asemantic and the precariousness of a highly specific semantic dimension with which it is then connected.13
This relationship he’s talking about is one where the extremeness of the music’s cultural signs lines up with sonic extremes in timbre and volume to make rhythms—either as beats or merely as temporal events in beatless tides—and the music’s shape comes from these alignments of extremes. These coordinated “kicks” serve as metaphors to show us just how genuinely invasive the world’s medial “noise” is, and in doing so they offer us a congratulatory sense in recognizing them, an aesthetic appreciation for the neat alignment of the sonic with the conceptual, and the dirty horrorshow delight that comes with witnessing real ugliness. It all adds up to a “passive experience of overwhelm[ing], masochistic pleasure.”14
Diederichsen here is advocating a paradoxical kind of liberation, arguing that autonomy, subjectivity, and sovereignty over oneself aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The rallying cry of most progressive social movements is “freedom,” but the claim that he situates in this music is that modern freedom and the responsibilities of autonomy in fact only enslave and exhaust us: as subjects with free will, we choose and detail our identities from an artificially narrow, sanctioned range of media noise, or alternatively we might resist the invasive aggression of media, dogmatically asserting an autonomy whose parameters are in reality dictated by our fears rather than our desires.
Diederichsen proposes that in contrast, we can save ourselves a metaphorical beating by choosing to become a thing, by giving up on subjectivity and forfeiting that fight to control the noise and escape from it. This allows us to channel our attention toward a more sensorial, affective experience of feeling.
Throbbing Gristle’s slogan “Entertainment Through Pain” means thus recognizing “all the things observed by the culture-industry thesis, along with the situations described by paranoid Burroughs-based theories of manipulation and conditioning, as a single, monolithic pain programme.”15 Struggling autonomously against this pain only reveals the tragic inescapability of the control machines (what Diederichsen calls “Pain Through Entertainment”), but submitting willingly to the “pain programme” reveals pleasures unavailable through other ways of listening and being. Diederichsen identifies three in particular: first, submission preempts domination, allowing the “kick” to be a masochistic thrill instead of a combative assault; second, the summoning call to conformity intrinsic in media and rhythm can now suggest a communal sensation, the carnival instead of the gulag; third, reacting to the amplitude and rhythm of media and noise is a simpler and more bodily immediate pleasure than reacting to the contradictory knots that tangle its content, affording listeners an instinctual dérive of sensory experience.
These new possibilities are neither intrinsic to the music nor marked by tangible change in one’s political surroundings; instead they emerge from a new way of listening, and by extension, of being. Following through on the familiar industrial assertion that perception shapes reality, the revolutionary potential of this submission is apparent only to those who consensually submit. The meaning and reward of this internal revolution is really only available, then, to people whose physical needs are already met and who possess enough subjective autonomy to render submission a choice. In short, it’s the same kind of demographic blind spot that Chapter 14 exposed in industrial music. Historically (as Chapter 13’s discussion of fascism and irony revealed), industrial music and noise avoided issuing political demands specific enough to change this situation, because doing so would be seen as a capitulation to the rigged game of partisan politics. Through this avoidance, however, industrial music’s all-or-nothing politics suggests with grim entitlement that you’re on your own: altruism is futile.
This is a problem.
The revolution in the mind afforded by a submissive response to the deep formal kick of industrial noise is as individually fragile as it is collectively limited. Effectively a change in perceptual attitude, it’s prone to disruption during penetrating moments of self-awareness, and although Diederichsen differentiates between “an intellectual, ideological passivization and a sensory, nervous one,” it’s not clear that listeners consistently do.16 The most obvious evidence of this is “the unholy alliance of industrial music with SS men or other bastards,” born from the asemantic blankness of noise and from the focus on pure form that a submissive hearing requires.17 This blankness is almost inevitably painted over (or at least tinted) by the extreme political content that so often parades at the music’s surface; or alternatively it gives rise to an aesthetic of purity itself that is supposedly apolitical, troublingly close to the fascism that industrial music so often takes as window dressing, as we saw in Chapter 13.
Broadly, these are some of the problems that this book’s first pages address in their discussion of the “vacuum left by deprogramming.” These problems are enough of a reality that Throbbing Gristle saw fit to address them head-on when they bent weirdly into lounge music symbology on 1979’s comparatively beat-driven 20 Jazz Funk Greats. In fact, to Throbbing Gristle, providing listeners’ blank submissive receptivity with an inauspicious foreground subject was the correction of a mistake; the quartet’s sadness and vitriol toward the hopped-up thugs who mistook their systemic extremism for directed malevolence makes that clear. The commitment to this change is furthermore evident in Chris & Cosey’s dance stylings and Genesis P-Orridge’s championing of acid house music.
Despite elite noise fans’ suspicion that drum beats indicate selling out, consider instead their potential to offer a steady division of time (or a topical presence of pop) as a semineutral way of filling the void where rationality used to be—a hole that extreme noise can otherwise leave open to hate-based politics. Diederichsen concurs:
It was probably best for the pure effects to be directly hooked up to physicality in such a way that the bodies did the narrative themselves in the most compelling and accurate fashion: by dancing. In many respects, this is the best way to become a thing, an object buffeted to and fro, and still with sufficient headspace free to observe oneself and others with pleasure.18
Rhythm doesn’t surrender the music’s elusive power to heady apprehension, but in many ways it maintains the antirational industrial ethic by mapping itself onto the carnal, instinctual body in dance. Granted there’s a danger here of pop itself overrunning the deprogramming, but if the drumbeat’s suggestion that pop complicity is a lesser evil than tribalized violence seems milquetoast amidst revolutionary politics, then the abreactive commentary that EBM sculpted out of dance rhythms comes into focus as an important political turning point within the genre—yet another corrective measure over time. Thus from Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire to the present, we see nearly unanimous functional agreement on the steady beat’s political role in the genre, and more importantly by extension, the valuing of industrial music’s practical, real-world impact. Pure noise bands and the power electronics subgenre might stand at the gateway to some unattainable, chaotic Eden with a flaming sword in one hand and Might Is Right in the other, but as Guy Debord and Situationist coauthor Gil Wolman write, “Détournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and the least effective.”19
The potency of the pan-revolutionary against the control machines depends on contact between the two; noise can only redefine music when the two touch. Noise is the grandest articulation of a process whose tactics, in order to succeed practically, must be implemented at more nuanced levels. If industrial music constructs a future hell-bent on combating the pan-systemic nature of control only with noise eternally placed outside of music (noise as noise), then its role will remain symbolic rather than real, remembered wistfully as an ideological dead end whose sole plan for growth was to turn the volume knob higher and higher.
Industrial music’s relevance has changed because the world has changed. It’s eye-opening to realize how suspiciously close modern reality is to the cyberpunk dystopia that industrial music sought to avoid by preemptively situating as its revolutionary arena. Cyberpunk’s kinship with industrial music makes sense, given its roots in science fiction, and to a lesser degree, ecoterrorism—a radical defense of the last vestiges of a world free from economy, religion, language, and reason, essentially a Burroughsian dream.* A central narrative of cyberpunk and industrial music alike is that of a rogue abuser of technology unhinging the system with its own tools.
In her dissertation on industrial music, Karen Collins quotes Mark Hillegas, explaining that dystopia—central to Collins’s notion of industrial music discourse—is formulated on “the cataclysmic war which precedes the new state… the standardization of men and women, including artificial faces and numbers for names, the substitution of the manufactured (plastic flowers and trees) for the natural, and the familiar revolt against the machine.”20
But dystopia as fiction takes on an entirely less futuristic, if duller and more cynical, sheen when dystopia as reality is already in place. Between 1975 and the early 1990s, a cataclysmic war—the Cold War—ended, preceding a new global economy, and the academy and mass populace both gained admittance to previously limited telecommunications networks, ushering in a new era of internet access in which artificial faces and numerical names were the Usenet, BBS, and MUD standard. Today, email services prompt users to tack numbers onto their names, (comically) to avoid being mistaken for someone else. Furthermore, the musical revolt against the machine was a clear and polarizing benchmark of popular political culture, enacted both in the earnest antisynthesizer tirades printed on records by Boston, Queen, and Lou Reed and also through the sheer ironic mass of industrial music’s history—to say nothing of the cyclical battles for “authenticity” in indie rock and pop.
Even though industrial music has always been ethically concerned with the present, the genre’s aesthetics over its first decades expressly projected a future. However, the years leading up to and following the millennium have passed this future by, as Chapter 18 notes with regard to Apoptygma Berzerk. The genre’s widespread momentary popularity peaked at that pre-millennial moment of eclipse, but since the dreamed-of future became the past, industrial music hasn’t changed its tune much, which is why it can seem passé in the twenty-first century. As noise artist and media theorist Thomas Bey William Bailey writes:
The “retro” fascistic elements utilized by Laibach—uniforms, banners, rigid discipline and Wagnerian symphonic clarity—are, paradoxically, the same elements which distance it from more modern… emanations of fascism. Leading ultra-rightist politicians like Jean Marie LePen and David Duke have made it a habit to court mainstream respectability, opting for crisp business suits and jeans instead of military uniforms, and insisting, at least publicly, that their followers claim power through the ballot box rather than through guerilla actions and violent intimidations.…21
As we might see over this book’s preceding pages, the historical tides of industrial music’s cultural relevance and visibility have ebbed and flowed with its outermost thematic content and the way it handles rhythm and form. There’s actually no indication that its political tools of détournement and dérive ever stopped working; instead, industrial music’s crisis of relevance both in pop and in politics comes from a bad miscalibration of these tools. It’s no use détourning Hitler or dériving the battlefield for the umpteenth time. To become effective once more in revealing and reversing the meanings of controls signs, to undermine mediated communication and governance through ambiguity, confusion, and anger, industrial music needs to take on contemporary and specific signs. The Cold War is over. No, you can’t use you a swastika. Yes, you can still wear combat boots.
Zeroing in on how a new, effective industrial music might work, we can look to other musics of resistance that have made a tangible difference. Chapter 14 demonstrated that despite good intentions industrial music has blind spots when it comes to race. For a variety of reasons, then, the genre might do well to learn from African American music and the protest histories of other racial minorities. Compare for example the détournement that industrial music hurls so broadly at cultural authority with the more issue-specific critiques that hiphop voiced via noise and sampling in the 1980s and 1990s. Industrial concerns like technocracy, plutocracy, and theocracy haven’t abated since Throbbing Gristle’s day; in fact, they’ve considerably strengthened their grip on western culture. In contrast, though, hip-hop’s concerns of racial politics in the west have taken clear if interrupted steps away from brutal tyranny over the last thirty years. This is not to assert hip-hop’s direct causality in social change, per se, but the attention and influence commanded by the likes of Public Enemy and Ice-T derived from their specificity of critique and their willingness to work within major media systems—both tendencies that industrial music as a rule resists.
Thomas Bey William Bailey notes that no “contemporary power electronics artists have delved into the grisly specifics of the more recent genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur etc.—making one wonder if these purveyors of brutality truly have a sense of history beyond Anglophone and Western European spheres of influence.”22 If industrial musicians were more willing to refocus and take a cue from the nonwhite subaltern repertoire, then the misdeeds of control machines might reveal themselves in greater specificity, visibly dislodging a single brick from the wall instead of imperceptibly loosening them all. Aptly, another advantage of this change is the expansion of industrial music’s revolutionary potential beyond the internal revolution that Diederichsen describes, which depends frankly on a kind of class privilege. The politics of pan-liberation are relevant to all people.
To some industrialists, topical specificity or willingness to engage with mainstream media and commerce—especially after industrial music’s disastrous mid-1990s “sell-out”—might appear as unconscionable concessions to ephemeral culture or as assimilation by way of stooping to bleeding-heart electoral debate. As film historian Robert Ray argues incisively, however, “The avant-gardist’s typical complaint about assimilation seems misguided.”23 In an essay called “How to Start an Avant-Garde,” Ray points out, “To assume that increasingly rapid co-option will destroy the avant-garde ignores how much the avant-garde itself has, throughout its history, promoted its own acceptance,” adding, “The Impressionists, [who were] the first avant-garde, understood almost immediately that assimilation was a necessary goal.”24
Whether we’re discussing impressionism, hip-hop, or industrial music, each in its moment of historical ascent sought to expand the number and breadth of ways in which people can interpret and behave in the world. By charting new, unexplored territory, the avant-garde can be seen as expanding that very mainstream against which it contentiously pulls. This tense dialogue and contact is essential for change, and if the tension is absent, artists beware: it’s not because you’ve broken free of cultural controls, but because you’re flailing in a supposedly “radical” playpen that has been cordoned off for you. To effect real-world improvement, artists must accept the risk of noise becoming music in the name of increasing the possibilities for musical meaning. Artists must resist isolation and open their own work to continuous change and motion as they remain a step ahead of the assimilating agents who in their pursuit—and in spite of themselves—expand the borders of cultural options, one momentous stride at a time. This is a vital and often-overlooked aspect of the noise-as-music approach.
Early in this book we saw a tension over the “I-word”: exclusionist conceptions often delimit the genre in terms of sound, instrumentation, politics, era, or geography, while an inclusionist definition spans a wide range of highly varied so-called industrial music made for different reasons at different times. Whether exclusionists assert that “real” industrial music is Can or Throbbing Gristle or Skinny Puppy or Funker Vogt, this attitude denies the music’s capacity then and now to be part of the ongoing operation described at the end of Chapter 13, resisting assimilation not to escape forever from the mediated world of hidden hegemonies but instead to stretch, overfill, and inoculate that world against itself bit by bit as it swallows down the stuff of the pan-revolutionary in each little, inevitable recuperation. On the other hand, an inclusionist view of the genre isn’t just useful for writing a book about the history of music that people have called industrial; it’s politically important to any future artist or fan who sympathizes with the industrial desire for change because it maps out a continued and still salvageable revolutionary program. Understanding the variety of industrial music over time—even the corners of it that are too poppy, or too noisy, or boring—reinforces Chapter 2’s explanation of the music as process more than sound, but here we can understand the idea of process in the widest possible way. This approach safeguards against future industrial music merely sonically rehashing some favorite subgenre’s moment in nostalgia. From this perspective, we can eye the future optimistically but also assess the past with honesty, reaffirming the simple but important fact of industrial music’s continuity both in name and in pan-revolutionary attitudes and methods.
The industrial worldview casts reality as the perception of reality, and so we as audiences, performers, and scholars of industrial music have the chance to sculpt the music’s meaning and potential, depending on what we perceive to be the answer to this chapter’s opening question: What is industrial music’s goal? At this point, unless we deny the music’s continuity, its technological prescience in the 1980s, its millennial concerns in the 1990s, its politicization of rhythm, and the limits of purely asemantic expression, then staking out extremes for their own sake cannot and must not be the goal of industrial music. The ideal of noise as noise—invariably linked to exclusionist views of the genre—comes from an incomplete understanding of industrial music’s arguments, effects, practices, and history. Though we should eye carefully the manipulative economies of credibility, kinship, and lineage by which Cabaret Voltaire and VNV Nation somehow “sell” one another, a dose of inclusionism’s political practicality informs this book’s final idea.
If noise stands in for the most irrational and revolutionary in art, and music is metaphorically the known, predictable, contained world of governance, then industrial music’s power is neither simply a case of noise as noise nor noise as music; instead, industrial music can excite a sonic and symbolic frisson between noise and music, subversively rupturing their supposed border. In the spirit of Burroughs and Gysin, we can listen anew for a Third Mind between these two alleged positions, suggesting their binary opposition as a false one. Where raw noise à la Whitehouse or Merzbow reinforces the pairing with its in-or-out proposition, subtler uses of noise, both literal and figurative, can attack systems of control virally from within, and not just brutally from outside.
In her book Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, Joanna Demers writes, “In cases where some vestiges of conventional harmonic or melodic beauty linger, the role of noise, repetition, stasis, and distortion shifts to negative beauty… the desire for a return to conventional aesthetic language mixed with the knowledge that such a return is impossible.”25 And so it should be, as the likes of Susan Sontag and Genesis P-Orridge have warned us. Whether in worship of beauty or at war against it, the fundamentalist paths of purity are dangerous political roads. Consider then Snog’s 2010 “Sleepwalk,” a harmonically lush, slow song whose chorus slips unexpectedly to a major key. Over a breathtaking accompaniment from the City of Prague Philharmonic Choir, singer David Thrussell invites the listener to “Sleepwalk through this world with me, one nap at a time.” Snog here recognizes still that beauty is the enemy, but instead of fighting it with ugliness Thrussell turns beauty against itself: the song is unmistakably gorgeous, and its beckoning call to blindness, ignorance, and complicity reveals more about the hidden reverse of consensus aesthetics—and hence ethics—than a litany of accusations or a wall of distortion.
Is the direction advocated here really industrial music? Surely some will say no, but ask what matters more. A pop genre or a war’s end? A distorted TR-808 kick drum, or exposing the lies of broadcast media? Whether a song has guitars, or whether dogs died for your eyeliner? It’s true that a victory of this sort is far from the sublime destruction of gods and governments, money and meaning, but it’s a good start.
Beyond the stubborn obsolescence of simply reversing “music” and beyond the callous pessimism of purely internal change awaits this third option. It is a third mind: a future that has the potential to be more than the sum of music and noise, of the racial self and the other. It is the specific, the liminal, the absorbed extremity. It is the revolutionary.