Although industrial culture traces an unambiguous paper trail and philosophical heritage back to Futurism and Burroughs, less clear is its connection to previous musical styles that sought to liberate noise under a modernist mandate of innovation. The sonic precursors to industrial music are generally too numerous and too indirect to warrant much specific exploration in this book, but it’s worth digressing for a few pages to address the enticing grip that twentieth-century art music (or less precisely, “classical” music) has long held on industrial culture. There’s a vague but deep gut feeling that the two musics share a fundamental bond—that a hidden truth about industrial music lurks in the oeuvres of Arnold Schoenberg, Iannis Xenakis, and Philip Glass, encoded in the histories of musique concrète and improvisation.
Gracing the pages of Industrial Nation and other magazines every now and then, readers find broad, tentative articles surveying the development of the theremin or the rise of the Darmstadt School of composers. Bands and journalists perpetuate this supposed kinship without specifying it when they haphazardly drop names: “comparisons could be made to Front Line Assembly, Numb, Stockhausen, and Skinny Puppy,” declares Phosphor magazine in a 1993 review of the gritty UK dance act New Mind, offering little follow-through on Karlheinz Stockhausen.1 Industrial trio Covenant conclude their 2000 album United States of Mind with four minutes and thirty-three soundless seconds (on a track called “You Can Make Your Own Music”), nodding slyly to composer John Cage, whose silent 4’33” of 1952 may be the ultimate open question of what constitutes music; but the other ten songs on Covenant’s album are more or less all pop tunes with scarcely a trace of Cage’s vital indeterminacy.* And in the rare academic overview of industrial music, connections are only a little clearer, usually by way of an obligatory paragraph in which French composer Edgard Varèse’s name is sure to appear alongside mention of his allegedly proto-industrial works Ionisation and Poème Électronique.
Thankfully, we can largely sweep away this hazy uncertainty if we bear in mind a few guiding parameters as we trace industrial music’s connections with art music. First, art music in the twentieth century is exceedingly varied in its attitudes, techniques, and sounds, so when the time comes, we’ll need to specify just what music we’re talking about. Next, different aspects of art music feed into industrial music with greater or lesser influence, so we need to ask what parts of this music matter to industrial audiences. Is it the timbral sounds, the approaches to harmony or rhythm, a sense of long-range formal development, the attitude of the iconoclastic, the mixing of highbrow and lowbrow, the compositional techniques of synthesis or phasing, the radically new philosophies of chance and silence, the materiality of the music, or just the cultural fact of twentieth-century art music’s reputation? Finally, it’s useful to ask specifically how these musical elements are inspirational or ancestral to industrial music; they might be objects to imitate or to tear down, or they could be sonic starting points, rarified holy texts, theorizations, or perhaps they are texts to cut up, processes on which to meditate, or a canvas on which to piss.
In light of all the indirect ways that these musics might connect, it’s neither an accurate history nor a useful model to categorize western composers or works into mutually exclusive schools and make simple declarations of causality. Try considering it this way instead: a lot of western art music in the twentieth century can be broadly plotted as combinations of three general artistic tendencies that arose more or less in order and came eventually to coexist, to be reasserted, and to respond to one another. These different visions were as much ideological as sonic, because each one implicitly makes assertions about how art should ideally be experienced, and by whom.
We might describe the first common tendency as having sought musical progress by blazing forward down a long-inherited trajectory of classical music’s alleged evolution, racing to lead the compositional pack at the foremost extremity of harmonic tension and formal organization. We can think of this tendency as traditionalist, because although the sounds of the previous century were themselves passé during the 1900s, they acted as guideposts to the future. The second tendency envisioned a way forward not by continuing classical traditions but by tearing them down along with their supposed modern inheritors. This mind-set was reactionary in replacing composition’s traditionalist practice of directed harmonic research with a focus on radical new timbres, un-“classical” instruments, and eclectic stylistic palettes. The third tendency arose from the view that attacking tradition meant recognizing—and thus validating—its grip on the present, and that furthermore, those who most specifically counteracted tradition managed in the process to identify themselves as targets for assimilation into its preservational, academic, and cultural institutions as safely “controversial” new voices. Instead then, this third tendency sought out ways to make music unconcerned with moving unilaterally “forward”—even unconcerned with being “music” at all. We might characterize this artistic tendency as anarchic because it purports to reject heritages, hierarchies, binaries, and other deep preconceptions.*
Each in its own way, these three tendencies perpetuated the modernist obsession with originality that dominated western art throughout the whole century. Whether taken as exclusive dogmas (which was rare) or as combinable strategies (far more common), these three tendencies all sculpted music that expanded the art form to new extremes, pushing into unexplored, often ugly territory. This is rightly part of why so many industrial artists and fans recognize twentieth-century art music’s relevance; industrial music is necessarily invested in extremes.**
For a few reasons, the traditionalist first tendency offers industrial music relatively little as either a philosophical orientation or a repertoire. Immediately problematic is its reverence to the past (even as it looks to the future). Indeed, it’s rare for industrial musicians to boast any “classical training” because not only are such declarations the meaningless stuff of amateur press releases but they are nearly always attempts to legitimize the genre with reference to a regressive conservatism. Granted, in its taste for the epic, industrial music occasionally wolfs down the leftovers of goth’s indiscriminant feast upon western culture circa 1000–1900 AD, giving rise to pseudoclassical oddities like the bands E Nomine and Will, and more dubiously, tributes to Johann Sebastian Bach by Die Form and Laibach (both released in 2008).* But it’s more often the case that in their quest for immediacy and the rejection of tradition, industrial musicians begin their careers with no formal knowledge of music. This is connected to a second reason why high modernists such as Arnold Schoenberg and Milton Babbitt are not really part of the genre’s inheritance: their music is driven by (and indeed it usually sounds driven by) harmonic and organizational details that few in the industrial community have seriously ever studied, fewer have mimicked, and even fewer still want to listen or dance to. Especially since the mid-1980s, the overwhelming majority of industrial music is, by the standards of traditionalist art music, both tonally and rhythmically conservative, sticking to stable keys and regular groupings of steady beats. Bands such as Zia and Vampire Rodents gesture to more adventurous tonal realms with their occasional digression into alternative tuning systems, but as Zia’s Elaine Walker indicates on her website, “I compose microtonal music strictly by ear and leave it to others to analyze, so you won’t find ratios or mathematics here.”** Her statement also reveals a third disconnect between traditionalist twentieth-century composition and industrial music: by rejecting the old mind-body divide of Descartes and embracing physicality, industrial music seems morally opposed to traditionalist attitudes such as Milton Babbitt’s famous 1958 suggestion that not only were audiences not worth wasting complex music on, but performance (and possibly even hearing) itself got in the way of this music’s proper systemic presentation. The fact that many have referred to this strain of composition as “eye music” stands in clear contrast to EBM’s “body music.”
Traditionalist approaches to composition at best buttress industrial music’s broadly modernist revolutionary spirit, but the second aforementioned tendency’s reactionary approaches bear much closer inspection. Specifically, reactionary art music of the twentieth century has in some ways provided the genre with actual sounds. This approach to art music often privileges rhythmic or sonic detail, manifesting in works by Henry Cowell, tape music pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, and Varèse and Stockhausen. The scope that these composers encompass is very broad in its time span, in its set of specific compositional techniques, and in its specific ideologies within an overall reaction against tradition. But for our purposes, this breadth matters relatively little because to most industrialists who confronted this music (and arguably to most nonspecialist audiences), its compositional concerns about large-scale shape and process may seem less revolutionary than its immediate surface-level incorporation of noise, percussion, and the timbres of synthesis and tape. It’s telling that in 1995, after Stockhausen himself was asked by a journalist to listen (for the first time) to electronica by popular artists who cited him as an influence (such as Aphex Twin), he roiled, “I wish those musicians would not allow themselves any repetitions, and would go faster in developing their ideas or their findings, because I don’t appreciate at all this permanent repetitive language,” betraying a resolutely classicist take on the large-scale treatment of small-scale noises.4 In light of industrial music’s attitudes toward tradition, hierarchy, and the body, Stockhausen’s opinions seem positively relical when he continues, “Music is the product of the highest human intelligence, and of the best senses, the listening senses and of imagination and intuition. And as soon as it becomes just a means for ambiance, as we say, environment, or for being used for certain purposes, then music becomes a whore.”5 The infamous Prostitution exhibit of Throbbing Gristle’s precursor troupe COUM Transmissions leaps to mind here as an appropriately contrasting view of whoredom itself.
It’s not a surprise, then, that the way industrial musicians directly deal with this second tendency in twentieth-century art music—in which Stockhausen’s name appears to carry special weight—consistently illustrates just how little they really absorb its values. Across the wide industrial spectrum, perhaps the only compositional element reliably shared from Cabaret Voltaire to Combichrist and from Die Krupps to Doubting Thomas is the sonic use of noise, and so regarding the superficially noisy art music of the reactionary strain, industrial music operates like a cargo cult: Cowell’s detailed writings on polyrhythm and an academic understanding of acoustic Fourier transformations have nothing to do with a performer’s thrill in overpowering an audience with a distortion pedal.
Here are some examples of the shallowness with which this stuff carries over into the genre. Laibach’s “Die Liebe” and Severed Heads’ “Acme Instant Dehydrated Boulder Kit” (both from 1985) sample works by Stockhausen, but both lock the sampled formal complexity onto a simple 4/4 rhythmic grid. Steve Law of the band Zen Paradox gives away the game of reducing this music to timbre when he says in a 1995 interview with industrial zine Music from the Empty Quarter, “I listen to a lot of avant garde and classical music like Ligeti, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and John Cage, which I can also use for sampling purposes, some of the sounds they create are absolutely incredible.”6 Similarly, the members of Zoviet France, according to founder Ben Ponton, are fans of “Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez, and Luciano Berio,” but like Steve Law, Ponton seems to focus exclusively on the sound itself, continuing, “We’re just as much into Motorhead as we are into Stockhausen. I think the common factor in all of it is an element of noise really. Noise is a non-musical sound format, which you find in Motorhead just as much as you do in Stockhausen.”7 Focusing like this on the surface of art music downplays its contextual order and relations—which Stockhausen maintains are central.
To a handful within the industrial scene, this is old news. A 1982 issue of the zine Flowmotion affectionately calls Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and 23 Skidoo “garage Stockhausen dilletantes”8 [sic], and Genesis P-Orridge in 1981 maintains that the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Nurse With Wound, and NON just “play music that is amplified. I don’t think it’s electronic music. That implies some kinda Stockhausen.”9 Similarly, in a 1980 interview, Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire confirms, “Any avant-garde music we’ve picked up on is a secondary thing, and we realised the parallels between them and us, but it hasn’t been a conscious decision where our music is supposed to parallel that. We’ve only realised it in retrospect,”10 later adding, “I’m sure people think we grew up with Stockhausen.”11
We shouldn’t let the superficiality of industrial music’s connection to reactionary art music cast a negative light on the genre. In fact, far from a point of criticism, this tenuity is evidence of a vital political difference: it’s often asserted that composers such as Schaeffer and Cage believed part of their mission was to musicalize noises, but in contrast, industrial music retains part of its confrontational power by unapologetically treating noise as music’s dangerous outland. Although the genre may not fully accomplish the mission to “exterminate all rational thought” (as issued in David Cronenberg’s film of The Naked Lunch), it’s nonetheless a step in the right direction when Test Dept. rehashes the sonic texture of John Cage’s 1939 First Construction (In Metal) while unharnessing it from the meticulous structural considerations that aspire to make it “more” than angry clatter.* To the industrial mind-set, angry clatter is good; visceral chaos trumps ordered rationality—at least in nonironic settings. This is evident in the improvisatory phrase lengths shown earlier in à;GRUMH…’s “Ayatollah Jackson,” and it is taken to extremes in a piece such as Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Seele Brennt,” where the timing of the work isn’t governed by a metronome but by lead singer Blixa Bargeld’s pulse, irrational and carnal. Naut Humon, a member of first-wave industrial act Rhythm & Noise, articulates this pre-intellectual approach when he says, “I saw a bridge between Hendrix and Stockhausen. The challenge was to understand noise in an emotional manner.”12 To industrial music, the most appealing components of art music are noise, ugliness, and the force of the moment, and so in turn these are the features most consistently adapted from the reactionary second tendency.** This is why it’s easier to draw musical connections to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music or to the Intonarumori that gave Russolo childlike glee than to Schaeffer or Varèse.
By rejecting high-minded fixed structures and old belief systems in lieu of immediacy, industrial music—as “serious” composition pertains to it—is most productively informed by music of the twentieth century’s anarchic third tendency. These musics share a number of attitudes in common—such as the belief that challenging and provoking an audience can be a productive goal rather than a failure of communication—but beyond ideological similarities, there’s a comparatively significant mass of evidence that suggests real historical connections. To begin, let’s look very briefly at two American works from the early 1960s that exemplify the anarchic tendency.
La Monte Young’s 1960 “Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H. F.” is scored for a massive cluster of noise to be repeated loudly and precisely, sounding every one to two seconds for a predetermined but variable number of iterations.* Performers most often play it in fortissimo arm-length blows to a piano. The effect is invariably jarring, and by most listeners’ standards oppressively unpleasant. Critics’ interpretation of “Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H. F.” has been consistent over time: focusing less on the noisiness and more on the demands of precise repetition, Marjorie Perloff emphasizes that the piece shows, “as Gertrude Stein had already taught us, that there is no such thing as true repetition.”13 To John Cage, it revealed that “the same thing is not the same thing at all, but full of variety.”14 Composer Cornelius Cardew takes the idea a step further when he writes, “What the listener can hear and appreciate are the errors in the interpretation. If the piece were performed by a machine this interest would disappear and with it the composition.”15
But this musing rings false to those of us who are inured to latter-day industrial music’s mechanically exact repetition. There can be musical value in tyrannically overwhelming and silencing listeners—perhaps just as much as one finds by empowering listeners to seek out humanity within noise. And this other way of hearing the piece not only represents the industrial take on Young’s work, but there’s a good argument that it represents Young’s own view as well. In 1960, composers such as Erik Satie and John Cage had already raised musical questions about repetition and performance using much less confrontational methods, so it’s clear that the piece’s aggression isn’t merely incidental to the goals that Perloff, Cage, and Cardew identify. Rather, the work’s darkness is a necessary part of its appeal. When Young himself performed the piece in 1961 as “1698,” his 1,698 repetitions surely became more an exercise in surrendering the body and mind to musical structure such that the varying precision of those repetitions may well have come to matter less than their inevitability, amounting to a decidedly industrial effect. Vitally, Young himself empowers this reading when he specifically articulates that the creation and enjoyment of “good” art—perhaps along with morality itself—is a control machine to dismantle, even as it operates from within each of us. In “Lecture 1960,” a prose performance containing the one-word paragraph “Anarchy,” the composer famously writes:
Often I hear somebody say that the most important thing about a work of art is not that it be new but that it be good. But if we define good as what we like, which is the only definition of good I find useful when discussing art, and then say that we are interested in what is good, it seems to me that we will always be interested in the same things (that is, the same things that we already like). I am not interested in good; I am interested in new—even if this includes the possibility of its being evil.16
Importantly, the “new” that he talks about here is a nondirectional, nonteleological one, thus differing from the traditionalist and reactionary preconceptions of “progress,” which were synonymous with “good.” Witnessing the power of the nongood and the primally regressive, Young directly foreshadows some vital ideas underlying the industrial genre’s cruelest musical manifestations and its gloomiest theatrics.
Another relevant example of anarchic musical cruelty is 1964’s “The Wolfman” by Robert Ashley. A work for voice and tape, the score indicates that the performer be a “sinister lounge singer,” but the real source of menace lies in the extreme volume boost on the microphone that makes every point-blank whisper and lip smack a searing torrent of overmodulation and clinging feedback. Listeners who can endure the performance are treated to fifteen minutes of Ashley’s own intimate human noises made grotesque, all-enveloping, and machinelike through amplification. The sleeve photo on the accompanying album is fittingly an extreme close-up of Ashley touching the microphone to his mouth, wearing ultra-hip black shades. More than Young’s piece, “The Wolfman” resists coolheaded philosophizing; its discourse is unambiguously monstrous, right down to its title.
The drive to create a viscerally powerful, unpredictable experience grants tactical validity to shock and disgust—and indeed as Young says, even to evil. Whereas these experiences had been by-products or simply aesthetic décor in previous music, here horror and oppression take on a functional, structural power. As part of the repertoire of anarchic thought, darkness was explored alongside humor and boredom, which helps explain why most of what Ashley and Young wrote wasn’t as confrontationally grim as these pieces, but regardless of mood, their overall output is nonetheless consistent in its industrial-friendly concern with immediacy. Ashley’s use of electronics was enlivening, often based on real-time performance through processing and amplification (in contrast to the frozen, premeditated laboratory assemblages by the likes of Stockhausen), and Young helped solidify his legacy by compiling 1963’s Anthology of Chance Operations, a collection of works that bypassed traditional musical scores, largely obsolesced performers’ rehearsing and training, empowered and alienated cultured and unschooled audiences alike with democratic even-handedness, and broke down walls between music, theater, poetry, and art. The musical aesthetic that would become central to industrial music was thus in place by the early 1960s within art music, but it was not yet singled out, existing instead as one of many ways to throw away old preconceptions. It surfaced in the nastier, confrontational moments to which many new composers were prone but in which few if any expressly wallowed.
There are a handful of direct and careful borrowings from this music on early industrial records: after witnessing a revelatory 1979 concert of Steve Reich’s music, Jim G. Thirlwell of the Australian act Foetus began using Reich’s phasing practices on his early albums, and Nurse With Wound lifts a beatless ninety-second sample of John Cage’s “Credo in Us” on 1980’s “Ostranenie.”17 In particular, the focus on repetition in works by Reich, Young, and Glass is shared by many industrial artists, as pervasively illustrated throughout this book, but even though mimicking the noisy timbres of reactionary art music largely misunderstands that music, repetition here is an act, and not a sound. Specifically, repetition is an act best understood through mimicry—for what else is it besides self-copying? Thus, industrial music’s imitation of anarchic and quasi-minimalist art music doesn’t encounter the same structural misunderstanding to which its aping of Stockhausen was prone.
But beyond all this, the most important connections between anarchic twentieth-century composition and industrial music aren’t so imitative; indeed, the fact of art music generally has more of an impact on industrial music than its content. Rather, the most vital connections are often indirect, spawned from the primordial fertility of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ artistic zeitgeist that anarchically broke down barriers between high and low culture, between artistic media, and between personal and political expression. There are lots of ways to illustrate this, but three serve particularly well in getting the point across.
Historically important to industrial music is its connection to Fluxus, an international democratizing art movement that didn’t define itself through any one aesthetic but instead sought the eternally new cutting edge of art, whatever that was in any time and place. Through this approach, Fluxus viewed itself as ever-changing and incapable of becoming passé; it sought to integrate art and its effects into daily life. Chapter 7 discusses Fluxus in greater depth, but for our purposes here, it suffices to say that the movement’s radical assertion of an ever-progressing avant-garde resonated with both Genesis P-Orridge and La Monte Young, who was for a short time quite central in the movement. It’s safe to assume that through the wide networks of Fluxus, people like Boyd Rice of NON heard the music and meaningfully encountered the ideas of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Charlemagne Palestine. Fluxus was widespread, eclectic, and certainly unfocused, but it serves as an unambiguous historical meeting ground between pioneers in both art music and industrial music.
A second connection comes to us through the Velvet Underground, whose 1967 album with the German chanteuse Nico is a central reference point for nearly all innovations in rock music since. Industrial music’s pervasive obsession with repetition and noise and its hero worship of the Lou Reed coolness that David Bowie would later seize upon are just two easy connections to draw. It’s also worth acknowledging Clock DVA’s cover of the Velvet Underground’s “The Black Angel’s Death Song” and the full-album remake of Nico’s entire Desertshore that former Throbbing Gristle members released in 2012. The Velvet Underground’s link with anarchic art musics comes through its member John Cale, who performed, composed, and recorded alongside Cage and Riley in the early 1960s prior to the band’s formation. With Young, he helped organize the Theatre of Eternal Music in the mid-1960s, which experimented with drone music. Cale himself had even played “Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H. F.” during solo concerts in 1963, banging on a piano with his elbows while kneeling before it, as if worshipping ugliness itself. Without directly carrying over these experiences to industrial music’s language, Cale was as responsible as any musician for exposing pop at large to the techniques, sounds, and personalities of twentieth-century art music.
A third clear line that we can draw between art music’s anarchic tendency and industrial music is visible in what record collectors call the “Nurse With Wound List,” which was published in the liner notes of Nurse With Wound’s first two albums, 1979’s Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella and 1980’s To the Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl. The list features the names of 291 musicians or groups whom Nurse With Wound’s members at the time—Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill, and Heman Pathak—considered especially important or influential. Most were (and still are) outlandishly obscure. As important early figures in what came to be called industrial music, Nurse With Wound effectively issued with the list a declaration, a challenge, and an assignment to the hungry obsessives who constituted nearly the entire industrial fanbase of 1979. Fothergill explains that the list wasn’t arbitrary or showy: “Steve or I had at one time or another almost every record that [all those artists] released.”18 In so carefully presenting their music as the sum of the list’s influences, Nurse With Wound effectively proclaimed a kinship between their nominally industrial work and that of the musicians on their list. Its inclusions range from noise bands to jazz improvisers to psychedelic freakout acts, but there is a clearly identifiable lineage of composers on the list too: Cage, Ashley, Alvin Lucier (who was Ashley’s collaborator in the Sonic Arts Union), Cardew, Reich, Riley, and Young.* These names amidst the list’s variety affirm that even though industrial music is no simple inheritor to classical music’s radical bloodlines, its claims of muddy bastardy are tough to deny.
The anarchic avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s is thus the closest industrial antecedent within art music by virtue of its compulsion for immediacy (the root of its occasional shock imagery) and its traceable connections to the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound. The messy indirectness of these connections both contributes to and possibly stems from a sense that noise, confrontation, immediacy, and repetition were very much “in the air” at the time of industrial music’s inception. This leads us to one last observation.
Consider how the desire to tear down inherited preconceptions is shared by industrial music’s forebears: radical art music unseats a preoccupation with hierarchical form, Debord and the 1968 rioters sought to unmask the spectacle, the Futurists wanted to sever all ties to the past, and Burroughs tried to reveal that the human condition itself was conspiracy. When Eno writes that art music of this third tendency was “so explicitly anti-academic that it often even claimed to have been written for non-musicians,” he implies that once music gets too structurally fixed—or learning gets too academic—then it loses its liberating power.19 If we recall from a few pages ago the idea that artistic strategies make assertions about how art should be experienced and by whom, then we can see that Eno, as if speaking on behalf of all of industrial music’s revolutionary ancestry, inscribes a community of people who are anti-elitist, who do not divorce the body from the mind, who value immediacy, and who distrust authoritative institutions and their rationalizing verbiage of misdirection. Eno, and with him the industrial genre, thus privileges a class that is intellectually and politically engaged, but not academic—one that believes in the aesthetics of political change as much as any detail of its implementation.
The role that noise and revolution as ideas played in the fecund cross-pollination of the late twentieth-century zeitgeist can carry this idea further: the anarchic attitudes that spread in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s throughout performance art, racial protest music, novelty pop, No Wave, experimental jazz, drug-inspired psychedelic jamming, early hip-hop, and dub reggae all help us see the industrial community as part of a larger whole. Cultural critic Greil Marcus gestures toward some of these moments alongside Situationism and Dada in what he calls a “secret history of the twentieth century,” capping his narrative with punk rock, but for our purposes, we might give here a slightly new inflection of meaning to what Marx and Engels call the “revolutionary class.”20 It’s useful to know the roots of industrial music, but when we see how they extend in parallel to distantly related contemporary branches we can understand the genre as belonging to a family marked by questioning, immediacy, and the demand for change. This is an important idea that we’ll return to much later in this book.
The industrial community sometimes wishes to hear in the noise and dissonance of high modernist music an ancestry more direct than history, analysis, or ideology bears out. Conjuring connections to twentieth-century art music without understanding its historically competing values makes for haphazard revisionism, and even though some important links do exist, understanding how and why they exist is crucial. This is because justifying industrial music vis-à-vis “classical” not only misses the point of both musics, but it risks symbolically yoking whole communities and classes of people to the hierarchies of tradition and control they seek to topple. Recognizing the nature of musical and philosophical kinships, then, is vital to this music’s past, present, and future alike.