EARLY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, “INDUSTRIAL MUSIC” MEANT THE MUSIC played for or performed by workers to facilitate their labor.1 In its broadest definitions, industrial music could refer to dustbowl field songs and maritime shanties, but by the mid-1930s it especially denoted recorded music, piped through loudspeakers by such corporations as Muzak, RCA, and General Electric, into already noisy factories.2 At the height of World War II, The Musical Quarterly boasted, “In facilitating the all-out war production effort, music has been found a valued ally, judging by the phenomenal increase of plants, arsenals, and shipyards using it. … On the assembly line, music is applied to such prosaic objectives as speeding output, relieving fatigue, reducing accidents and absenteeism, bolstering morale.”3 In the same article, workers noted, “if you are on a bad job, the music most certainly helps you to forget it and stops you from grumbling.”4 It was so effective that industrial music was in fact declared by the English government as mandatory fare in military factories, and so the BBC themselves pumped out the tunes, ranging from foxtrots to Viennese waltzes to Brahms.
This was a functional music, not consumed as art but disseminated to streamline workers’ efficiency, decrease their emotion, increase reliability, and promote unity among them. In short, it was played to make humans as machinelike as possible: no mistakes, no dissent, no slowing down. Any irony that modern “industrial music” casts on this original “industrial music” is intentional. In seeking to reveal the coglike role that people play in a larger system of control, the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire saw technology as both a component of hegemony and an easy metaphor for it.
The next few chapters demonstrate how and why this came to be. Specifically, industrial music’s perspective on humankind’s relationship to technology has historical roots that reach back over three centuries, but whose most relevant articulations arrived with the revolutionary technophilia of Italian Futurism and the antiauthoritarian techno-paranoia of American author William S. Burroughs. The understanding of technology, art, and power that Futurism and Burroughs together convey are two sides of the same coin, comprising an intellectual precondition for industrial music’s belief systems. As we’ll see, the literary and philosophical ideas behind industrial music often matter to musicians and fans of the genre at least as much as any sonic forebear; this is evident in that the variety of sounds encompassed by this thing called industrial music is far more wide-ranging than its attitudes. Finally, concluding this conceptual prehistory are a few pages devoted to the important question of just what—if anything—industrial and “classical” art music have to do with one another.