Art historian Nicolas Ballet’s Shock Factory is a book seemingly at odds with its subject, industrial music, at every possible level. This 500-plus-page tome is the very model of professional scholarship. It is the work of years of research, with interviews going as far back as 2014. It weaves in citations across the disciplines: music journalism, art criticism, literature, literary history, and philosophy. It presents a trove of archival material: intentionally ungrammatical manifestos, obscene collages, confounding film stills, cut-up texts, and some truly agonizing recorded material. It is a thorough, refined exploration of a most dissonant art, by which music, as movement founder Genesis P-Orridge put it, “is degenerating marvelously into noise.” With a patience that is nothing short of superhuman, Ballet brings coherence and context to a uniquely renegade counterculture that waged sonic and visual warfare against both.
Not that the impressive effort is sufficient to justify the endeavor. If all underground movements have two origins — one for its participants, the other for everyone else when the underground reaches capacity — the dual origins of industrial music are equally obscure. The second, in fact, seems more gladly forgotten for those of a certain age. Some remember their older siblings circa 1994 trading in their flannel and denim for mesh and leather, their Nirvana for Nine Inch Nails, and their lazy sarcasm for exacting German. Industrial of that vintage, essentially heavy metal you could dance to, had quite a vogue. It was in soundtracks for blockbuster and arthouse films alike, and, being more earnest, carried grunge’s torch of artistic integrity and public controversy with aplomb. Until 1999, when it became synonymous with school shooter chic.
Ballet leaves mention of the second origin until the very last chapter, in which it is practically an afterthought. His scope begins in the mid-1970s, mainly in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, and stops dead at 1995, before mainstream success and, more importantly, before the digital revolution. It was a multimedia avant-garde that was nonetheless strictly analog. This suggests that industrial music in its pure form is mainly of a historical interest and, unlike its more primal contemporary punk, was frozen against evolution. In truth, the legacy of industrial music at the turn of the century is much more complicated, and to an extent that even Ballet in all his research doesn’t seem to realize.
Like punk, industrial was catalyzed not only against wider social conditions of its era, but by the previous counterculture. Though where punk was purely reactive to hippie psychedelia, industrial was reflective. Industrial shared with psychedelia, in Simon Reynolds’s words, the “impulse to blow minds through multimedia sensory overload” and “an obsession with sonic treatments and extreme effects.” But it was a difference between “kissing the sky” and “staring into the cosmic abyss.” Industrial constitutes “one long bummer trip.” Consider Throbbing Gristle’s 1977 song “Hamburger Lady,” essentially industrial’s “White Rabbit.” More of an aural diorama, it features Genesis P-Orridge reciting an account of a burn victim through eerie vocal distortion amid layers of soundscapes replicating the dismal ambience of being stuck in the hospital. Demoralizing and unnerving, it makes Radiohead sound like Grouplove; no other work perfectly distills the technique and intent of the movement.
Ballet’s thematic structure echoes Reynolds’s description. Industrial artists, some of them leftover from the ‘60s underground, were no less inspired by fringe spirituality, Cold War existentialism, rampant consumerism, sexual liberation, and utopian visions than their predecessors. Yet, each has its inversion. Utopian retreat gave way to dystopian confrontation. Bands appropriated fascist aesthetics in their branding and fashion. They promoted themselves with a mixture of samizdat and deliberate propaganda techniques. Performance art pieces exalted sexual deviance, self-harm, and blasphemy. Violent and sexual media were stolen and manipulated for subversive ends. “[W]e thought we were like a terrorist group …,” Richard H. Kirk said of his band Cabaret Voltaire. “The confrontational thing was always important, just the idea of winding society up, waging war on society or the status quo.”
It’s a view that is not without its intellectual grounding. Ballet practically carpet-bombs his text with extracts from the canon of cultural theory and transgressive literature. Though most important is William S. Burroughs, who is less the patron saint of drug-addled excess as he was to punk than a full-on prophet. His entire corpus, from his experimental novels to his overt treatises like “The Electronic Revolution,” is taken as a step-by-step blueprint for the movement. And Burroughs acknowledged the connection, appearing in the 1984 film Decoder, a West German answer to the LA punk-tinged Repo Man the same year, featuring industrial artists and music and centered on using noise recordings to initiate societal breakdown.
Where Shock Factory falters is in its vindicating one of the movement’s primary concerns: information overload. The book is so extensively documented, with every excess accounted for and contextualized, that very little is left for deeper analysis or interrogation. This is largely owing to Ballet wanting to keep things on the ideological straight and narrow. Even in industrial, you can still go too far. Such as when fascist posturing goes from subversive to sincere, as it is often laid against Boyd Rice. Though neither transgressive literature nor concerns about consequences of mechanizing modern life are unknown on the Right, in Yukio Mishima most notoriously, but in the more expansive and prescient work of Ernst Junger most crucially. And this is to say nothing of the techno goth-accented accelerationism of Nick Land. This flaw extends to his own side. When examining industrial’s appropriation of, and sometimes direct participation in, pornography to undermine sexual repression, Ballet notes that in practice the results were “occasionally contradictory.” Often, they did as little to disrupt the patriarchal gender binary as the 1960s counterculture. But ultimately, industrial must be a sex-positive enterprise.
But industrial suffers from another, and greater, boomer generation lapse: to always picture oneself as the opposition speaking truth to power. Ballet ends with that impression, noting a revival in the industrial sound in 21st-century pop music, suggesting that the struggle continues. It’s a bit awkward when technological progress has made the industrial movement arguably the more successful revolution than any other subculture. We are in the era of the glitch, of the Blue Screen of Death, of overabundant and manufactured information, and of a culture where everything is fragmented and nothing is shocking. Industrial won; noise dominates in the 21st century. At the same time, the connectivity and resources that enabled 20th-century subcultures are all but obsolete. But if the urge remains among the young, they may well follow industrial’s example and embody its exact reflection, guided by a text with “industrial” in its title, by one Theodore Kaczynski.
Chris R. Morgan writes from New Jersey. His X handle is @CR_Morgan.
