In 1994 Industrial music is but a distant dream. As a genre created and defined by its main exponents, it has long ceased to exist and as befitting its modus operandi it died a slow, painful and gruesomely gory death between 1981 and 1986. However, if it were possible to briefly turn the clock back and then view with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, one would realise how everything could have turned out so very differently.
The subsequent ascent of Techno and its infiltration into popular mainstream culture cannot be viewed as a wholly good thing. The acceptance by the culturally illiterate masses of an underground art-form such as Techno is unprecedented in modern culture, yet its vacuous and faceless personality is unfortunately very well suited to a post-adolescent audience force fed on Nintendo and 2 Unlimited.
In the late 70s Punk had swept the nations youth along with it's wild and irreverent exuberance. It's crude and anarchic DIY noise working as an antidote to the smug and arrogant overproduced Progressive rock of the time. Despite its openly nihilist morality and its stance as the voice of a repressed society it was still recognisable for what it was; abrasive pop music.
Emerging at the same time, Industrial was a perfect balance to Punk's traditional guitar based musical format. Using found sound source material, tape loops, sound synth's and experimenting with studio effects, in the context of producing a soundtrack for disaffected youth this was a truly new musical development. An intellectual almost classical and middle-class approach that was to stimulate thought and provoke reaction, yet also to disturb and shock. Punk sneered at you and wanted to be nasty, Industrial really was nasty. A grim response to the impending apocalypse, its vision was totally bleak, there was no humour to be found there. The music was the sound of grating machinery and of death and decay and writings on the dark and repressed side of human nature. Its intellectual veneer was a distinct contrast to the thrashing of ineptly played guitars that emanated from the inner city housing estates.
By 1978 the idealistic driving force behind punk was dead. Killed by the major record companies trying to milk the next big thing in pursuit of ever bigger profits by leaping on the bandwagon while it was still gaining momentum. Those bands stopped making music fuelled by anger and frustration and instead started writing songs in an effort to become pop stars, to play the corporate game and become that thing they professed to despise.
By this time, Industrial has established itself as a truly alternative genre. it was experimental, it was art. It saw itself as pushing back the boundaries of modern music and a natural reaction to and simultaneously a result of contemporary society. It expanded into areas other than the purely musical. It encompassed performance art and sculpture, writing and design. A whole industrial Chic sprang up to mirror its decaying vision. Designer and not so designer Camouflage became a new uniform.
Its most valid contribution to the world of rebellion though music was the inevitable written or photographic manifesto that accompanied each and every outpouring. In a totally unprecedented manner, youth culture became intellectual. They were suddenly confronted with something to think about. All the people involved in this first wave of Industrial music had something important to say. The very structure of the genre stressed the need for intellectual discipline. Its obsessions and interests, clearly laid out, demanded total attention. There was a very strong and defined interface between the artistic and social values which Industrialism expounded. So even though it wallowed in the outer margins of society, finding pleasure in the pursuit of self-knowledge. Through the presentation of images from the Death camps, dissected and rotting corpses and the deriguer obsession with serial killers and mass murderers. Industrial culture shocked a music buying youth into self-examination and the pursuit of dubious knowledge. Charles Manson and Alistair Crowley became its best know icons proof that marketing does work. A new generation became thoroughly au-fait with murder and forensic practice as every convert built up and extensive reference library of medical and sociological textbooks. Through the adoption of Crowley and his writings Industrial culture was able to claim a mystical and spiritual side as many converts examined and experimented with his ideas on Magik.
A large part of its power to shock came from Right Wing or Totalitarian imagery causing many people to denounce Industrial music as being Fascistic by nature. Its denigrators failed to realise or appreciate the uneasy duality of the attractiveness of Fascist/Totalitarian images and the importance of breaking taboos. Any striking symbol is by its nature threatening, and the most notorious are the most powerful in their capacity to provoke a reaction. In defence of Industrial culture it needs to be said that it was unfortunate that certain people involved in the music had appropriated the more extreme elements of the images and ideas purely for their own good, having no thought for the philosophy or ideas involved.
Industrial Music like Punk could not sustain its energy forever, People tired of pure noise as music and death as art. So the genre as a whole never crossed over into popular culture as it was hoped it could do. As the eighties wore on the originators of Industrial decided to move on and push their research into other areas. In some cases this has been richly rewarding with the emergence of both musical and textual works based around the fast growing concepts of Artificial Intelligence and smart drugs. This was the direction Industrial should have taken instead of being distracted by dance music.
A new wave of so called Industrial music has consequently emerged. Making the apparently radical move of trading their keyboards for drums and guitars these bands appropriated the Industrial tag and merged it with a mix of dance rhythms and Metal grindings. The result is not wholly unsatisfactory, but the intellectualism or even thought, is sadly lacking. They may talk about social alienation and the obsessive trauma and angst of their personal relationships but they offer no insight and certainly no solution. The consequence of this is that the music is often totally ignored by those arbiters of taste; the music press. It is now no longer interesting enough for its original audience as they have grown out of being excited by destructive energy posing as rebellion and the crossover potential of the music into the true mainstream is virtually nil. It is true to say that there have been successes in the "Industrial" field but this success has been achieved by aiming a new hard edged music at a jaded and willingly accepting metal market.
All of a sudden in the accepted area of electronic music Electro became Techno and was embraced by the Industrial audience. The music was raw, it was hard and it satisfied the need for something new. Then somewhere along the line Rave culture bounced into the vacuum of the nations teenage brain, Techno covered a mutation of House and mean dance music. Once this happened it was all over. Techno can be exciting music and due to its obsession with "Analogue" sounds can sound genuinely warm. However, its lyrical and conceptual content is more often than not, zero.
The advance and easy accessibility of cheap musical technology should have meant that experimentalism should have been rife. Instead it was an opportunity wasted. The technology merely served as a way for any spotty talentless yob to go ahead and make a "dance" record. Not that this situation should be totally decried. In some ways it was an extension of the Punk ideal which allowed anyone the means to express their musical ideas. The result of which was a continual and overwhelming steam of sonic diarrhoea streaming out of the bedroom of anyone with a Portastudio and a computer.
The most disillusioning thing about the mass acceptance of Techno culture is its total lack of ideas. It has nothing to say, Rave culture has been spoken of as the new Hippydom, a reincarnation of all those wonderful sixties ideal; peace, love and the striving towards a brave new world. Surely they are missing the point. In the sixties there was a move towards something totally new, people really did embrace new ideas and there was a ready exchange of information. Paradoxically, the technology which should have allowed this free and mass exchange of information has only served to blinker peoples eyes to what is possible. Too much time is spent concentrating on the technology rather than what it should actually be doing. People are suffering from a technological overload and the pace of its development is moving so fast that the opportunities that it offers are being wasted.
Where is the innovation in Techno music that goes to make youth culture so genuinely exciting? Media hype and it's collusion with DJ culture means that effectively peoples choice is severely restricted. There is a constant feverish search to move on to the next big thing. Ideas are never properly developed and opportunities are too often missed. It has never been easier to manufacture and distribute a record but the dictates of fashion determine what should be seen and heard. The result is that any new release has a shelf life of about three weeks. Like the technology which makes it all possible, choices are presented but access is denied.
There is hope that Techno and it's attendant culture can in the future provide something more musically and culturally interesting than the ambient bleeps that currently pass for technological musical innovation and do nothing more than provide a passing soundtrack for an ephemeral and fickle club culture. However, there are signs that there is a discernible growing trend within the Techno arena for active research into cyberkinetics, the use of interactive computer software and the widespread using of networking and digital bulletin boards by those computer users who have seen beyond the games potential of their machines. These basic concepts herald the new creativity and will thereby provide the future for Techno culture, a cultural Cyberworld without boundaries.
This is the future, the true legacy of the first wave of Industrial culture.