Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music

Noisy, confrontational, and controversial, industrial music first emerged in the mid-1970s around bands and performance groups who combined avant-garde electronic music with the provocative attitude and style of punk rock. In its early days, bands such as Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire produced a genuinely radical form of music bent on recontextualizing the signs and methods of cultural authority in an attempt to liberate listeners from the trappings of modernity. But, as industrial music took on more and more elements of popular music over the course of the 1980s it slowly abandoned its mission. By the mid-1990s, it was seen as simply another style of pop music, and had ironically fallen into the trappings it sought by its very existence to destroy. In Assimilate, S. Alexander Reed provides the first ever critical history of this fascinating and enigmatic genre tracing industrial music's trajectory from Throbbing Gristle's founding of the record label Industrial Music in 1976, to its peak in popularity on the back of the band Nine Inch Nails in the mid-1990s, and through its decline to the present day. Through a series of revealing explorations of works spanning the entirety of industrial music's past, and drawing on extensive interviews with musicians, record label owners, DJs, and concert promoters, Reed paints a thorough historical picture that includes not only the bands, but the structures that supported them, and the scenes they created. In so doing, he reveals an engaging story of an ideological disintegration and its aftermath. The definitive text on the genre, Assimilate is essential reading for fans of industrial music, and scholars and students of popular music alike.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. A Fading Vision Lost in Time 2. The Pan-Revolutionary 3. The "I"-Word Part 1: Technology and the Preconditions of Industrial Music I. Italian Futurism 1. Industry 2. The Aesthetics of the Machine 3. Crash II. William S. Burroughs 1. Junkie 2. The Control Machines 3. Brainwashing and the Conflation of Authority 4. Mediatic Verses 5. The Cut-Up 6. Process as Composition 7. Media 8. Techno-Ambivalence III. Industrial Music and the Avant-Garde 1. Noise and Revisionism 2. The Revolutionary Class Part 2: Industrial Geography IV. Northern England 1. Progress in Hell 2. The Original Sound of Sheffield 3. Meatwhistle and ClockDVA 4. Throbbing Gristle 5. Manchester in the Shadow of War V. Berlin 1. An Island Out of This Planet 2. Strategies Against Architecture 3. German-ness 4. Ingenious Dilettantes 5. West Germany Beyond Berlin VI. San Francisco 1. Madness in Any Direction, at Any Hour 2. Monte Cazazza and Self-Propaganda 3. Z'ev and Survival Research Laboratories 4. Factrix and Chrome VII. Mail Art, Tape Technology, and the Network 1. Fluxus and UFOs 2. A History of Tape Trading 3. Taping as a Political Act 4. The Eternal Network 5. A Virtual Scene Part 3: Industrial Music as Music VIII. The Tyranny of the Beat: Dance Music and Identity Crisis 1. Those Heady Days of Idealism Are Over 2. Irony 3. Technology and Rhythm 4. Futurist Pop 5. Pleasure 6. Industrial Identity IX. "After Cease to Exist": England 1981-1985 1. The Mission is Terminated 2. London 3. Beyond London X. Body to Body: Belgian EBM 1981-1985 1. A Satellite State 2. Luc Van Acker 3. Front 4. Musical Order 5. Bodily Order XI. Industrial Music as a Theatre of Cruelty 1. Artaud-Damaged 2. Theatricalities of All Kinds XII. "She's a Sleeping Beast": Skinny Puppy and the Feminine Gothic 1. From Pop to Puppy 2. Vancouver's Fertile Ground 3. Disrupting Maleness 4. The Feminine Gothic Part 4: People and Industrial Music XIII. Wild Planet: WaxTrax! Records and Global Dance Scenes 1. Industrial Music and the Mainstream 2. The Beginnings of WaxTrax! 3. Ministry 4. Mixing and Merging 5. The Business of Chaos 6. Clubbing and Participatory Culture 7. New Beat 8. The WaxTrax! Heyday XIV. Q: Why Do We Act Like Machines? A: We Do Not. 1. Pretty Hate Machine 2. Industrial Harmony 3. Language, the Self, and Gender 4. Get Me an Industrial Band 5. Resembling the Machine XV. Death 1. Death as Event 2. Death as Metaphor 3. Death as Fashion 4. New Life XVI. Wonder 1. Covenant and the Ubiquitous Sublime 2. Apoptygma Berzerk and the Spontaneous Sublime 3. VNV Nation and the Unthinkable Sublime 4. The Futurepop Backlash 5. Clubbed to Death 6. The Longevity of Industrial Bands 7. Industrial Music Is Dead? Part 5: Meaning and Revolution XVII. Back and Forth: Industrial Music and Fascism 1. Extremism as the Norm 2. Silent Politics 3. Loud Apolitics 4. The Effects of Fascism's Spectre 5. Fascist Assimilation 6. The Hidden Reverse XVIII. White Souls in Black Suits: Industrial Music and Race 1. Whiteness 2. The Inheritance of Blues, Jazz, and Dub 3. Exotica, Caricature, and the Techno-Oblivious 4. Technology and Racial Engagement 5. Black and White 6. Repetition and the English Ballad XIX. Is There Any Escape for Noise? 1. Unpalatable Truths 2. The First Two Options 3. Transgression as Law 4. The Future Happened Already 5. Pleasure, Flag Planting, and Revolution 6. The Third Mind

About the Author :
S. Alexander Reed is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Florida. He has published and presented research on vocal timbre, embodiment, postpunk music, and the recordings of Nine Inch Nails, Laurie Anderson, Rammstein, and Tori Amos. Reed has released five albums with his own gothic-industrial band, ThouShaltNot.

Review :
Well-written and impeccably researched, Assimilate is worth a look not only by music fans looking to learn about this industrial wall of sound, but also by scholars of pop culture wondering why the kids feel the way they do.