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POP MUSIC, CULTURE AND IDENTITY
Edited by
Jason Whittaker · Elizabeth Potter
Pop Music, Culture and Identity
Series Editors
Stephen Clark
Graduate School Humanities and Sociology
University of Tokyo
Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Tristanne Connolly
Department of English
St Jerome’s University
Waterloo, ON, Canada
Jason Whittaker
School of English & Journalism
University of Lincoln
Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK
Pop music lasts. A form all too often assumed to be transient, commercial
and mass-cultural has proved itself durable, tenacious and continually
evolving. As such, it has become a crucial component in defining various
forms of identity (individual and collective) as influenced by nation, class,
gender and historical period. Pop Music, Culture and Identity investigates
how this enhanced status shapes the iconography of celebrity, provides an
ever-expanding archive for generational memory and accelerates the
impact of new technologies on performing, packaging and global
marketing. The series gives particular emphasis to interdisciplinary
approaches that go beyond musicology and seeks to validate the informed
testimony of the fan alongside academic methodologies.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
v
vi Contents
Works Cited177
Index195
Notes on Contributors
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xi
CHAPTER 1
First Plateau
On 18 October 1976, a small audience gathered at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in London to, as they believed, witness a performance
piece by COUM Transmissions, the art group comprising Genesis
P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti at its core. COUM Transmissions
formed in 1968 and was profoundly influenced by Dada and the interna-
tional art movement, Fluxus. COUM’s final performance was part of the
infamous Prostitution exhibition that shocked audiences with bandages,
tampons, bottles of blood as props, and pornographic images enlarged
onto posters: the exhibition quickly gained notoriety with Fleet Street edi-
tors and led to the artists being denounced as “wreckers of civilization” in
Parliament. Since their inception, COUM Transmissions had attracted
some attention for their extreme performances although their influence—
until Prostitution—had been limited.
E. Potter
University of York, York, UK
e-mail: emp534@york.ac.uk
J. Whittaker (*)
University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
Second Plateau
On Halloween night in 1986, Canadian band Skinny Puppy played an
intensive hour-long live show. Just a month after the release of their sec-
ond studio album, Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse, the performance
would re-energize the earlier efforts of the likes of Throbbing Gristle. On
a darkened stage at Dolce Vita in Lausanne, Switzerland, cEvin Key and
Dwayne Goettel take their positions behind towering racks of synthesiz-
ers, disappearing into the background. Distorted, disembodied, and inde-
cipherable voices fold into rhythmic beats begun without the presence of
a frontman. Nivek Ogre with pallid makeup, smudged black eyeshadow
1 INTRODUCTION: ASSEMBLAGES AND INTERVENTIONS 3
around his eye sockets, and under his cheekbones wavers onto the stage to
his microphone. The song “One Time, One Place” begins and Ogre sways
with occasional convulsive movements—striking his head, pulling his hair,
and drooling while he shouts the words to the song. When his voice hits a
louder volume, the vocals become mechanically distorted, competing with
the danceable bassline and driving beat.
During the song, “Assimilate,” Ogre’s convulsions become more
erratic and violent. The danger increases when he holds a large knife in
both hands. His knuckles are white, gripping the blade so close to his
face—the knife appears to have a mind of its own, wanting to plunge into
him. The vocals, already unclear in the studio recording of the song, lan-
guish hazier with the layered reverberation. His live agonizing screams
cease while the reverb carries it forward and he meditates with the knife
like a ceremonial blade. An audio sample of a shrieking woman pierces the
obscured screams and he flicks and pulls the blade parallel to his sucking
mouth slicing on both sides. The dripping Glasgow smile is prominent
while the echoing moans of Ogre’s whine, “I can’t smile” hangs in the air,
penetrated with what sounds like a flicking radio dial of poppy disco inter-
rupts. In the audience, fans sway, stomp, and punch their fists in the air to
the beat while all this occurs on stage. The simulated self-aggression on
stage is entangled with the celebratory pleasure of dance music, creating a
bizarre and complicated discourse of what audiences enjoy when viewing
live music. Skinny Puppy’s stage antics would develop over the years into
occult costumes, screen projections of bombings and vivisection, and
buckets of fake blood poured onto the stage and into the audience’s faces.
The artist, typically viewed as in control of the entire performance,
becomes victimized to the voyeuristic audience: mutilating himself for
their entertainment. The power dynamics have shifted into a new contract
of the artist and spectator.
Third Plateau
A man, known only as the “metal fetishist,” walks through a semi-derelict
industrial yard, dressed in overalls and a peaked cap. The site is empty,
filmed in atmospheric monochrome, with rusting air-conditioner units
poking through broken windows and heaps of junk piled around the
single-story wooden buildings. Barefoot, he steps inside one of the build-
ings and drops a metal rod and pieces of wire, wrapped in a pornographic
magazine, onto the tiled floor, before kneeling amidst the detritus and
4 E. POTTER AND J. WHITTAKER
slowly unzipping his jacket and exposing his chest. As the camera slowly
pans around the chaos of junk and dirty metal, discordant, repetitive beats
of industrial machinery begin to play in the background, and amidst the
scraps of metal we catch glimpses of runners and athletes, collages of per-
fectible machine bodies that contrast with the abject decomposition all
around. If, as Laura Mulvey argues in Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema, such slow shots are the classic fetishism of the male gaze, linger-
ing upon the female body, something is very wrong here—interrupted as
both music and scene are by a sudden cut to the fetishist piercing his leg
with the metal spike, black blood spurting between his fingers across the
celluloid. Later, when he removes the bandages with which he has bound
his leg, the fetishist is horrified to discover maggots falling from the rust-
infected wound.
Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) is often described as
a cyberpunk horror but is more important as establishing a particular aes-
thetic of industrial culture. While S. Alexander Reed rightly emphasizes
the importance of Futurism to the genre, with its invocations of techno-
philia and Filippo Tommasso Marinettii’s “aesthetics of the machine,” it is
also important to recall the importance of Dada to much industrial music
and culture in the 1980s and early 1990s. The contraptions of Duchamp
and Picabia are useless and frequently derelict, literally broken in the case
of Duchamp’s notorious The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
Filmed on 16 mm monochrome stock, Tsukamoto’s visuals are frequently
stunning, but they also record the backstreets of a Tokyo less familiar to
the technological utopia frequently presented to the world: rather, this is
a place of crumbling junkyards and fabricators, the rotting assembly lines
of post-war industry that over the subsequent decades would increasingly
be shipped to mainland China—just as European and North American
heavy industries were outsourced to other parts of Asia and South America.
As such, the aesthetic invoked by Tetsuo, with its accompanying music
composed by Chu Ishikawa (who formed the industrial percussion group,
Der Eisenrost), focuses on the body not as the perfectible machine of
Enlightenment thinkers such as La Mettrie or of electronic music bands
such as Kraftwerk, but rather as broken assemblages of flows and parts,
always dysfunctional, often in pain but only knowing itself through its
own torture.
1 INTRODUCTION: ASSEMBLAGES AND INTERVENTIONS 5
Fourth Plateau
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a deadly
shooting rampage at their high school in Littleton, Colorado. The
Columbine High School Massacre was the worst school shooting at the
time with 24 people injured and 15 killed, including the shooters. The
horror of the scene caused the American people to question the young
men’s motivations. In attempts to understand this atrocity, investigations
into Harris and Klebold’s media consumption revealed they were obses-
sive fans of industrial music. On Eric Harris’ personal blog, he wrote: “I’ll
just go to some downtown area … and blow up and shoot everything I
can. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame.” The last sentence is a quotation
from KMFDM’s track “Anarchy,” a song about rising up from debase-
ment into brazen, violence-based power. On the same day as the shooting,
Klebold wore a t-shirt with the word “Wrath” printed in bold red letters
to reference the KMFDM song of the same name. The day after the shoot-
ing, Sascha Konietzko, founder of KMFDM, released a statement to
express sympathy for the victims. “We are sick and appalled,” Konietzko
wrote, and clarified that, “from the beginning, our music has been a state-
ment against war, oppression, fascism and violence against others.” The
moral panic shifted the target to Marilyn Manson with headlines like,
“Killers Worshipped Rock Freak Manson” and “Devil-Worshipping
Maniac Told Kids to Kill.” In actuality, Harris and Klebold did not like
Manson’s music at all and listened to the likes of KMFDM, Nine Inch
Nails, Rammstein, and other industrial musicians. The connection to the
Columbine Massacre remains despite KMFDM’s best efforts including
their campaign advocating for more effective gun control legislation in the
United States. Those campaigning against the industrial musicians Harris
and Klebold enjoyed focused on the genre’s themes of marginalization,
BDSM references, physical violence, and pain. These essential elements of
industrial music became weaponized in a different manner: instead of
exploring the dimensions of body and mind, it was considered to be nefar-
iously influential to producing extreme acts of violence against the public.
The symbolic and metonymic violence of industrial music performances
and recordings moved from the world of metaphor into the very real world.
6 E. POTTER AND J. WHITTAKER
Fifth Plateau
The band Death Grips has the hallmarks of industrial music: melodic
synth, multi-layered recordings, extensive sampling, harsh vocalization,
and crushing lyrics. These, however, are complicated and reenergized by
hip-hop rhyming schemes and percussion loops. Their experimentation is
not relegated to their music composition as shown by their release of the
album, No Love Deep Web in 2012. On Twitter, Death Grips made a vague
online announcement of the album with an edited publicity photograph.
Hidden in the promotional image was the first clue to engage in their
alternate reality game. Alternate reality games (ARGs) are described as
chaotic fiction, where individuals collaborate in an interactive networked
narrative using the real and virtual world as a conduit. Typically, ARGs are
centralized on the internet but also include telephone, email, and letter
correspondence. Using the Tor anonymity network online, Death Grips
provided encrypted archive file references that fans would need to explore
to receive the end message. Sending the fans on a quest using braille mes-
sages, QR codes, binary code, Affine and Caesar ciphers, and many other
communication types, the game revealed that the release date for the
album was intended for October 23, 2012. This new wave of industrial
music has embraced the technological innovations that the current world
has to offer and transformed traditional consumption roles. Typically,
there would not be a labyrinth of codes to reveal a release date for an
album, but this approach introduces a self-guided power and discovery
process independent of the artist.
After struggles with their record label, Death Grips released the album
themselves through Twitter, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and other torrent-
ing websites. Later that day, it was revealed that Death Grips topped
BitTorrent’s “List of Most Legally Downloaded Music” following the
release of No Love Deep Web, with 34,151,432 downloads. Epic Records,
their label, shut down the band’s website although they would later deny
any involvement. The band then posted confidential emails with Epic
Records and the contract was severed. Online, fans speculate the hostility
between Death Grips and Epic Records inspired the controversial album
cover: Zach Hill’s erect penis with the album title written in sharpie on it.
This defiant and controversial act reaffirms the body’s important place in
industrial music. Like Ministry before them, whose controversial album
cover for The Land of Rape and Honey (1988) features the burnt corpse of
a victim of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Al Jourgensen of Ministry
1 INTRODUCTION: ASSEMBLAGES AND INTERVENTIONS 7
explained that the image was chosen because his original idea of a decapi-
tated deer had been rejected. The rejection of traditional power structure,
such as that of a band and a recording label, has been turned upside down
by both industrial bands using bodies that are unseemly to the general
audience. Confirming their similarities, Death Grips and Ministry co-
headlined a tour in 2017.
Puppy. Throughout the 1980s, books such as RE/SEARCH and Open Eye
created aggregations of performers and groups alongside writers such as
William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Kathy Acker and art movements
such as Actionism and the parodic forms of Neoism with its roots in
Dadaism, Futurism, and Fluxus. One of the most significant early indus-
trial music groups, Cabaret Voltaire, took its name from the Zurich night-
club, established by Hugo Ball and Emily Hennings and associated with
Dadaism. This indicated an ephemeral quality to the industrial scene, that
it was often a series of contingent assemblages of loosely related approaches
to music, fashion, bodies, and culture.
Unsurprisingly, a significant number of titles dealing with industrial
music have tended to focus on the history of the scene or, more specifi-
cally, individual bands. Reed’s Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial
Music (2013) is the most comprehensive account, with notable studies of
groups including those of Simon Ford’s Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story
of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (1999), Mick Fish’s
Industrial Evolution: Through the Eighties with Cabaret Voltaire (2002),
Alexei Monroe’s Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (2005), and
more recently Jennifer Shryane’s Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende
Neubauten: German Experimental Music: ‘Evading Do-Re-Mi’ (2016). A
feature of such books is their willingness to engage with high theory
(Monroe’s book, for example, includes an introduction by Slavoj Žižek
who has often written on his fellow Slovenes) and it is this critical engage-
ment that particularly attracts us to the genre. As such, while this intro-
duction provides some account of the evolutions—or, perhaps better, the
mutations—of industrial music and culture, we are more concerned with
the impact of the scene on perceptions and configurations of bodies (such
as through fashion and invasive body modification), power relations
through sexualities and fetishes, the role of noise in all forms of music—
from experimental and avant garde forms that share roots with the atonal
performances of Karl Stockhausen to EBM (electronic body music) and
other forms of dance and techno. In addition, this collection is keen to
extend the focus of industrial culture to explore elements such as queer
sexualities and intersectional social and political identities. As such, influ-
ences include John Gill’s Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in
Twentieth-Century Music (1995) and Jennifer Wallis’s Fight Your Own
War—Power Electronics and Noise Culture (2016), which have been as
important in shaping the development of the approaches of Bodies, Noise,
1 INTRODUCTION: ASSEMBLAGES AND INTERVENTIONS 9