When I was sixteen years old, I saw my first concert ever: KMFDM on the Symbols Tour in 1997 playing at San Francisco’s Warfield concert hall. I was living in the suburbs of Alameda County, CA, at the time, struggling with being a pretty stereotypical nerd. I had thick glasses, a very unfortunate haircut, no sense of style to speak of, a persecution complex due to being an enormous nerd, and fairly crippling social anxiety disorder. On top of that, I did not have a particularly healthy relationship with my parents. Unsurprisingly, as a dejected and resentful social misfit from white American suburbia, when I first encountered industrial music it was a thrilling experience. I started the same was as I imagine most industrial fans my age did, by picking up on Nine Inch Nails before delving deeper into the subculture that Trent’s music sat atop. About the time I’d first heard of KMFDM, the kind and sympathetic black-clad high school oddballs who had marginally taken me in invited me to go along with them to the upcoming show in that storied land: the City.
The whole experience was pretty wild. It was the first time I’d been so SF at all and I was thoroughly unfamiliar with the city as a whole. Once we hit Haight Street, I was already dumbfounded by how preternaturally cool an adventure I was having. From the punks shuffling through the LPs at Amoeba to the decked-out goths tending the register at the clothing stores, it felt like I’d stepped into an alternate dimension, one in which being a social freak was more the norm than being the jocks and yuppies who never left me alone. I was worked into a tizzy hours before the doors opened at the Warfield. When we got there and were let in, I was about ready to explode. Here I was surrounded by people who looked like they’d stepped out of an ‘80s cyberpunk movie (to this day, the Rutger Hauer film Split Second stands as probably the single most aesthetically influential film I have ever seen; growing up to be a rivethead is a direct result of seeing that film when I was 11), with guys in leather jackets and Doc Martens, girls with crazy hair colors, and none of them seemed to give a damn about what I looked like. During the entire show, I just stood in the crowd, mouth agape at how absolutely awesome the entire thing was. I was hooked.
Last night, I got a bit of a taste of that experience again. One of the big reasons I wanted to go to the Wax Trax Retrospectacle was because a good portion of the same lineup KMFDM had in 1997 was back together. Sure, it would have been fun to have Sascha, Skold and Ogre in the show as well, but Ogre is probably rather busy and the last time I saw KMFDM, it was the Sascha and Skold variation and a huge disappointment. En Esch, Guenther Schulz and Raymond Watts would have to do. The performance itself turned out to be a bit dull (note: RevCo and Front 242 were amazing), but it was still nice to revisit an experience I’d had 14 years prior and had served to shape much of my social life throughout my adulthood. However, what preceded KMFDM’s show really made me think. Before the performances began for the night, Julia Nash, daughter of Wax Trax Records’ Jim Nash, brought out a couple of long-time Wax Trax fans to speak to the crowd about their experiences with the label and its music. The first speaker, a very eloquent man of advancing years, told the story of his experiences as a gay teenager living in the South and how his introduction to Wax Trax made him feel. He had discovered a musical community in which the bigoted, gay-bashing, backwards mentality that persecuted him on a regular basis was the freakish, abnormal behavior instead of the socially-acceptable norm. He’d found people who embraced him as a fellow traveler in a countercultural movement. It was a beautiful, inspiring story.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s kept up on my blog ranting and finger-pointing at industrial that I have had a bit of a crisis of conscience when it comes to industrial music and its attendant scene. However, I’ve also done a lot of introspective analysis of why I am unsatisfied as well. I’ve asked myself over and over if I had built up the industrial scene in my mind into something it had never been in reality. How much of my dissatisfaction was my fault? Had I just had my head in the clouds the whole time? Stories like the one told by the guy last night make me feel like there is at least some basis for my concerns. When I was that dorky, awkward teenager from the burbs, the industrial scene became my home, for better or worse. I’m unwilling to write off my positive experiences in the scene as a product of youthful exuberance and naivete; similarly I am unwilling to write off my recent displeasure with the scene as a product of jadedness or just a more nuanced sense of realism. I’m going to posit that the scene once was a home to the outcasts, the nerds, the queers, the freaks who did not fall into the social safe zones of pop culture at large. However, there are a few catalysts for change for the worse that I will posit are responsible for the gradual dumbing-down of industrial in general.
I’ll start with the low-hanging fruit of the bunch: the internet. As Gabe of Penny Arcade once famously and very accurately depicted (see comic below), the internet is a magical place where otherwise normal people turn into complete shitheads once they’re not going to be held personally accountable for their words.
I know it’s a bit of a low blow, but anyone familiar with Side-Line Magazine’s forum will not find much questionable about Gabe’s assertion. When provided with an easy way to connect with fans of the same form of music from across the world, you’d think people would bond in ways previously impossible across the lines of nationality, sex and gender, ethnicity, religious practices, sexual orientation, and practically any other typical line of demarcation between people. I’d go further and say that if any musical genre should engender this kind of bonding over such a method, it would be industrial, a genre that has for so long prided itself on being off the beaten path and committed to rejecting the false prejudices that society at large leveled at its members. Instead the anonymity of internet communication creates a scenario in which people’s preexisting prejudices become even more magnified, as the threat of being personally taken to task on one’s ignorance is largely removed. What could be a meeting ground for likeminded individuals turns into a sea of frothing trolls calling each other out for liking music they personally do not and barraging each other with slurs and epithets. Extremely bad moderation also played a huge role in the out of control ignorance on Side-Line, specifically when a large portion of the forum’s users were banned and the forum itself was brought down for several hours as a result of a discussion about a band the forum’s administrator personally disliked, yet a user who continually espoused racist, sexist, blatantly neo-Nazi rhetoric was not dealt with for several weeks. However, strict moderation would not have solved the problem of why people engage in activity that would need to be moderated.
By no means am I going to say that the industrial scene is solely afflicted by internet anonymity disease. Anyone who reads the comments on practically any new story on any website is familiar with how brazenly stupid and obnoxious people can be when they’re not face to face with whomever they’re antagonizing. However, I suspect the industrial scene as a whole has slacked off on its commitment to being intolerant of intolerance, which has created an air of permissiveness that is actually far less constructive than if the scene had maintained a policy of policing itself (quoth PWEI, freedom of expression doesn’t make it all right). Being radically inclusive and having metaphorically open borders does not work if you are too lazy to be diligent about keeping track of what is slipping through. Contrary to popular belief, not every idea is equally valid and acceptable. Some ideas are just plain bad, dangerous, backwards and harmful to the whole. These ideas are ones borne out of a willing adherence to ignorance, bigotry and dogmatic resistance to critical thought. Industrial as a community once felt like a scene where people rejected these harmful influences, but it would seem that in the interest of not appearing similar to the tormentors who once rejected our values before we joined the scene, we as a group refuse to castigate harmful thought and behavior. That, or we as a group are too lazy, indifferent or frightened of confrontation to stand up to the insidious aspects of our society that have infiltrated our ranks. Unless we accept that sometimes we will in fact need to hold our fellows and friends accountable when they say or do something stupid, intolerant or dangerous, we’re going to have to get used to this scene becoming a regressive, meat-headed mess of bad and toxic ideas in which we are too scared of being yelled at to confront the social bigotry that we joined the scene in order to get away from.
Note: For a great read on why you should not be afraid of holding someone accountable for saying something ignorant, I suggest Hoyden About Town’s Don’t Mistake Expressing Contempt For Taking Offense.
Secondly (or thirdly, if you count going off about the naïve conception of inclusiveness that the industrial scene has embraced as another point), the dynamic between the music and the scene has changed. The scene built up around the music at first; people became fans of the music, then they all started hanging out. That’s how a scene is born, obviously. As a collection of fans begins to evolve into something more structured and cultural, ideas such as prevailing fashion and ideas will begin to emerge, but it was ultimately the music that united everyone, with the other elements being complementary. Now, the music obeys the scene. Bands by and large seem to spend much more time and effort designing their on-stage image than actually making good music. Furthermore, as more self-styled industrial bands (or even bands who doggedly deny that they belong to any of industrial’s subgenres, yet are still quite pleased to take the money of their fans in the industrial scene) embrace the idea of what I would call pop success, thanks to the example of bands like Combichrist and VNV Nation, the attitude towards making music has become one in which risky, interesting music is deemed to be a bad idea. Industrial becoming “safe” is, quite frankly, what will kill its spirit. Safe in this sense is relative; obviously Combichrist will probably frighten the hell out of your average Dave Matthews Band fan. However, if bands are increasingly unwilling to stray too far outside of the formulas that have grown to be perceived as routes to financial success in industrial music, the genre as a whole will continue to stagnate.
On the subject of industrial’s priorities, I will once and for all say that I am incredibly tired of the term “production value” being trotted out to validate music that is intensely dull. I suppose it is really up to the musician whether they want to make a record that focuses on music as an art or as a marketable product. However, the cognitive dissonance that fans experience leads to very boring industrial music that is produced specifically to sound like another, more financially successful band, or specifically to be played at clubs, to be excused for its lack of any ingenuity or artistic integrity on the grounds of its supposed high production value. Usually this term seems to be a nicer way to say, “This music sounds like Tiesto farted into a coffee can full of scrap metal,” but that might just be me. Ultimately what it means is that people are finding ways to excuse the sterilization of industrial music’s vibrancy in favor of maximizing its marketability. Again, this is a sure way to render the genre stagnant. Am I one of the purists who thinks that music is only cool when it sells badly? Not really. I simply feel that if music sells well, it should be for a good reason: that it is good, interesting music that brings something new to the table. I believe that we as a music scene should stop making excuses for musicians who are so lacking in respect for us as their fans that we are regarded only as a way for them to not need a day job.
Ultimately, I choose to not go anywhere anytime soon. Many people I’ve known in the past have given up on industrial as a scene and as a music because they did not like where it had gone. At the risk of making these people angry, that is taking the easy way out. It’s like people who threaten to move to Canada if a person they dislike is elected President; you might feel better about yourself, but that person is still President, and your taking your toys and going home doesn’t change anything. Instead, I choose to believe that we as a scene can recapture the attitude that drew us all together. We can still be the scene that the gentleman who spoke at the Metro on Sunday gave so much praise to, one that made his life better by accepting him for who he was instead of who he was attracted to. It takes work, diligence and passion, though. We as a community must choose to be more than just another vapid scene mirroring the worst aspects of the society we claim to provide an alternative to. Once that choice is made, it needs to be stuck to. Ignorance, bigotry, cynical commercialization and creative vapidity need to be rejected. The question of whether we are up to the task remains to be seen, but it isn’t an impossible task. After all, it just means we need to be as good to each other as we once were.
Reevaluating Industrial
When I was sixteen years old, I saw my first concert ever: KMFDM on the Symbols Tour in 1997 playing at San Francisco’s Warfield concert hall. I was living in the suburbs of Alameda County, CA, at the time, struggling with being a pretty stereotypical nerd. I had thick glasses, a very unfortunate haircut, no sense of style to speak of, a persecution complex due to being an enormous nerd, and fairly crippling social anxiety disorder. On top of that, I did not have a particularly healthy relationship with my parents. Unsurprisingly, as a dejected and resentful social misfit from white American suburbia, when I first encountered industrial music it was a thrilling experience. I started the same was as I imagine most industrial fans my age did, by picking up on Nine Inch Nails before delving deeper into the subculture that Trent’s music sat atop. About the time I’d first heard of KMFDM, the kind and sympathetic black-clad high school oddballs who had marginally taken me in invited me to go along with them to the upcoming show in that storied land: the City.
The whole experience was pretty wild. It was the first time I’d been so SF at all and I was thoroughly unfamiliar with the city as a whole. Once we hit Haight Street, I was already dumbfounded by how preternaturally cool an adventure I was having. From the punks shuffling through the LPs at Amoeba to the decked-out goths tending the register at the clothing stores, it felt like I’d stepped into an alternate dimension, one in which being a social freak was more the norm than being the jocks and yuppies who never left me alone. I was worked into a tizzy hours before the doors opened at the Warfield. When we got there and were let in, I was about ready to explode. Here I was surrounded by people who looked like they’d stepped out of an ‘80s cyberpunk movie (to this day, the Rutger Hauer film Split Second stands as probably the single most aesthetically influential film I have ever seen; growing up to be a rivethead is a direct result of seeing that film when I was 11), with guys in leather jackets and Doc Martens, girls with crazy hair colors, and none of them seemed to give a damn about what I looked like. During the entire show, I just stood in the crowd, mouth agape at how absolutely awesome the entire thing was. I was hooked.
Last night, I got a bit of a taste of that experience again. One of the big reasons I wanted to go to the Wax Trax Retrospectacle was because a good portion of the same lineup KMFDM had in 1997 was back together. Sure, it would have been fun to have Sascha, Skold and Ogre in the show as well, but Ogre is probably rather busy and the last time I saw KMFDM, it was the Sascha and Skold variation and a huge disappointment. En Esch, Guenther Schulz and Raymond Watts would have to do. The performance itself turned out to be a bit dull (note: RevCo and Front 242 were amazing), but it was still nice to revisit an experience I’d had 14 years prior and had served to shape much of my social life throughout my adulthood. However, what preceded KMFDM’s show really made me think. Before the performances began for the night, Julia Nash, daughter of Wax Trax Records’ Jim Nash, brought out a couple of long-time Wax Trax fans to speak to the crowd about their experiences with the label and its music. The first speaker, a very eloquent man of advancing years, told the story of his experiences as a gay teenager living in the South and how his introduction to Wax Trax made him feel. He had discovered a musical community in which the bigoted, gay-bashing, backwards mentality that persecuted him on a regular basis was the freakish, abnormal behavior instead of the socially-acceptable norm. He’d found people who embraced him as a fellow traveler in a countercultural movement. It was a beautiful, inspiring story.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s kept up on my blog ranting and finger-pointing at industrial that I have had a bit of a crisis of conscience when it comes to industrial music and its attendant scene. However, I’ve also done a lot of introspective analysis of why I am unsatisfied as well. I’ve asked myself over and over if I had built up the industrial scene in my mind into something it had never been in reality. How much of my dissatisfaction was my fault? Had I just had my head in the clouds the whole time? Stories like the one told by the guy last night make me feel like there is at least some basis for my concerns. When I was that dorky, awkward teenager from the burbs, the industrial scene became my home, for better or worse. I’m unwilling to write off my positive experiences in the scene as a product of youthful exuberance and naivete; similarly I am unwilling to write off my recent displeasure with the scene as a product of jadedness or just a more nuanced sense of realism. I’m going to posit that the scene once was a home to the outcasts, the nerds, the queers, the freaks who did not fall into the social safe zones of pop culture at large. However, there are a few catalysts for change for the worse that I will posit are responsible for the gradual dumbing-down of industrial in general.
I’ll start with the low-hanging fruit of the bunch: the internet. As Gabe of Penny Arcade once famously and very accurately depicted (see comic below), the internet is a magical place where otherwise normal people turn into complete shitheads once they’re not going to be held personally accountable for their words.
I know it’s a bit of a low blow, but anyone familiar with Side-Line Magazine’s forum will not find much questionable about Gabe’s assertion. When provided with an easy way to connect with fans of the same form of music from across the world, you’d think people would bond in ways previously impossible across the lines of nationality, sex and gender, ethnicity, religious practices, sexual orientation, and practically any other typical line of demarcation between people. I’d go further and say that if any musical genre should engender this kind of bonding over such a method, it would be industrial, a genre that has for so long prided itself on being off the beaten path and committed to rejecting the false prejudices that society at large leveled at its members. Instead the anonymity of internet communication creates a scenario in which people’s preexisting prejudices become even more magnified, as the threat of being personally taken to task on one’s ignorance is largely removed. What could be a meeting ground for likeminded individuals turns into a sea of frothing trolls calling each other out for liking music they personally do not and barraging each other with slurs and epithets. Extremely bad moderation also played a huge role in the out of control ignorance on Side-Line, specifically when a large portion of the forum’s users were banned and the forum itself was brought down for several hours as a result of a discussion about a band the forum’s administrator personally disliked, yet a user who continually espoused racist, sexist, blatantly neo-Nazi rhetoric was not dealt with for several weeks. However, strict moderation would not have solved the problem of why people engage in activity that would need to be moderated.
By no means am I going to say that the industrial scene is solely afflicted by internet anonymity disease. Anyone who reads the comments on practically any new story on any website is familiar with how brazenly stupid and obnoxious people can be when they’re not face to face with whomever they’re antagonizing. However, I suspect the industrial scene as a whole has slacked off on its commitment to being intolerant of intolerance, which has created an air of permissiveness that is actually far less constructive than if the scene had maintained a policy of policing itself (quoth PWEI, freedom of expression doesn’t make it all right). Being radically inclusive and having metaphorically open borders does not work if you are too lazy to be diligent about keeping track of what is slipping through. Contrary to popular belief, not every idea is equally valid and acceptable. Some ideas are just plain bad, dangerous, backwards and harmful to the whole. These ideas are ones borne out of a willing adherence to ignorance, bigotry and dogmatic resistance to critical thought. Industrial as a community once felt like a scene where people rejected these harmful influences, but it would seem that in the interest of not appearing similar to the tormentors who once rejected our values before we joined the scene, we as a group refuse to castigate harmful thought and behavior. That, or we as a group are too lazy, indifferent or frightened of confrontation to stand up to the insidious aspects of our society that have infiltrated our ranks. Unless we accept that sometimes we will in fact need to hold our fellows and friends accountable when they say or do something stupid, intolerant or dangerous, we’re going to have to get used to this scene becoming a regressive, meat-headed mess of bad and toxic ideas in which we are too scared of being yelled at to confront the social bigotry that we joined the scene in order to get away from.
Note: For a great read on why you should not be afraid of holding someone accountable for saying something ignorant, I suggest Hoyden About Town’s Don’t Mistake Expressing Contempt For Taking Offense.
Secondly (or thirdly, if you count going off about the naïve conception of inclusiveness that the industrial scene has embraced as another point), the dynamic between the music and the scene has changed. The scene built up around the music at first; people became fans of the music, then they all started hanging out. That’s how a scene is born, obviously. As a collection of fans begins to evolve into something more structured and cultural, ideas such as prevailing fashion and ideas will begin to emerge, but it was ultimately the music that united everyone, with the other elements being complementary. Now, the music obeys the scene. Bands by and large seem to spend much more time and effort designing their on-stage image than actually making good music. Furthermore, as more self-styled industrial bands (or even bands who doggedly deny that they belong to any of industrial’s subgenres, yet are still quite pleased to take the money of their fans in the industrial scene) embrace the idea of what I would call pop success, thanks to the example of bands like Combichrist and VNV Nation, the attitude towards making music has become one in which risky, interesting music is deemed to be a bad idea. Industrial becoming “safe” is, quite frankly, what will kill its spirit. Safe in this sense is relative; obviously Combichrist will probably frighten the hell out of your average Dave Matthews Band fan. However, if bands are increasingly unwilling to stray too far outside of the formulas that have grown to be perceived as routes to financial success in industrial music, the genre as a whole will continue to stagnate.
On the subject of industrial’s priorities, I will once and for all say that I am incredibly tired of the term “production value” being trotted out to validate music that is intensely dull. I suppose it is really up to the musician whether they want to make a record that focuses on music as an art or as a marketable product. However, the cognitive dissonance that fans experience leads to very boring industrial music that is produced specifically to sound like another, more financially successful band, or specifically to be played at clubs, to be excused for its lack of any ingenuity or artistic integrity on the grounds of its supposed high production value. Usually this term seems to be a nicer way to say, “This music sounds like Tiesto farted into a coffee can full of scrap metal,” but that might just be me. Ultimately what it means is that people are finding ways to excuse the sterilization of industrial music’s vibrancy in favor of maximizing its marketability. Again, this is a sure way to render the genre stagnant. Am I one of the purists who thinks that music is only cool when it sells badly? Not really. I simply feel that if music sells well, it should be for a good reason: that it is good, interesting music that brings something new to the table. I believe that we as a music scene should stop making excuses for musicians who are so lacking in respect for us as their fans that we are regarded only as a way for them to not need a day job.
Ultimately, I choose to not go anywhere anytime soon. Many people I’ve known in the past have given up on industrial as a scene and as a music because they did not like where it had gone. At the risk of making these people angry, that is taking the easy way out. It’s like people who threaten to move to Canada if a person they dislike is elected President; you might feel better about yourself, but that person is still President, and your taking your toys and going home doesn’t change anything. Instead, I choose to believe that we as a scene can recapture the attitude that drew us all together. We can still be the scene that the gentleman who spoke at the Metro on Sunday gave so much praise to, one that made his life better by accepting him for who he was instead of who he was attracted to. It takes work, diligence and passion, though. We as a community must choose to be more than just another vapid scene mirroring the worst aspects of the society we claim to provide an alternative to. Once that choice is made, it needs to be stuck to. Ignorance, bigotry, cynical commercialization and creative vapidity need to be rejected. The question of whether we are up to the task remains to be seen, but it isn’t an impossible task. After all, it just means we need to be as good to each other as we once were.