I've always been fascinated by industrial music. It's by far the most challenging musical genre that I can actually enjoy. I can't understand a classical piece to save my life (and believe me, I tried), but this. This weird, self-loathing hybrid of music and performance art, that I get. Yeah it's highly conceptual, highly intellectual, but it's so blunt, so raw, yet so crammed full of details that I can't help but appreciating the craftsmanship. Its goal (well, originally), were to provoke, shock, show that music could represent ugliness, but that there was also a sense of visceral beauty to it. Because it represented an unspeakable rage. In the video I posted, Discipline (admit it, you can't stop watching),Throbbing Gristle's signer Genesis P. Orridge yells out for discipline in the middle of an unspeakable chaos. While I am not sure of the subject of the song, something tells me it's a kiss-off of militarized Europe, some kind of a grim victory song. In Hamburger Lady, there's no feeling of triumph, but not danger either. Just a really strange, dreamlike speech about an hamburger lady. Sometimes I listen to it and find love in the subtle voice tracks. Funny fact, Throbbing Gristle are still performing and they are super old.
The Throbbing Gristle and Monte Cazazza era were only the first movement of industrial. It split and created a fractal shape of different sub-genres such as: Electronic Body Music, Dark Ambient, Power Electronics, Industrial Rock, Power Noise and Electro-Industrial. I'm sure I'm forgetting some. I find myself going back to industrial whenever I'm bored with the actual state of music. It's a genre that never really let me down. The flow of creativity is constant because it's a genre driven by people who felt ostracized by the music community for their ideas in the first place. Don't get me wrong, this style of music is an acquired taste. It has an enormous amount of emotional violence. It takes some getting use to. A good sound system, an empty apartment and a willingness to "explore studio space" like a certain gold records producer once said. Personally, I find it's the only way to enjoy music as an intellectual experience. And I'm not talking about lyrics here. Song lyrics is an sidekick of poetry. It's a different art. Industrial is the only way I "get" music as an act of artistic creation and not as a transcending catharsis, which is my usual perception.
