MY LIFE WITH THE THRILL KILL KULT – “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan”
Industrial is disco, obviously. The most fun things about industrial music (which like most genres can’t be defined, but you know it when you hear it) are its beat-based shamelessness, drugginess and crassness: D.I.S.C.O. from head to toe. Of course the words are dystopically different – “I wanna rot my stinkin’ brain…dope forever, forever loaded” versus, I don’t know, “What’cha doin on your back? You should be dancing!”…but this is black sheep of the family stuff, not a whole different evolutionary branch. It’s only words.
When industrial music gets too harsh and knowing, it tends to go wrong. You could say the same with any genre, really: it’s this whole authenticity thing again. Where people slip up sometimes is assuming that you have to oppose authenticity with the inauthentic and the plastic, which is silly. Rejecting authenticity or ‘meaning it’ as a critical category doesn’t mean dashing headlong after the first J-pop diva or hand-me-down trash manifesto that comes along. What it means to me is realising that ideas of creative sincerity and integrity have precious little to do with my enjoyment of a record, and that attempts to take them into account lead in general to bad criticism and bad music, which is just as well because we can’t know those things for sure anyway.
My guess is you’re likely to get more out of music if you don’t ask the question in the first place: take everything at wide-eyed face value and let the good stuff filter through. I think that’s what I’ve been trying to do with NYLPM: what I didn’t want to do was paint myself into an indie=bad, pop=good corner, which judging by the site’s approval by the indie rock ‘scene’ hasn’t been an issue. This bout of self-analysis sprung out of HumanClick conversations and my self-conscious attempt to nail the Freaky Trigger aesthetic on a shirt Mike was making (follow the link and judge for yourself if I managed it or not).
Sorry, yes, meant to be reviewing a record. All that stuff is little to do with 1990’s “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan”, a favourite of mine from back then which I was glad to rediscover the other day. It’s a romp – 4/4 beats and stalker basslines, glam-fuzz guitar, muezzin cries, guttural howlings and layer on layer of drugsploitation sampling. Dark and exhilarating like a dumb videogame (and it makes it clear that muezzin cries only became such a monster cut-up cliche because they were ace).