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  • Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music by S. Alexander Reed
  • Rob Upton
Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. By S. Alexander Reed. pp. xv + 361. (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2013. £17.99. ISBN 978-0-19-983260-6.)

Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music is Oxford University Press’s first ‘serious study’ of industrial music, intended to supersede Paul Hegarty’s Noise Music: A History (London, 2007) and Eric Duboys’s Industrial Music for Industrial People (Rosières-en-Haye, 2007). It is a welcome addition to the increasing amount of scholarship that offers a sociological introduction to one of many styles previously omitted from the popular music studies canon. Currently an Assistant Professor at Ithaca College, New York, Reed is a ‘fan-scholar’ (as defined in Matthew Hills’s Fan Cultures (Oxford, 2002)), who has gained critical recognition as vocalist in the industrial band ThouShaltNot. Reed’s relationship with his subject results in an engaging writing style that brings to mind Andy Greenwalds’s Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo (New York, 2003) and Dayal Patterson’s Black Metal: Evolution of The Cult (Port Townsend, 2014).

Assimilate traces the industrial scene from its 1970s conception through to the turn of the twenty-first century. Identifying its beginnings as an avant-garde ideology (citing such musically diverse bands such as Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire), Reed follows the subsequent appropriations of dance music and Goth culture that resulted in the modern industrial subgenres of electronic body music and synthpop (as performed by such acts as VNV Nation and Covenant). Reed’s account examines a broader issue previously observed in Greenwald: does the act of labelling a [End Page 498] musical style construct social expectations of intrinsically restrictive aesthetic boundaries that restrict fluid cross-stylistic experimentation? Despite claims to the contrary (p. 14), Reed presents a ‘rise and fall’ narrative that corresponds conveniently with the interests of major record labels taming the initial founding ideologies and assimilating the industrial scene into an editable and marketable palette of sonic tokens.

This volume is impeccably researched; it is replete with track titles and meticulously cited quotations, and the sheer number of protagonists that frame the central historical narrative borders on the fanatical. Yet radically different historical interpretations (e.g. Al Jourgensen’s autobiographical account of his band in Ministry (Boston, 2013)) all suggest a volatile narrative of sodomy and heroin, which is played down in Assimilate. Readers need to bear in mind that this is Reed’s own history of industrial music: while Reed is sensitive to others’ ‘storytelling’ (p. 127), objectivity and distance are seldom attainable in this style of scholarship.

The inexperienced reader is given a sense of what industrial music can sound like. An opening anecdote describes Front Line Assembly’s music as ‘mechanized dance music that fused together manic narratives of high-technology, global warfare, emotional suffering, and the uneasy promise of humanism’ (p. 4). And it becomes clear that this is just one of the many musical styles that have been considered ‘industrial’. Though cursory, an analysis of two distinct recordings of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Still Walking’ (p. 37) relates the song to the underlying compositional process rather than to the musical outcome. Granting equal status to both the work and the performance allows Reed to consider diverse musical outputs yielded by the indeterminacy of musical performance as belonging to the industrial scene.

For Reed, these sonically diverse musical artefacts are judged to be connected through the central aesthetic and ideological principles that informed the first wave of industrial artists in the late 1970s. Although these founding ideologies are never fully critiqued, Reed offers writings by Antonin Artaud and Guy Debord, and the direct influence of William Burroughs, as the ideological base from which industrial musicians sought to ‘dismantle deep cultural assumptions so thoroughly normalized by media, government and religion as to seem invisible’ (fourth cover). The ideology of Burroughs becomes an interpretative lens through which to analyse musical content such as lyrics and song construction. In a convincing interpretation of KMFDM’s ‘A Drug against War’ (p. 30), Reed equates the listing of ‘Television, religion … sex and...

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