The reviews below are from the March 1990 issue of Waste Paper, a low cost fanzine put out irregularly by Wax Trax Records over a few years in the 80s and 90s – though sometimes with different names, certainly different styles, and changing levels of technological sophistication. 1990 was still pretty crude: a primitive early version of MS-Publisher (yes, loaded into the computer on floppy discs), cut and paste graphics from both old, lurid True Confession-style magazines and collections of goofy, often surreal copyright-free images gathered in cheap, oversized books you could pick up at Meininger’s, a few fuzzy, gray scaled black & white photos taken at shows, and, of course, our own thoughts, insights and impressions concentrated in deathless prose. It was then printed out on a dot-matrix printer in a clunky, utilitarian font guaranteed to fuzz, blur, and bleed on the pulp tabloid newsprint paper we opted for at Barnum Printing on S. Federal Blvd.
Here, that prose is presented in a long piece by yours truly and a shorter, more to-the-point, live review of, possibly, Nine Inch Nails’ first Colorado appearance when they opened for Jesus and Mary Chain at the Glenn Miller Ballroom in Boulder on 2/7/1990 by long-time Wax Trax employee, Liz Crow. Liz recently rejoined us after working elsewhere for over 20 years.
It is interesting to consider that of the people and bands written about in the following pieces, NIN’s Trent Reznor seems to have the greatest long-term success – not just with his own releases under that name but even more spectacularly, in partnership with Atticus Ross, with composing soundtracks. Trent and Atticus have provided the scores to 18 or so films and, astoundingly, won an Oscar for Best Original Score for 2010’s The Social Network.
Skinny Puppy isn’t doing much these days, with their last release being “Weapon” from 2013. Skinny Puppy’s Nivek Ogre and Mark Walk released ohGr’s 5th solo album, “Tricks,” in 2018; and Nivek has done some acting here and there in films like Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) and Queen of Blood (2014).
Meanwhile, Al Jourgensen of Ministry is, amazingly, still alive – despite claiming that he has died three times: ‘“The first death was the weirdest,” Jourgensen says, talking about it as casually as a walk to the shops. “I was at a party and OD’d. When I came back after being defibrillated, everyone was astounded that I could tell where everyone was, even in different rooms. I’d been hovering above me, watching all the panic and mayhem below as they were working on me.” (fr. The Guardian, 2/29/2024) And Ministry is still cranking out albums (Hopiumforthemasses came out in March, 2024) and still touring. Uncle Al is definitely a tough old bird!
Mussolini Headkick seems to have faded into the mists of time.
Anyway, here’s what we thought these Captains of Industry were up to back in 1990…
The Sound of Industry
By Duane Davis
[Originally published in Waste Paper in 1990]
Ministry – The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste LP (Sire)
Skinny Puppy – Rabies LP (Capitol)
Mussolini Headkick – Themes for Violent Retribution LP (Wax Trax)
Nine Inch Nails – Pretty Hate Machine LP (TVT)
The proliferation of Industrial Dance Music in the past year or so has been astonishing. From its humble beginnings as a kind of fusion of the Birthday Party/Neubauten/Foetus sensibility with the dance floor exhilaration of New Order and Depeche Mode has evolved a music and an audience that might be difficult to comprehend but are immediately identifiable.
The music is characterized by a series of contradictions. It utilizes a stop/start rhythm that defies expectations, that combines the regularity of the machine with the slouch and lurch of the body falling into decay. The sound has the iron clang and fleshy thud of a cybernetics of rhythm, a machine that sweeps across the dance floor lock-stepped in the irregular but irresistible motions of blood and muscle.
There is something peculiarly liberating about this, as though by giving yourself over to this music you have shuffled off the burdens of civilization, as though one were driven out of the mind and into the body by the voluntary relinquishment of control over that very body to forces greater, or at least louder, than one’s own. The music, spiked with the shards of its own broken propulsions, perforates the ego and allows the Id and all its darkness to bleed into those normally sacrosanct and spotless chambers of domestic tranquility that we call the everyday self, you and me when we are at our best stopping for all the red lights and paying for the apple we ate while shopping at King Soopers.
This music makes great use of sampling, of lifting bits and pieces of not merely other musics but of a great range of cultural detritus that washes up out of the great collective unconscious of the Now: dialogue from films and TV, newscasts, preachers, flim-flam artists and politicos. The effect is that of collage or pastiche, a constant intrusion of other realities, a juxtaposition of the contradictory demands made on the individual in his or her daily life.
The voices are wildly divergent, careening from the thick, guttural shout of the patriarch to the low, soft whisper of the seducer of innocence Armid the sharp hail of sound, the screeches of the machine, the loud roar of blood and hard crack of bone, the voice, that sign in music as in life, of the human personality, is warped and distorted, pressurized in a dense atmospherics of transformation and re-vitalization that aims to collect Power at the break, rift, the crack in the structure of music created by all that noise.
The audience these voices speak to is dressed in black. Their hair is black, their shoes are black and their fingernails are painted black. Their faces though are white, flour white, milk white, dead white, not merely drained of color but aggressively, decisively, emphatically white. Lines of color, red, yellow, and more black, slash across the faces, as gender and class fracture beneath the weight of the masks, imploding like black holes and making of faces gravity wells out which no signal comes but the alien pulse of primal energy. As the nuclear furnace inside a star strips the atom of its husk of valences, so does this costume strip the individual of its husk of identity, and thus the crowded dance floor becomes a transcendent plane of purity for the effect of all this Difference is the collapse of distance and measure: all are alike and all radiate a Pure Being This is indeed the land of monads where the individual as we know him or her dissolves made soluble in the flux of music and leaving behind an absolute substance: pure sex, pure power, pure hate, pure love, pure being.
The contradiction is apparent: absolute substance must always, in the final analysis, be reduced to an idealism, an abstracted concept bereft of life and particularity.
That is the risk this audience takes: to dissolve the social reality of everyday life in the corrosive flux of music, drowning in a vast sea of noise that unknits the tissue and tendon of personality as they strive for a community no language speaks to and no custom enfolds in its musty grasp.
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There is an unexpected range to the music in this field, as we can see in the four albums under discussion here (an admittedly narrow and arbitrary selection from a burgeoning catalogue of aural assault).
Ministry are old hands at this game with several lp’s under their belts (or one belt we should say as the group is primarily Alan Jourgenson). The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste follows on the highly successful The Land of Rape and Honey (also on Sire) released last year The band’s turn toward Industrial music was marked on TWITCH, a decidedly downbeat and subdued album of songs that rubbed against you like a fine sandpaper, a delicate abrasion that wore away the skin and muscle and polished the bones of a somber dance.
…Rape and Honey probably remains their best effort to date, with its mix of textures and aggressions, snarls and moans, cries and whispers.
THE MIND, unfortunately, is simple minded, monochromatic in the extreme and rigid with a rigor mortis of ideas and inspiration. “Burning Inside” can stand as the 1p’s benchmark: an ominous drone fades from speaker to speaker until a sudden eruption of piston-like drums underscores a clutch of brittle, chicken breasted chords. A distorted voice begins to bubble out of the mix like raw sewage seeping up through the rug at your feet. The lyric is angry but indecipherable, a vague encryption of hate and fear. The rhythm of the song, the propulsion of the bass and drums, is singularly dispiriting, fast, narrow, and repetitive. Beyond what is laid down in the first few moments of the song, little is added to its texture and grain. The song begins at one emotional level (overwrought, of course) and stays at that level to the end. It is enervating, not exhausting; anemic rather than viral.
This song is not, however, the album’s lowest ebb. That dubious honor belongs to “Test”, a silly attempt to create Industrial Strength Rap. A scratchy, scrawny voice trying its best to be macho intones, “Yo, this is a test…” Unfortunately, all involved fail. Everything in the song is a pale parody of rap’s brutal power over mind, body and speech.
“Cannibal Song” is one of the few change-up’s, starting off with a bumble- bee drone, the distant caw of a crow flying over the wasteland and a murmur of collapse. The drum thuds in as metallic squeals rise and fall in a skitter of noises, a nightmare of tilted forms and leaning structures. The pace is slower, more deliberate, more careful. In this piece we can hear the orchestration of collapse with its melody of erosion and counter-song of bitter, angry refusal. This may be despair but it is a militant despair, determined not to weep but to scorn – if there are tears they eat like an acid rain into the somber landscape.
On this album, Jourgensen has failed to understand that machines, even if repetitive, are complex, their rhythms and motions, beginnings and endings, and especially their intrusions into the flesh. An Ideal Mechanics may have the absolute confidence of the Unconscious, a coincidence of cause and effect that leaves no room for sublimation or any of the tricks of psychology, but the reality of machinery is far different, entailing as it necessarily does the contamination of the material by the motives of the human.
Shouting out cliches over the din of a noisy sewing machine, Jourgensen commits the deadliest of sins, but one I’m sure he intended to avoid: he is merely boring. Or, what is even worse, manages to sound like re-tread Pink Floyd as on “So What” where a light, hurried synth drum patters along the cranium with little squiggles of noise behind it while a voice natters on about someone who had a bad home life and so did not assimilate normal values regarding human life and thus goes out and kills people: “I only kill to know I’m alive. So what indeed. Is there anything here Norman Mailer didn’t say a thousand times better in 1957 in his essay, ‘The White Negro’?
This material has the feel of habit, not passion; of giving its audience what it expects to hear rather than what it should be made to hear. Its closest parallel is found in the current exhaustion of formulaic Hardcore where third generation punks in hand-me-down mohawks have turned the music into repetition rather than ritual, the Slamming Pit into an ant-hill rather than a rough ceremony of unity.
One of the powers of music is its ability to construct an alternate axis for defining human reality. It is a knife that slices into the heart at a different angle, exposing a structure hidden from us, layers of psychic tissue, cellular proliferations that displace and reorganize the foundations of motive and act. In Industrial Music, this can be done by caricature, as with Skinny Puppy and their EC Comics Aesthetics and B-Grade Horror Movie Philosophy(‘Be Prepared To Enter A World Stranger Than You Have Ever Imagined…’); or it can be accomplished by a kind of hyper self-analysis that goes beyond mere willingness to a virtual obsession with exposing the raw center of confusion where sex and aggression, love and surrender, fear and flesh commingle in a shifting hierarchy of dominance and submission, repression and expression.
Skinny Puppy, Canada’s revenge on the United States for the 1964 schlock horror film, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies’, provide the listener with a Grand Guignol performed by the Munsters. Really no more than ushers in this particular Theater Of Blood, Skinny Puppy have built and maintained a following by never over estimating their fans and by an actual talent in the studio for the construction of lush, thick melodramatic structures and a genuine feel for the dynamics of the human voice, sampled or otherwise. Their songs, entertaining though hardly diverting, are like four or five minute retellings of various Poe stories using the limited vocabulary of a ten year old from Arvada who has seen all the Friday The Thirteenth movies at least twice.
Despite this, Rabies, though not as powerful or exotic as their last 1p, VivisectVI (also on Capitol), is a fun romp through the Funhouse of Decay where such songs as ‘Fascist Jock Itch’, ‘Two Time Grime’ and ‘Rodent’ build up near lethal levels of radioactive rhythm and an effective though totally false Ground Zero urgency. High production values and an inventive approach to the varieties of studio induced sound mutation makes this lp a treat to listen to all the way through and as you go along, you can test your movie trivia knowledge by trying to guess the sources of the many sampled quotes scattered throughout the songs from various old movies.
If Skinny Puppy enjoy a partial success by the effect of texture on half-baked, cornball lyrics, Mussolini Headkick manage a complete success by the total submersion of content in context. The sound on this album, thirty odd minutes of pure seduction, traverses a Body of Desire, inscribing a liturgy of breaks and gaps, interruptions and ruptures on the pure surface of dance, a remarkable and hypnotic performance all the more powerful for its reliance on the apparent contradictions of license and compulsion, explosion and restraint.
Here is a music that introduces a viral enjoyment, a take over of the nerves by the tiny increments of cellular mechanics, an invasion of sounds and rhythms to which the only response is that of infection and contagion. Noise is recoded to a cryptography of propulsive, fluid motion and the iron restraints of beat and cycle. Drama is found in the oscillations of pulse, the rise and fall of a breath that is not your own but which nevertheless begins to regulate the rhythms of the body.
In an album of uniform excellence, “Jesus Collects” is still a star standout, a precise machine in which the parts are fitted with zero tolerance and cunning effect. Small, quirky sounds break through the surface of the song, only to be buried in the thick flow of voice and music, as though sparrows could dance on the crusts of volcanos. “Death Path” begins with a dense, fogged landscape, a contrast of keening winds and low, somber tones, as though out of the wastes a voice is forming, inchoate and ephemeral, doomed to wear away in the winds before it can say the words it is driven to speak. “The Eagle Has Landed” introduces в series of paranoic machines, small devices of voice and music driven along on the rising tensions of a world increasingly at the mercy of its own technology, never knowing if at this moment man or machine is master or servant.
Despite a cover ambiguous enough that the label, Wax Trax (Chicago), has recently started sending out explanations that the picture on the front cover is not pro-, but rather, anti-fascist (the painting, black and white, shows a near naked man entwined in a swastika with a look on his face that seems more indicative of sexual satiation than crucifixion), Mussolini Headkick’s Themes for a Violent Retribution provides a decidedly clear and definite enjoyment: highly recommended (after all, you can always tape over your own cover).
Nine Inch Nails is Trent Reznor, a 24 year old college drop out from the back country of Pennsylvania who, on his debut LP, Pretty Hate Machine (TVT Records), comes up with a slice of vinyl worthy of being put on the shelf next to Pailhead, Ministry’s 12″ Collection and Gary Clail’s Teckhead LP.
The key to the album is excess, an excess of voice, rhythm, score and lyric; an excess of sex and violence driven by a sweltering and claustrophobic introspection that paws relentlessly through its own body, finding a grim, grotesque satisfaction in its inadequacies and confusions.
Let’s start with the band name: Nine Inch Nails, a powerful image that necessarily evokes sex and aggression in this overly Freudianized society. It also brings to mind the Old Testament story from the Book of Judges where the woman Jael takes a hammer and nails her enemy, Sisera’s, head to the floor. Nails, of course, can be used for tasks as mundane as building a book shelf or as extraordinary as nailing someone to a cross. Reznor leans heavily toward the latter, finding in the act of crucifixion an image of sexual union equal to the ambivalence he feels for that particular act.
A strong, unreasoning fear of dissolution, of being somehow dissolved in the act of love, runs through the album. Unfortunately this smacks of classic proto-fascist sentiment, especially in such lines as, ‘my Purity you stole/did you think I wouldn’t recognize this compromise/am I just too stupid to realize…/it comes down to this/your kiss/your fist.’ In these songs, the physical act of love is freighted with a terrible anger and fear at the possibility of the loss of self, of the transgression of ego boundaries that have hardened into the walls of a fortress and a prison.
Elsewhere, though, on songs like ‘Head Like A Hole’ and ‘Terrible Lie’, Reznor is able to describe those fears in other terms, coming across a little like St. John of the Cross in jackboots and a leather jacket.
It is in fact this propensity for flagellation, for the hair shirt and cat ‘o’ nine tails scourging, that brings to mind Reznor’s closest spiritual mentor: Marc Almond, another devotee of the cross and whip whose God seems to speak to him out of a whirlwind of Sadian theology.
Almond’s failing, at least recently, is more musical than lyric and the listener becomes bored all too quickly in spite of Almond’s relentless dredging of his troubled heart. Reznor, on the other hand, may not have all of his words under control yet, but his music is another story entirely.
Trip hammer rhythms, buzzsaw squalls of guitar and a more than proficient mastery of the possibilities of the human voice are combined in song structures that maintain, rather than control, the tension from which they are built. If the tone is dark, the effect is nevertheless celebratory, a dance of survival in which the howl of fear is somehow transformed into an unexpected delight in the struggle of the flesh against its limitations.
Highly recommended.
Nine Inch Nails at the Glenn Miller Ballroom
by Liz Crow
[Originally published in Waste Paper in 1990]
PRETTY HATE MACHINE, the debut album by Nine Inch Nails, is one of the best albums in the Industrial Dance vein to come out in the last few years. Written and performed by Trent Reznor, its producers include Flood (Depeche Mode, Cabaret Voltaire), Adrian Sherwood(Tackhead) and Keith LeBlanc.
Noting the big-name producers and all the mixing credits, I was curious to know how Nine Inch Nails sounded live. My opportunity came when they opened for The Jesus And Mary Chain at the Glenn Miller Ballroom.
Reznor and the band he formed for the tour were great. They avoided the extremes that can occur when performing an album like this one live: either being so minimal it’s unrecognizable or so exact the only effort it requires is pushing the button on a tape player. The combination of guitars, percussion and tape was energetic and rich.
Resplendent in ripped-up shorts, T-Shirt and combat boots, Reznor alternated between moments of ranting, jumping around pulling the guitar player around by his ponytail and moments of slow passion.
Crowd response was good although Reznor’s sensuous voice and original lyrics were lost on many who were anxiously awaiting the arrival of their Guitar Gods, Jesus And Mary Chain.
Hopefully the next time Reznor and company are in Denver they will be headlining their own show.
They sure beat some of the headliners I’ve seen lately.
(No such luck, of course. Nine Inch Nails will open, once again, this time for Peter Murphy on March 16th at the Glenn Miller Ballroom — Ed.)
Uncle Al returns to Denver on May 31st at the Mission Ballroom for an Industrial/Goth extravaganza featuring Ministry, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kurt and Die Krupps.
Al’s touring behavior can be, shall we say, unpredictable! Al himself remarks of one tour in his autobiography, ‘In addition to the lawsuits there were tons of arrests on that tour. We played twelve states in a row during the US leg of the tour and on any given night someone from our band or crew was ultimately arrested and taken away by the cops.’
Or, on another tour, ‘We started the show with “Cattle Grind,” and the potato-sack dancer was staggering around the stage on platform shoes she had built out of two-by-fours.’
But best of all is Al demonstrating his displeasure with Metallica at yet another venue: ‘I grabbed my deli tray, looked at these arrogant fuckers, and grabbed handfuls of carrots, celery, and rolled-up ham. Then I dropped my pants and shoved all this stuff up my ass. I looked like a fucking peacock.’
So break out your two-by-four platform shoes and pack the deli tray with K-Y jelly and get ready to party: May 31st, the peacocks are gonna strut their stuff!
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