Post-Industrial Devolution

My latest column is a reading on early Industrial music and how its shifts reflected actual shifts in the industrial labor force in late capitalism.

It focuses on the genre's troubling fascination with fascism and rock's avoidance of it, also tracking the ways in which industrial and techno overlapped (with only the latter surviving in the popular imagination).

FYI, I did not choose that image at the top of the page of Kraftwerk, who don't really figure into this story at all.

There will be a part 2 coming soon with information on where industrial sound continued in IDM, Glitch, Downwards Records, Gabber, and other modern musics.