From Throbbing Gristle to SOPHIE: The Queer Legacy of Industrial Music
From the sonic terrorism of Throbbing Gristle, through to the playful experimentation of modern acts such as SOPHIE, industrial music has formed a core aspect of the queer musical landscape. Through studying its history, we can see how this most challenging of genres has reflected the lives of queer people perhaps better than any other.
When performance art collective COUM Transmissions unveiled their Prostitution exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1976, the resulting furore was almost inevitable. The show — which included artefacts ranging from used tampons to double ended dildos smeared with blood — led to Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn denouncing the troupe, and especially their sole female member Cosey Fanni Tutti, as ‘wreckers of civilization’. However, the show was also notably the moment COUM Transmissions made the full transformation into the equally challenging musical outfit Throbbing Gristle. Drawing their name from Yorkshire slang for an erect penis, TG (as they are often known) introduced a new, alien musical style, drawing more from the work’s of experimental sound artists such as John Cage, and the natural soundscapes around them in their industrial northern surroundings, than traditional rock n’ roll. Combining sampled field recordings with harsh soundscapes crafted either through primitive electronics or heavy distortion of traditional instruments, the group laid the groundwork for a new wave of experimental music. They released their debut album The Second Annual Report (1977) on the self-created Industrial Records, and in doing so coined the term industrial music. Little respected in their own time, their influence was only felt after they disbanded — their sound replicated in electronic music running the gamut from underground avant-garde to the shiny electropop of the early 1980’s. Their legacy now long established, TG nevertheless cut an intimidating figure in popular culture. Not only did their music sound challenging, but their lyrics dealt with the seediest of subject matter — tales of murder, burn victims, child molesters and neo-Nazis, awkwardly bolted onto walls of grinding mechanical noise. Many have attempted to ape the TG sound, and so many have failed. TG were wilfully transgressive, boundary pushing and irreverent. They aped Nazi imagery to lampoon Britain’s lingering post-war hostility, and they depicted sex only in its most debased, graphic forms to counteract the countries deep seated sexual repression (Tutti worked as a sex worker in various mediums both before and during her time in TG, her solo work detailing her experiences).
However, a facet of Throbbing Gristle’s history that is so often ignored is that they were a thoroughly queer outfit — and not just because half of the band were openly queer (Genesis P Orridge was genderqueer, using Xe/Xer pronouns, and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson was a gay man. And Cosey Fanni Tutti’s autobiography, Art, Sex, Music, details how the whole band engaged in non heteronormative relations). The very sound of industrial music, and TG’s in particular, is rife for interpretations concerning transmutable identities and shifting personal dynamics. TG’s brand of industrial is largely not bound by the conventions of rhythm, melody or song structure, instead opting for free-form textures and irregular time signatures. If we take ‘queer’ at its true etymological origin — to twist away, to move in a direction that is not straight or conventional — we can see that TG’s subject matter may have only been subliminally queer, but their artistic approach queered the notion of popular music altogether. Examples of this are rife throughout TG’s oeuvre, mostly on their debut record. It also proves how this approach can wield a wide berth of results — on their debut alone, the band veer from histrionic sheets of noise on Slug Bait, to an uneasy ambience on After Cease to Exist. The creative potential of this approach is equalled only by its inbuilt accessibility. TG were contemporary artists using sound as medium — they were not traditionally trained musicians. As has been said of punk (taking off at the same time as TG), any musical genre not based on the notions of classical training is automatically more accessible to those who are excluded from traditional artistic spaces. With their industrial sound, TG introduced perhaps the first genre within the realm of popular music that required no musical training at all.
But beyond this, the very nature of this malleable structure resonates on a thematic level with issues of great concern to queer people — the unstable nature of our bodies, of our identities in a modern world, and our positions of safety in a world marked by violence. So many of TG’s output depicts acts of dismemberment and abjection — Slug Bait’s depiction of castration, the description of a lady’s third-degree burns on Hamburger Lady. But as well as these more corporeal examples of physical annihilation, TG also dismember voices and identities, by clipping recorded speech and pasting it over ambient electronic textures, or by burying the voice under layers of distortion. The recurring theme of change, of self-destruction and self-creation, as well as the ever fluid nature of the music, reflected the need for queer people to construct our own identities separate from a conventional narrative. And their depictions of sex are equally bastardised, whether it’s the controlling antagonist of the creepy Persuasion, through to the appropriately titled Something Came Over Me. Queer people, more so than any other group, understand what it is like to have your sexuality cast as something seedy and abject, whilst the establishment hides its own perversity behind closed doors.TG not only celebrated the seedier side of sex, but also brought the concept down to earth by implicating us all, suggesting that we all have the potential for violence, perversity and vice regardless of social standing. This undermining of common values and misconceptions is especially pertinent to queer people, who are hypocritically oppressed under the assumption that their salaciousness is naturally inclined, and therefore unthinkable to those who are part of a decent, regular society. All these disparate themes in the TG cannon — control, the body, sex and violence — are best exemplified in their signature track Discipline. Throbbing Gristle’s mission statement, both in their music and their lyrics, was to highlight the importance of bodily autonomy, of free will and of adaptability. These themes were picked up upon by queer audiences who struggled to find meaningful representation in popular musical acts of the time.
Though TG never explicitly discussed queerness, its influence on their music, at least to a contemporary queer audience, is undeniable. Song titles such as Don’t Do As Your Told, Do as You Think hinted at their message of personal liberation, whilst the repeated refrain in Discipline of ‘are you ready boys?/ are you ready girls?/ We need some discipline in here!’ showed that their message was one that transcended boundaries of sexuality and gender. After disbanding, the separate members of TG continued to plough further advancements into queer culture — Carter and Tutti formed electropop duo Chris & Cosey, establishing themselves as pioneers of electronic dance music. Genesis P–Orridge formed Psychic TV, who heavily referenced satanism, highlighting the religions emphasis on sexual liberation. And ‘Sleazy’ went on to form legendary industrial group Coil with his life partner John Balance, who were one of the first musical acts to tackle the horrors of the AIDS epidemic head on, even sound-tracking the Terrence Higgins sponsored documentary Gay Men’s Guide to Safe Sex in 1992.
As TG were beginning to make waves in the UK, a simultaneous queer — industrial revolution was taking place in the US. Chicago based Wax Trax Records was formed in 1981, but started in earnest in 1978, by gay couple Danny Flesher and Jim Nash. Flesher and Nash, who owned a small record store of the same name, felt alienated by the aggressive attitude towards queer people at the time — a time of ‘hush hush’ politics surrounding supposed ‘non-traditional’ forms of sexuality, brought in by the Reagan administration and exasperated by the rising threat of the AIDS epidemic. Conversely, the pair felt that queer representation in the media had hit a period of stagnation — the most prominent queer acts at the time, Culture Club and Wham!, were deemed ill- equipped to deal with the pressures experienced by queer people down on the streets. By now, TG’s central theme of abjection and dismemberment was all too real for a queer audience — the AIDS epidemic revealed the truly ugly perception of queer people held by the US government, whilst across the world gay men were referred to in cruel, dehumanising terms in the press whilst the death toll continued to climb. Clearly, this was an environment that industrial music was designed to critique.
In response, the couple formed Wax Trax Records as a means of showcasing underground talent, as well as providing a safe space for outcasts and ‘freaks’. From the beginning, Flesher and Nash recognised that queer audiences tended to identify with taboo artforms and non-conformist artists, who reflected their own positions as a community pushed to the fringes of society. Though Wax Trax was not a queer label specifically, it attracted both a large queer audience and an audience of industrial, experimental acts who struggled to find traction with the more mainstream record labels. By its very existence, Wax Trax proved an irrefutable link between industrial music and the queer experience, both operating on the outskirts of respectable 80’s reactionary politics. In signing a wide variety of acts, Wax Trax also dabbled in disco, techno, electropop and punk — a melting pot of genres more commonly associated with queer culture, with industrial right at its core. Wax Trax managed to achieve what TG were incapable of doing — by signing acts who fused industrial with more conventionally accepted genres, they managed to push industrial into the clubs, gay and straight. Bands such as Ministry and Nine Inch Nails got their starts at Wax Trax, and both took industrial from the fringes into the charts by mixing in elements of metal, techno and house. It was a blueprint that would lay the groundwork for industrial acts to follow, who were now awakened to the dancefloor potential of the genre.
More contemporarily, there has been an influx of queer artists choosing to express themselves through the medium of industrial (or industrial-adjacent) music. Of course, over time, genres merge into one another and styles become fused together. Current queer artists — such as SOPHIE, Lotic, Yatta and Arca — have spurred a new movement in experimental music by fusing an industrial approach with genres more recognisable to a mainstream queer audience in the spirit of Wax Trax Records, whilst largely retaining the renegade spirit of Throbbing Gristle. Perhaps the most successful of these artists is SOPHIE, a record producer and electronic musician who actively uses her music to explore the different facets of identity politics. It is inarguable that SOPHIE’s music is informed by her experiences as a trans woman, and her musical style, which combines the crashing, grinding beats of industrial with bouncy synthetic EDM helps to establish her vision. Faceshopping is perhaps the best example of this collision of ideas — the juttering beat and stabs of noise are paired with a reflection on the possibilities for shifting one’s own identity in the modern media age: ‘My face is the front of shop/My face is the real shop front/My shop is the face I front/ I’m real when I shop my face’. Much like how apps, filters and photoshop allow us to morph our identity at whim, the use of industrial textures allows for a disruption or alteration of the beat. Lotic, a New York based, queer, black artist, uses similar textures and combines it with music more likely to be found at a New York drag ball, especially on their 2018 album Power. Much like SOPHIE, Lotic uses the elastic potential of industrial to their advantage, either using it as an underpinning on songs such as the more obviously trap influenced Nerve, before unleashing an onslaught of cacophonous noise on title track.
What is clear here that a huge array of artists have reached a similar conclusion — industrial music, with its commitment to adaptability and experimentation, lends itself inherently to conversations around identity, and how modern conversations around identity put more focus on the idea of malleability and fluidity. It is telling that so many of our most exciting industrial and experimental acts are queer people, often queer people of colour. Experimental musician Yatta plainly stated that her album WAHALA (2019) is about: ‘being black, being trans, and being African on foreign land’. Though Yatta does not necessarily fall within the remit of industrial, her use of snipped and sampled dialogue recalls Throbbing Gristle’s use of field recordings (a primitive form of sampling) on tracks such as Slug Bait and In The Valley of the Shadow of Death, once again highlighting the power of placing real voices front and centre. It is not only the intersection of race and gender that is tackled by these industrial artists — on her most recent LP The Origin of My Depression (2019), Australian drone/noise artist Uboa grapples with the inextricable link between gender dysphoria and mental illness, expressed conversely through either pastoral ambience of walls of shredding dissonance. And acts such as Arca — whose beautifully structured industrial records have led to production gigs for Bjork, amongst others — have continued the spirit of Wax Trax by centring not only the queer experience in their work, but the possibility for industrial to be combined with dance and ambient music to create work with real commercial appeal. Arca’s most recent single at the time of writing, Nonbinary, brings the queer-industrial story full circle — with references to ‘French tipped nails round the dick’, and a proud proclamation that it is indeed ‘a treat’ to be nonbinary. Much like Throbbing Gristle, these artists recognize the thematic link between the unstable nature of industrial noise and the unstable nature of the human body, especially in a world where your body is open to deconstruction, either of your own choosing or by the physical violence threatened by others
Industrial, like all genres operating on the edges of extremity, is often in danger of being co-opted by a largely straight, white male audience. It is part of our cultural conditioning that we perceive anything aggressive, abrasive and bold as innately masculine, and therefore the antithesis of feminine or queer. This, of course, is not a viewpoint shared by and large by industrial fans, who know that a brief rundown of the genre’s history reveals the integral role queer people have played in its evolution. Whether a queer audience is attracted by its irreverence, it’s amorphous sound or it’s dancefloor potential, there are many possible reasons as to why this most challenging and confrontational of genres is so special to a community that is often presented as shallow and overly sensitive by mainstream society. Industrial’s place in our history proves that queer people, as much as ever, crave art that reflects our political indignation, our proud uniqueness and our determined perseverance. The queer experience is complex and multifaceted, challenging and uncompromising, all of which is recognisable in industrial’s long and fluxional history.
