Industrial music sprang from the simultaneous vision of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, which were each, in their own way, only a backlash to the music of the 1970’s. They were the antithesis of the “peace & love” hippie-ism of the early 70’s or the disco-era fad of the late 70’s. Before that point, music told stories, but these stories were usually stories of love, stories about life. This was music about hate. A hatred of everything the 70’s was about, a hatred of everything our society, our world, had become.
To draw a line between the seminal period of industrial-noise-experimentalism of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire and the period of the early 80’s that spawned the synthpop of Ministry and the new-wave-cum-experimental of Skinny Puppy is nearly impossible. It would be hard to find any reason to say that the industrial artists of the early 80’s were inspired by those of the late 70’s. It is unlikely that Nivek Ogre and Cevin Key ever heard Throbbing Gristle and formed Skinny Puppy, saying “we can expand on this”. So, instead, the historical perspective of industrial music makes correlations between those that worked from that same viewpoint of life: that hatred of society and the world that bred it. “Industrial music for industrial people…”
So it can be said that industrial music, despite musical themes and similarities in sounds, was never a genre of specific musical types, but a genre working from an emotion, a genre built on speaking out about the ills of mankind, a backlash to what is “pop”.
And so it was that bands like Coil, Foetus, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Chrome, Einsturzende Neubauten, and others that inspired a feeling in the next generation of “industrial” musicians, breeding a contempt for society, and turning performance art into music.
Admittedly, the music was far from refined and most is experimental only for the sake of being experimental. Taking away the mystique of pushing boundaries and doing something that defies the idea of musicality, some of it was quite very boring and pointless. But some of it made an impression and it was the strange “shot heard ‘round the world” that introduced ideals that set the industrial genre into motion.
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