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What's Wrong With Industrial?

© Ryan Speck

Industrial music suffers from an inability to get anywhere in the world. Is this because it’s just not a style that is accessible for the masses? Or is there something in the very nature of what’s being heard that prevents it from gaining any further popularity?

When Nine Inch Nails “broke”, it never dragged industrial into the spotlight. Nor did any of the other artists, such as Stabbing Westward or Gravity Kills, that had mainstream success shed any light onto the underground…

It’s hard to try to tell yourself that industrial just isn’t palatable to the masses, because every GNC commercial for weight-gainer is fraught with badly constructed industrial made with the “Methods Of Mayhem” sample disc and every car commercial on TV is backed by jagged hard-electro beats.

So why isn’t industrial finding any acceptance?

I personally find industrial a hard genre to get into these days. It isn’t for the lack of musical quality, though. It’s hard to become interested in a genre like industrial when all the more well-known bands are out-of-print or broken up. More often that not, it’s both.

It’s easy enough for KMFDM to find fans, but what about all the other bands out there? I’ll admit, I used to know about every industrial band that had seen fit to release some music into the scene, but now it’s just a web of obscure local bands, ever trying to be more and more elite in their underground-ness.

Distribution in industrial circles is weak. Living on the east coast, I find it impossible to find any industrial from labels other than majors and Metropolis, who endlessly churns out the same bands making the same style of music, doing nothing to help the music scene. Most smaller labels are west coast-oriented and you’re forced to deal with specialty shops and online industrial retailers to do anything other than waste an hour looking through CD’s at Tower Records.

In these times, there is also an amazing lack of journalism on the part of industrial music. Word-of-mouth is almost the only means of hearing about some bands these days and even then one is left with a distinct lack of information regarding their music other than how “133t” they are. That, too, is part of the problem. The rabid fanbase of industrial music has gone from being twenty-something computer geeks to goths and teenagers. The fanbase that once supported industrial music has faded away and has been replaced with people that enjoy the music but lack the rabidity that their forefathers had… This is only compounded by the ever-growing fragmentation between elitist industrial fans who either listen exclusively to EBM or industrial-rock.