MINISTRY - IN CASE YOU DIDN'T FEEL LIKE SHOWING UP
i was always sympathetic to industrial, although i wasn't exposed to it until after its peak. there was this kind of crude materialism to it - the video has footage of oil rigs - massive industrial structures. i think what was going on here was something that it's a shame we've lost. it was this kind of niaeve belief that all ideology and human pretension was being crushed under the might of these massive industrial monoliths and their violence and inhuman strength - a lot of metal and industrial bands explored this. there's something really interesting about this period - 80's/90's, where we don't yet have a definitive understanding of neuroscience and we don't know what role, if any, the human has in this world. so we are still imaging ourselves as kind of projected spirits made powerful by the might of our steel and machines. it also probably had a lot to do with the terror of nuclear war and a kind of determination to live as some sort of mutant amongst the devastation.
i like this and think it was fundamentally positive, because there's a sense in which it was a kind of brutal communalism - the idea that humanity is this sick weak thing that's being exhilaratingly crushed by, and also endowed with god like strength, by its technics. these bands were looking out at the noumenal world and reveling in the fact that there is this space in it where all human vanities and souls are irrelevant. if you get blasted by a nuke you're dead and it doesn't matter who you are or what you think. there's a kind of holy indifference to all this that these bands wanted to tap into. it merged with cyberpunk as well. the movie doom generation was the pinnacle of this and has an industrial soundtrack.
as i said, i really liked all this stuff, because it had this great attitude of sickness, cynicism and darkness in the face of these inhuman structures. this was really healthy and cool but it totally got wiped away by the time the 00's came around. it was all about the darkness of the world! it was also this kind of 80's consumerist idea that everything we were doing was getting bigger, harder, more inhuman, and it would just stretch to the skies and onto to infinity. that didn't happen of course, but if you look at old cyberpunk imagery, the future they depict is one where buildings just loom and get bigger and bigger and more dense and complex and every part of them is taken up with satelites and pipes and wires and stuff. whereas what really happened was the reverse, things got minimalist and tried to be as natural and light and non threatening as possible.
i think therefore this music was sort of about the way the human body was being absorbed by its environment, and it represents a kind of limit, and IRL instead of getting like this things just imploded and became smaller, more compact, and eventually you have iPODs which is a piece of consumer electronics that is not being marketed as this kind of phallic thing like its harder, bigger, better, more complex, more features, lists of technical details and schematics and numbers and specs all emphasizing this intensity and power, but is instead being marketed as a kind of cutesy kitschy naturalist narcissistic appendage to the body.
also you had nin who took this and made it all about the personal angst of the interior of trents soul/anus, which kind of ruined it.
but of course, it was mixed up with a lot of rock n roll bullshit and macho posturing. the moment for this stuff has long passed, which is a shame, because i think it was a lot cooler than what replaced it.
and we just don't have the kind of darkness that this music has anymore. we have hyper personalized music where the backround and the technology, if there even is any, is all subsumed by the leering body of the performer. so it seems we became desperate to have the world reduced to a part of our souls rather than the inverse like in industrial.
so yeah, that's my view on this album i've never even listened to before.