Keef Baker, I love your music but you're wrong.

I love Keef Baker. Well, I love Keef Baker's music. If you don't know him, he's a really good IDM / electronica artist who has had a bunch of great albums released on Hymen, n5MD and Ad Noiseam. Anyway, he also has a music blog, and recently published a post entitled "A Metaphor for the Decline of Industrial Music". Go have a read. I think it's a thoughtful and well-written article, though I think it's completely wrong. To be more specific, I think it contains some interesting and truthful ideas, but I do not think he puts forward any reasonable case for the "decline of industrial music" (a strange concept something I've been hearing loads and loads about ever since I started listening to industrial music, which was around 1994... wow, it seems like it's dying a particularly slow death!).

The metaphor he uses is that of abstract versus cat pictures. Someone becomes interested in abstract art, and then becomes disillusioned because lots of people start putting out cat pictures and calling them abstract art. Hence, the decline and fall of abstract art. The metaphor is that there is so much junk non-industrial music around, calling itself industrial music, that the overall genre collapses upon itself in a pile of crap.

There are a number of problems with this line of reasoning, but the main problem is that it confuses what something is, with what it is called. In Keef Baker’s metaphor, why did the abstract art fan become saddened by the cat pictures, irregardless of what people were calling them? Here’s a metaphor that describes how I see the situation.

I’m an abstract art fan (i.e. where abstract art represents industrial music). I’m happy because every weekend I go to a local art gallery and check out the new great abstract art paintings. Every weekend there are new ones and they’re generally really good. After a few weeks I notice that a gallery called “Abstract Art World!” opens up across the road, and it’s full of cat paintings. I shrug my shoulders and go into the gallery that has actual abstract art, which I love, and it’s still there and still great. Next week there are another half dozen more galleries opening up, all claiming to be full of abstract art, and all full of cat paintings. I again ignore them and go check out the gallery I love which still has amazing new abstract art.

You could continue this metaphor to any extreme you like, where every gallery, or even building in the world is full of cat paintings claiming to be abstract art. And as long as my favourite gallery is there, week after week, full of great new abstract artworks, then I should be happy, and my life is not affected one tiny bit. So it would make no sense to talk about the decline of abstract art, just as it makes no sense to me to talk about the decline of industrial music.

Now the obvious retort would be “Of course it’s declining! At the beginning, there was great abstract art (industrial music), but now it’s 1% abstract art and 99% cat paintings!” (fake industrial music). No, it’s not. Assuming that either a) anyone sensible and informed can understand what actual abstract art is, or b) abstract art is simply whatever I declare it to be (I’m happy with either of those options), then the amount of abstract art (industrial music) has not changed one bit. If (a) is true, then all the cat painting people are wrong and lying when they say they are making abstract art. And if they’re full of shit, why would I care what they say? If (b) is true, then music genres are entirely subjective. In which case, I can invent away any problems I like by just redrawing what I constitute abstract art to be: starting by excluding cat paintings would be a sensible first step.

The only way you’re in trouble is if you believe (c), which is that the overall sum of human opinions form the truth of what constitutes a genre name. So the vast masses of cat painting fans have in fact “reclaimed” the term “abstract art”, and the art as you understand it doesn’t meaningfully exist anymore. But if you’ve fallen for this “socially constructed” guff, then you can just socially disassemble the problem yourself too: invent a new genre name, call it “blabstract art”, and declare that you love “blabstract art”, which is what used to be abstract art. In which case, abstract art is dead, but has been reborn as a healthy, vibrant “blabstract art” movement.

“But that’s just shuffling words around!” would be the reply. “It doesn’t help save abstract art / industrial music!”. Indeed, which shows the foolishness of the argument in the first place: a problem of words, not of music. Industrial music is perfectly well and healthy. If you go to discogs.com, and inspect the release roster of the quality industrial music labels out there (Malignant, Hymen, Ant-Zen, Hands, Ad Noiseam, n5MD, Tympanik), you’ll find an extraordinary amount of amazingly good and completely “industrial” (whatever that means) music was released in 2013; I would say just as much, as in any other recent year. I’ll be posting my best of 2013 soon, and it’s really hard picking just 10 amazing albums from last year. Sure there has also been a lot of crap. But we remember Sturgeon’s Law, don’t we? It applies to everything, including industrial music. You can accept the legions of Suicide Commando clones (even Johan has now become a sad clone of himself) as the 90% of crap in industrial music, or shuffle them into a different genre, it doesn’t matter. There is still a core of great industrial music being produced and released, and it’s even easier to find and access it than ever before. There might be a decline in the accuracy of terminology around industrial music (I actually wouldn’t say there is anyway, since the term has always been nebulous and ill-defined), but there certainly isn’t any decline in the quality of the music. You would think of all people, someone putting out great industrial music would realise this.