What was the most random thing you bought on eBay during the lockdown? Come on, we all bought something weird, didn’t we? Me? I purchased a near complete lot of the comic book series Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children for twenty bucks. Long out of print and never collected in trade paperback, single issues are still the only way to revisit this creation of writer Dave Louapre and artist Dan Sweetman.

That the fate of Beautiful Stories is an open-ended mystery is apt. After all, one day in 1989 it just showed up in comic book stores looking like no other title beside it. Each issue was a self-contained short story accompanied by Sweetman’s uneasy and jittery illustrations. The stories were morbid and realist reimaginings of myths and archetypes through an American sense of irony, with Louapre’s writing voice jumping from Jim Thompson to Joe Frank as needed.

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Art predicts the future by accident.

That was the thought I had on first flipping through Nicolas Ballet’s overwhelming and exhilarating tome, Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music. And industrial music—especially its first practitioners Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire, Coil, and Test Dept—was well placed for that kind of prophecy. Starting in the UK and spanning the late 1970s and throughout the ’80s, industrial music connected the frayed ends of the hippy underground with the rise of the 24-hour news day, corporate media consolidation, the birth of the religious right, and the waning of the Eastern Bloc. Ideology was collaborating with technology in a way we had not experienced yet and the industrial bands were there to report back with homemade synthesizers, scavenged metal, and hand-cut tape loops. Juvenile-minded punk may have been all about its fragile present, but the industrial artists were happy to raid old avant-gardes and imagined futures for their visual palette of—allow me one more list—propaganda, extreme criminal deviancy, war, occult ritual, body politics, and information technology.

As Ballet argues in his introduction, taken as a whole, industrial music is its own alternative postmodernism.

By focusing exclusively on the visual trail left by the industrial scene, Ballet avoids reducing the scene’s efforts to some wierdo subset of pop music history and instead foregrounds the ideas. That’s appropriate, because for the most part these were not garage musician hopefuls. They were performance artists looking to undermine the idea of entertainment itself. Ballet’s 600-page cataloging is meticulous, insightful and at times horrifying. This is a genre that can still shock decades later, maybe because the framework among disparate artists is surprisingly consistent. Obsessed by the machines that manufacture everyday life, they believed our chromed and molded luxuries were made at the same factory as our blood- and dirt-covered horrors.

And therein lies the oft missed meaning of industrial culture: If you can learn how the totality is made—through its thought-killing cliches to use the phrase from psychologist Robert Jay Lifton—you can also take it apart. You can “short circuit the control process” as Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis Breyer P-Orridge tells Ballet.

For a genre built on discomfort, Ballet does not shy away from 2025 questions. Letting voices from the scene speak openly, Shock Factory addresses the aesthetic misogyny of many of the releases, along with personal failings. (The late P-Orridge did run a literal cult for several years, among their other accomplishments.) There’s also the problem of how this “laboratory of ambiguity” played with fascist imagery, for both subversive and fetishistic reasons. (Keep in mind this goes back to bands as prosaic as the Rolling Stones or fashion houses like YSL.) For Ballet, the use of these aesthetics will ultimately escape the control of the artist, no matter how ironic they intend to be. He writes, “The power of the visuals used has the capacity to blur the original purpose of dissent.”

That said, Ballet resists easy judgements. What is “good” industrial or “failed” industrial is up to the reader and for readers like myself that can be a personal question.

At the beginning of my career there were zines and collage mail art. Like many of the artists in Shock Factory I found my source material at thrift stores or in dollar bins at places like John K King Books: medical textbooks on skin diseases, monographs about Minamata victims, 1960s leftist paperbacks. There was also my tape. Inspired from reading about, yet being too young to have experienced SPK or Cabaret Voltaire live shows, the tape was cut with a Radio Shack video editor and collected scenes from: Holy Mountain; political assassinations; NFB films from the library; primal scream therapy; video nasties; Jonestown; and Kaiju fights. It was for any band gullible enough to be believe I was a renowned video artist at 19. It was a bit rich that I labelled it “Deprogramming Tape” but at least for me that title was correct. Even if it crossed fully over into self-parody, I was still learning montage in the Eisenstein-sense: how an image changed when it was pushed against another image; how emotions could be sampled and altered, like anything else.

As an adult I know there is real pain behind some of these source images. My favorite punk album cover design growing up was Discharge’s Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, which juxtaposes, among other images, sunbathing shots with napalm burns. Why was I drawn to that? Susan Sontag wrestled with questions like this in her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others. (And which is quoted throughout Shock Factory). Sontag was, at the end of her life, pessimistic about the effect of atrocity imagery. That it might do little to sway anyone’s opinion because our well-intended compassion can be short-lived while in front of horrible images, perhaps even more so the more horrific they are. Yet when I think about the fold out Crass1 poster above my teenage bed of a war destroyed, burned-hand with the slogan “Your Country Needs You,” and why I hung it there, my motivation of don’t become working class cannon fodder seems pretty solid in retrospect. 2

Ironically, as the extreme signifiers of the industrial scene were incorporated into the mainstream and hybrids like industrial rock and nu metal, many of the pioneers featured in this book had already left the dystopia behind and eased into dance music and the utopia of the 1990s and beyond. And that conversion is completely understandable. Emotionally, intellectually, and even physically, you can’t stay in the Black Lodge forever. As well, the technology itself was changing. Samplers, sequencers, layout, and video had all gone digital and this democratization of media tools along with the mass dissemination of information and culture through the internet would change everything for the better.

That was the plan, anyway.

Instead, social media feeds in 2025 can seem like Ludovico treatments of disparate, clashing videos of local crime, skin care routines, self-appointed gurus, uprisings, AI, cult-like memes, and citizen reports on genocide. That is to say, it’s a lot like an industrial clip tape made by an 18-year-old looking for the meaning to life by sorting through its most brutal, finger-cutting pieces.

There’s now significant social pressure to not engage with social media, with the idea that using social media co-signs the legitimacy of dark forces. I’m no electoral wonk, but I did notice Democratic candidates spending the last four years comically terrified of podcasts—almost as much as the Vatican was once terrified of the Gutenberg press. Also, legacy media believed Substack was the coming of the Antichrist. Perhaps in trying to maintain past hierarchies that don’t exist anymore the liberal center is at continual risk of ceding every new platform to the right.

At one time in the late 1980s Skinny Puppy3 was putting out so many 12-inch singles that sampled the news of only a couple months previous that their songs operated as relatively real time remixes of history. That this is how I learned the truth about Middle East conflicts or America’s AIDS policies is no different than someone today learning socialism 101 through YouTube essays.

Even Cabaret Voltaire had one final act of subversion, via a pressing plant error, when a Taylor Swift fan took to TikTok in 2023. She described how the Swift album she bought had music that turned out to be a mix of Cabaret Voltaire’s track “Yashar.” According to the Guardian, “Despite initially finding it ‘so creepy’ Hunter has come around to the Cabaret Voltaire track. ‘When the beat kicks in I was like: this is a vibe.’”

The images we’re watching right now are as threatening as anything from the twentieth century. It’s easy to feel, in the words of Einstürzende Neubauten, “Power is a non-stop tape and my ears are wounds.” But we should resist the urge to look away in retreat from technology. As Ballet argues, “[The] industrial bands’ fascination with the worst that humanity has to offer comes from a profoundly humanist worldview.”

Even more than looking, you should use whatever tools you can or, in the anti-tradition of industrial culture, abuse them.

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With the high barrier of access to MTV and MuchMusic replaced by the easy access and churn of YouTube and TikTok, musicians are now on their own with making music videos.

For directors, the era of David Finchers burning through record company millions in order to jump to feature films was over long ago. With 4k filming available on phones, there isn’t even a need for a music video “director” anymore. (I write this as someone who has worked on about 25 videos since I was a teenager.)

Given just how much this collision of art and advertising changed music forever, and that music videos were a rapid iteration form for anyone who wanted to learn filmmaking, there’s surprisingly very little in terms of film preservation.

The only full and footnoted curation of the music video’s peak era was the Directors Label series of DVDs from Palm Pictures released between 2003 and 2005.1

I’ve collected most of this series from eBay or the floor bins of record stores, and not so much for the nostalgia—more for the filmmaking history. I revisit them every few months to see the ingenuity, problem solving, and sheer invention of very talented directors taking on a paid gig and having one or maybe two days to shoot it. As an era of film, the music video is comparable in its chaotic innovation only to the expressionistic 1920s, or the New Wave 1960s. (Not coincidentally the two eras robbed to the bones by music video directors.)

The Directors Label DVDs were lavish. Most have books included as well as in-depth commentaries and short films. The series wasn’t perfect. The absence of volumes from women— like say Floria Sigismondi or Tamra Davis—is acutely felt. But the series didn’t have time to self-correct, as the DVD format itself was reaching its own peak in 2005. (Not coincidently the same year YouTube launched.)

Twenty years later musicians are still stuck in a Faustian loop. Instead of working for record companies they now work for YouTube and Spotify. This new paradigm does have one significant upside for musicians—total artistic control.

The old paradigm had its upside too—shitloads of money for videos like the following…

Spike Jonze

Video auteur superpower: Making dumb smart

Is there a Björk video: It has the best Björk video ever made

For reference-obsessed men of a certain generation there’s life before the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” and life after. And Jonze’s CV doesn’t stop there: “Buddy Holly” by Weezer; “Elektrobank” by the Chemical Brothers; “Praise You” by Fatboy Slim; and Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet.” It’s Spike Jonze’s bipolar world of nostalgia and loss that we’re living in now, but it started here.

VMA Moment: Daft Punk’s “Da Funk” for being the first time Jonze showed how much raw pathos he could work into his frame, which pointed to his career beyond Dickies and wallet chains.

Anton Corbijn

Video auteur superpower: Being tall, Dutch, and weird

Is there a Björk video: No, but there’s a short film with David Lynch and Captain Beefheart

Corbijn’s videos were an organic progression from his work as the preeminent alt-rock photographer of the 1980s and ’90s, and his aesthetic of high concept/homemade execution is closest to my own heart out of all these directors. That aesthetic turns a 10 dollar costume rental, a lawn chair, and a Swiss glacier into a grand statement for Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” while Nirvana’s rotting collage of “Heart-Shaped Box” gave the band its last scream.

VMA Moment: Nick Cave’s commentary where he politely explains how much he dislikes the video of his song.

Mark Romanek

Video auteur superpower: Making the artist happy

Is there a Björk video: No, but there is Fiona Apple’s “Criminal”

At first, you can’t really break down the elements that make a Mark Romanek video, other than noting the exquisite craftsmanship, and that every concept is sold. Then it hits you: he’s able to give the artist—whether it’s NIN or Fiona Apple—exactly what their song needs.

VMA Moment: Using a hand-cranked camera to film NIN’s “Closer.” Top that, emulsion purists.

Chris Cunningham

Video auteur superpower: Vanished genius

Is there a Björk video: Yes, and the robots will make you cry

If you’re asking what ever happened to Chris Cunningham, obviously you never watched In the Womb: Animal Babies on Disney Plus with your then nine-year-old and spotted Cunningham’s name in the credits for effects design, and then tried to explain to your nine-year-old why that was so cool, and then ended up putting on Cunningham’s video for Squarepusher, which the nine-year-old loved. No matter the reason Cunningham hasn’t directed or been in the public eye for the last decade, I’m glad he’s back this year with some suitably twisted body horror art for the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery.

VMA Moment: It’s nearly Bjork’s “All is Full of Love” but nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever dethrone Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy” as the most malevolent video ever made.

Michel Gondry

Video auteur superpower: LEGO

Is there a Björk video: The one where she drives a cartoon tank

Once you learn Gondry is a drummer you can start to see how his brain must work. It’s probably the time signatures that control his body—combined with his love for the live animation of Norman McLaren—that drove Gondry to create the highest water marks of video work from the turn of the millennium.

VMA Moment: While my own brain still breaks every time I think about the layers of choreography in the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be,” it’s Gondry’s video for Kylie Minogue—fusing slapstick and the quantum multiverse—that does it for me.

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In the small town where I grew up in there was an evangelical church that, at Christmas time, opened a quonset hut full of biblical scenes built out of surplus mannequins with glued-on beards and Party City wigs. For terminally ironic teenagers these thrift store-David LaChappelle scenes were a free entertainment godsend. One year, dressed in our punk and goth finest and stoned on weed, we posed with the figures, rearranging them in questionable tableaus when no one was looking. I think we even signed the guestbook with Manson girl names. Now that I’m far past my hokey teen transgressions I see that we were answering religious kitsch we found genuinely oppressive with our own brand of subcultural kitsch.  

In the end, it’s probably a danger to not take everyone’s kitsch seriously.

That hut is long gone but over the years I’ve kept looking for these places while on road trips and tours and taking photos when I can. The following photos are of derelict Christian parks in Connecticut and California. In their own ways, both places sprang from American anxieties: Holy Land USA wanted to bring a mini-golf-sized holy land to a dying industrial town while Desert Christ Park’s creator built reinforced concrete icons in the Mojave Desert meant to survive a nuclear war. (Though of course they couldn’t even survive bored teenagers.)

HOLY LAND USA (Waterbury, Connecticut)

Created by a Catholic businessman in 1955, Holy Land USA presented plaster and concrete versions of holy land sites and stories cut into a terraced hill. There was also a biblical animal petting zoo.  After the owner's death in the 1980s the park fell into severe disrepair, culminating in being the site of a horrific murder in 2010.

That crime mobilized a group of civic leaders to buy Holy Land. The area has been cleaned up but the exhibits are not restored—I still remember the odd feeling of looking down while getting into shooting position and realizing I was stepping on a piece of a Samaritan’s plaster face.

DESERT CHRIST PARK (Yucca Valley, California)

The statues of Desert Christ Park were created by aviation worker Antone Martin during the early days of the Cold War, from 1945 through the 1950s. Displaying idiosyncratic interpretations of biblical scenes Martin wanted his "nondenominational message of peace" to be able to survive a nuclear war so he sculpted the figures out of bunker material, including steel reinforced concrete.

It fell into disrepair in the ’80s and ’90s. Locals often stole the heads from the Jesus statues before it was reopened in 2004.

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While researching the life of Kiki de Montparnasse, a researcher finds a handful of snapshots of Picasso and his friends hanging around their neighborhood, bouncing from café to café. Over the course of several years, he collects all twenty-four photographs taken that day, sequences them, identifies the exact date they were taken—August 12, 1916—and the photographer: the artist Jean Cocteau, who was using up four rolls of film he had left over from documenting the Belgian front.

Occasionally one comes across a book of nonfiction that feels like fiction, a hoax, fiction posing as a hoax, or perhaps the other way around.1 A Day with Picasso is none of those things. Rather, this slim hardcover published by MIT Press in 1996 is an earnest work of historical research.

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As someone whose close friends since childhood have mostly been women I’ve long benefited from making those bonds outside of the norm. But I’ve also learned where things get complex, and where our shared experiences stop and remain beyond me. I think most acutely of those nonverbal moments of communication that happen between two women. When a shoulder touch or a silent look can convey everything from “Yes you should go for him” to “Trish is upset in the next room and we’re needed. I know she brought it on herself, she always does. I’m not defending her but we should be there for her.”

All in a millisecond glance. (And I hope Trish is okay.)

This shared mind is a good survival skill, but it might also come from a deeper place, where group identity is made by rituals and murmuration. Anna Gaskell’s staged, cinematic photos of girls in various costumes and tableaus capture those rituals, both fairy tale-ish and nightmarish. The images in her 2001 monograph can sometimes seem like a queer subversion of the Lewis Carroll–gaze. Other times they’re as feral as Cronenberg’s brood, revolting against the conformity imposed by puberty and uniforms.1     

Gaskell’s girls are often playing games of some kind and games are how typical children learn and recreate society’s violent sorting. Who’s inside or outside the group? Who has value or not? The artist had to make these images and that compulsion comes through.

Gaskell continues to exhibit, though her recent work is less frenzied compared to this collection, which by my memory was culturally radical even at the time. The early Bush era was a numb haze of monochrome clothes and Muzak electronica. It was far from our current era of kinderhorror, where expressing anxiety and abjection is not just in the open but encouraged as healthy.  

Maybe herein lies the path to Gaskell’s pop culture rediscovery. Just imagine M3GAN or Abigail2 flipping through this monograph and feeling seen by this past.

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