Crust punk. Rave twink. Middle-aged Substacker. I have more identities to answer for in my life than Bob Dylan does. Yet around Y2K I was mostly pretending to be an adult—that stage you do right after your teen years that also allows space for the next generation to be stupid. That means I missed out on the worlds of nü metal and its hip-hop cousin, Eminem.

In 2001 in the UK there were concerts one month apart by Eminem and a pre-allegations Marilyn Manson that collectively shook that nation’s parents and commentators. Photographer Neil Massey was there.

This isn’t about exported rock stars though. Massey knew the fans were as interesting, if not more so, than the artists and instinctively captured the crowd as well. Collected decades later in a photo zine, the images are a mirror for the viewer to see yourself in, no matter when or how you punched your troubled teen card.

Printed in a limited edition of 100, copies are still available through Massey’s site.

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When writer Peter York first published Dictator Style in 2005 there was no way he could have predicted this look’s American revival in 2024. And there is a cheekily elegiac tone to his book, as if to say there was a sunsetting of dictatorship culture. After opening with a quote of “In Every Dream Home A Heartache” York points out the then-dominant billionaire taste was “the dressed down wooden beams of new Silicon Valley money.” At the time, no one rich and all-powerful wanted to actually look it. Fast forward a few election cycles.

While the idea of bad/good culture itself is root coded into every capitalist project from colonialism to neoliberalism, any dictator’s sartorial choices can still be a hilarious respite from years of that boot on your neck. Really? You’re wearing that to the show trial?

According to York, you too can get the look with the following rules….

“Have Yourself Everywhere”

“Think Hotel”

“Have Important Oil Paintings”

“Go For Gold”

“Big It Up”

“Think French”

“Involve Brands”

Dictator Style is out of print but can be bought through Abe’s.

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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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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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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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