A decade of noise and nihilism

I was 12 years old in 1990, 22 in 1999. Musical taste between those ages is like the first moments of the universe: explosive, contradictory, beyond the rationalization of known science.

In my 90s, music was the only thing that mattered. I was a club-goer, producer, DJ, promoter, remixer. I signed with French and German record labels. I sold sound systems to clubs and DJs. I built an apartment studio. I ran live sound for jazz and hiphop groups. I saw Rammstein’s first US concert, Bauhaus’ last, and a hundred more between. I wrote a thesis on digital music that predicted the rise of MP4 and studied to be a sound designer. Music was oxygen.

Of course, I didn’t know all of that would unfold when I was only 12. The music started normally, and then it was anything but.

1.

U2, “One”

“One” arrived on radio at a perfect inflection point. I was struggling to connect with my nascent music collection; my Billy Joel and Genesis cassettes were emotional oatmeal. At the same time, I started feeling things in the hyper-raw, disorienting and paranoid way only a 12-year-old experiences. This song — sort of about God but really celebrating love beyond secular categorization, and illustrated with haunting photography from Anton Corbijn — was the first music that moved me in mysterious ways. Pun intended. (From Achtung Baby, 1991)

2.

Public Enemy, “Can’t Truss It”

As a dumb white kid growing up in middle-class New Jersey attending a white school with other white kids, I grasped racial tension only in the hazy abstract. Slave ships were a page in a history book. Police brutality only happened in L.A. that one time. Rap was party music about how parents just don’t understand. Public Enemy inverted all of that. “Can’t Truss It”, with its devastating beat and unrelenting Chuck D narrative about the slave trade, almost burned out my rewind button. With lines like “still I pray to get my hands around the neck of the man with the whip”, this was the song that made me question. I’m convinced it was one root to my lifelong liberalism. (From Apocalypse 91 … The Enemy Strikes Black, 1991)

3.

Ministry, “Psalm 69”

Was there any album more dangerous in 1992? Rejecting bullshit 80s metal and dismissing sterile club music, this was the filthy, dark, aggressive, sacrilegious and immoral tour of depravity that teenagers hide next to the dimebag and condoms. Every song is a buzzsaw of vile, but the title track, with bone-crushing riffs, signature Al Jourgenson fury and openly blasphemous rhetoric, was my anthem as I struggled with authority and organized religion. (From Psalm 69, 1992)

4.

Pigface, “Asphole”

This was the tipping point. A high school friend, who also introduced me to zines and cigarettes, gave me a Pigface cassette she had stolen from her kind-of-ex-boyfriend who was older and deeply into black clothes and eyeliner and whose coolness seemed unachievable through my desperately awkward high school eyes. The opening track, sung by Skinny Puppy’s Ogre, was a shock to the system: raucous, irreverent, alternative—an anthemic Musical Red Pill that literally changed my life. (From Notes From Thee Underground, 1994)

5.

Skinny Puppy, “Worlock”

After 1995, I saturated myself in machine music. Techno, jungle, acid house. Anything outside the mainstream and anything that annoyed other people. The inevitable endgame was industrial: abrasive, confrontational, totally counter-culture by design. Most industrial bands were talentless shit. But Skinny Puppy brought a level of artistic integrity and emotional realness that eluded most, and “Worlock”, even today a crucial monster of a song, pulled me into the darkest center of my headphones with a spiritual death grip. It was the rawest thing I had ever heard. (From Rabies, 1990)

6.

Coil, “The First Five Minutes After Death”

At some point, all true disciples of electronic music swim far enough upstream to find the geniuses of the form waiting patiently with a discography to challenge the most confident listener. Coil remain unlike anything else. Complex, spiritual, immersive, and in the world before MP3s, mythically scarce. “The First Five Minutes After Death” is all of that and more, a brief passage that demands fealty to shifting musical subplots. To own it was privilege, to like it was achievement, to understand it was enlightenment. This, and really their entire backlog, was a dark, private place segregated from DJ culture and the mainstream. (From Horse Rotorvator, 1986)

7.

Tricky, “Makes Me Wanna Die”

For years, I was deeply into triphop. Portishead, Ruby, Massive Attack, etc. But Tricky, with his smoking cerebus voice and complete fuck-all production style, delivered a pitch-perfect album of dissatisfaction, paranoia, fear, hope, emptiness and broken love. “Makes Me Wanna Die” is all of those things, but cuts arterial deep and just bleeds and bleeds. After about 2000 I put the album into storage and still have a tough time listening to it. (From Pre-Millenium Tension, 1996)

8.

Hanzel und Gretyl, “Mutant Starseed Creation”

There is nothing original about Hanzel und Gretyl (Americans, btw). Their music is aggressive but predictable, danceable but forgettable. But: they are fun as hell. This album, and specifically this song, was on non-stop repeat in my car through sophomore year of college because it scared the shit out of everyone when I screamed along to the only lyric of substance: “Alien, you came to fuck me / Take my seed and make my breed”. It was nihilism turned up to 11, and more or less defined my entire aesthetic and attitude. And if you think this is bad, you should have seen their live shows. (From Transmissions from Uranus, 1997)

9.

Haujobb, “Less”

Released on the brink of the new millennium, Haujobb’s third album was a masterpiece of craftsmanship and restraint, and a total rejection of their early EBM sound. “Less”, its only single, evoked an aesthetic so fresh that it reset my musical bearings for the next few years as I sought out a world of sterile IDM and surgical tech step. This new direction, an early echo of dubstep and evocative of science fiction films to come, was the perfect soundtrack for a millennial transition. (From Ninetynine, 1999)

“This was to be my final hit, but let’s be clear about this. There’s final hits and final hits. What kind was this to be?” — Rent-Boy