Industrial music engineered political affect as a counterweight to propaganda
Evidence
Test Dept’s signature sound is intensely percussive, a convulsive dance music that took its inspiration from Soviet constructivism, but which became something like the British equivalent of the politicised US hip-hop group Public Enemy. The records are sonic mosaics, pulsing with panic, the sampled voices of Tory MPs countered by defiant statements by left-wing militants. One of Test Dept’s most powerful tracks — “Statement” from the 1986 album The Unacceptable Face of Freedom — features miner Alan Sutcliffe giving a moving account of police brutality during the strike. The track is a work of emotional engineering, a collectivist response to the manipulation of affect and desire through advertising, branding and political propaganda. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1361
Categorization
- XREF: “Emotional engineering” as a collectivist counter to the manipulation of affect strongly echoes critiques of capitalist realism and of propaganda economies in the reader’s knowledge base. — connects to: Political music must fight over perception itself, not just messages — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1285; Second-wave industrial bands took the genre beyond music into political collectives — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1360; Musical subcultures articulated resistance to war on terror policies (+2 more)
- SEED: A possible essay angle: how sampled voices of politicians vs. militants constitute an early form of meme-warfare / media counter-narrative before the internet.
Broader Connections
- Second-wave industrial bands took the genre beyond music into political collectives
#expands(0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1360 - Musical subcultures articulated resistance to war on terror policies
#exemplifies(0.75) - Propaganda reduces both language and its audience to instrumental tools
#complicates(0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 261 - Fascist music has co-opted the language of cultural-studies antihegemonic resistance.
#contradicts(0.72)