The Rock Blogger

Mike Doherty has written the inspired article Modest Muse for the CBC, examining the impact of author JG Ballard’s writing on popular music, particularly in post-punk and industrial scenes. Ballard’s writings developed a cult following worldwide, as he wrote speculative fiction pitting transgressive protagonists against cold mechanical worlds and dangerous urban pathologies not unlike our own.
A brief excerpt:

The British author, now 76, is often said to have inspired the entire genre of industrial music, and his fiction certainly explores its central preoccupations. Ballard writes about the increasingly intimate relationship between humans and machines (most infamously with Crash, in which characters become aroused by car crashes) as well as the disturbing atmosphere of mind control created by the prevalence of mass media (as found in the experimental 1970 story collection The Atrocity Exhibition).

Having been both a Ballard and Joy Division fan, I found the article to be strangely revealing as it brought me deeper into post-punk’s often literary aspirations. I’ve noticed similar expressions of post-industrial anxiety in the work of Nine Inch Nails, especially the technological horror shows of The Downward Spiral, where songs like Ruiner and The Becoming eschew an almost bio-mechanical aesthetic.

When put into a wider thematic and cultural context, music like this becomes part of a larger, almost philosophical movement concerning the sociological decline of civilization. Bodies without limits, thresholds shattered, time accelerated. Symptoms of a wider post-modern dystopia where no definition, of love, of progress, of humanity, is safe from deconstruction.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.