I'm sure I must have mentioned it once or twice before but for me there really is no other music quite like aggrotech. I don't know of any other genre that takes several of my favourite kinds of music - EBM, trance, and hard house - and combines them with the worst vocals ever heard outside of black metal and every single embarrassing trope in gothic and industrial imagery to make something to utterly, obnoxiously, UNIQUELY fucking dismal. And to add insult to injury, greedily accepts "industrial" and "EBM" as labels!

Aggro. Tech. Exactly the kind of stupid name this utterly stupid music deserves. Whenever I hear it I want to pick it up by the plastic hair extensions, swinging it over my head like a big black seeping medical waste binbag full of goblin vocals, MDMA and Cyberdog gear, and fling it into the path of an articulated lorry.

However, in recent times I have had to make peace with the fact that not only does it exist and is hugely popular, it also exists in uncomfortable proximity to music I do very much like and is hugely popular with people who in all honesty are probably nice enough folks who I certainly wouldn't be adverse to messily clinking plastic snakebite & black pints on the dance floor with if literally any other type of music was playing.

Aggrotech is music which happens to overlap with a lot of the clubs, gigs and festivals I enjoy going to for other, better kinds of industrial, and is enjoyed by people who also happen to enjoy getting On It and dancing all night as much as I do.

This puts me in a position of being unable to just ignore aggrotech "because it's just not my cup of tea". I hate it so much I can't stop thinking about it more than is healthy or reasonable, and it's a big enough subsection of this "industrial" thing that accounts for at least half of my music taste that I can't just pretend it has nothing to do with music I like.

Big enough, in fact, that esteemed Youtube Content Provider "Graymads" saw fit to make a half-hour video essay entitled "What the hell was aggrotech?" - note past tense - attempting to dissect the bloated neon cadaver of this (rightly, in n0teeth's view) widely despised subgenre of the thing we call industrial. You can watch it by clicking on the pic below because Big Aggrotech has sabotaged the Youtube embed function to try and stop the people from learning the truth:

I normally don't bother watching "video essays" (YouTube should be used only for classic Simpsons clips or documentaries about obscure Cold War proxy conflicts) but aggrotech is such a passionate pet hate of mine I decided to make an exception. So in the spirit of criticising - no, HATING - things in good faith, in at least trying to understand exactly what it is that makes the mere mention of Aesthetic Perfection make me feel the bile creep up my throat, I've watched the above clip and have some honest and hopefully constructive feedback to give (to the video creator that is - if you're an aggrotech musician my feedback is to make yourself useful and volunteer to be turned into soylent green):

  1. That opening tune over the daft goth dance routine was actually pretty good, what was it?
  2. Thank you for placing aggrotech in the context of what was generally a pretty bad decade for music by using footage from wretched "scene" bands.
  3. And on that note the hyperpop / crunkcore comparison was painful but true.
  4. Leave Millionaires the fuck out of this though, Just Got Paid Let's Get Laid was a bop.
  5. What's with the footage of London bus route N25? Is aggrotech particularly associated with the nightbus from Oxford Circus to Ilford?
  6. "industrial was an offshoot of punk" - not quite, the two genres sprang up more or less around the same time, but separately from each other. TG and the Pistols may have both been formed in London in the mid-70s and perhaps even shared some of their fanbase but they were coming from different backgrounds and going different directions.
  7. The potted history of post-TG industrial is a good and concise rundown of the bands it mentions but it does skip a few years and an entire continent. Although the Gristle > Puppy > Nails progression is a logical one (and Skuppy have clearly been a big influence on aggrotech especially vocally and thematically) you need to mention the European bands - your Kliniks, your Die Forms, your yelworCs - who, concurrently with their North American peers, were mashing up harsh, distorted drum machine spasms with nasty, guttural vocals and unwittingly laying the blueprint for proto-aggrotechers like Leather Strip.
  8. Watching the clip of Psyclon 9 it dawned on me that the black metal influence on the vocals is probably the thing I despise the most about aggrotech. So I definitely learned something watching this video essay, namely that black metal isn't one of the handful of metal genres I like.
  9. God, the dancing is just so naff isn't it? I know you're supposed to live & let live if people having fun but I've never seen a single cybergoth doing their moves who actually looked like they are having fun.
  10. I gotta say one thing for Combichrist: once you got past their knuckleheaded, occasionally grossly misogynistic lyrics the music still holds up reasonably well. Their beats were certainly a lot harder than a lot of other bands out there at the time. Or at least a lot harder than other bands that fit into the same accessible, club-friendly space: power noise was still going strong and was obviously a lot harder than Combi, but lacked the club-friendly choruses and structure.
  11. Not naming any names (because I've already named the two worst offenders further back) but a recurring theme I'm noticing with all these bands is that they eventually realise they simply have no idea how to make their music harder through electronic means alone (something which I don't hear power noise, EBM and techno-industrial artists struggling with anywhere near as much). So they start adding in guitars in an attempt to mask their mediocre attempts at EBM with mediocre metal.

Overall: this was a smoothly edited video on a niche topic that I don't think is discussed widely enough. My criticisms are mainly to do with some glaring gaps in history, which I would assume that a fan of this subgenre might take issue with as well. The video did nothing to change my mind about this pustule of a subgenre, nor did it fully explore the thinking behind how it formed.

Perhaps these two facts are connected: without a glimpse inside the mind of the people who first decided to make aggrotech, I can't relate to them or the human creative urges that drove them. Sometimes when an artist opens up about their motivations - which they are by no means obliged to do! - it can help even us haters "see where they were coming from" even if we don't like where they ended up going. But after watching this video I still only perceive bad music, worse clothes and a pig's trough of hackneyed "edgy" lyrical and visual motifs.

Havine said all that, I still fuck with futurepop: aggrotech's prettier, more melodic, instrospective twin. But that's a story for another time.