The song lyrics of industrial music are heavily influenced by existential philosophy. In fact, two of the most prolific industrial musicians--Gary Numan and Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails)--are quite obviously influenced by Nietzsche's existential concept of the "death of god." While the two industrial musicians that I will examine, Gary Numan and Trent Reznor, are not necessarily existentialists, their art reflects a very intriguing influence of this existential philosophy. I will show that through an examinination of the "death of god" theme in their music, both Nine Inch Nails and Gary Numan successfully criticize institutional religion in the same way that Friedrich Nietzsche did in his books over one hundred years before.

The two somewhat ambiguous terms that I will be employing in this inquiry are the words "existential" and "industrial music." While I do not wish to exhaust this paper defining these terms, I feel that there needs to be a clarification of the words; however, as a philosophy, the lines that define what is "existential" and what is not "existential" are shady. Nietzsche and existentialism scholar Walter Kaufmann writes:

Existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy. Most of the living "existentialists" have repudiated this label, and a bewildering outsider might well conclude that the only thing that they have in common is a marked aversion for each other. To add to the confusion, many writers have frequently been hailed as members of this movement, and it is extremely doubtful whether they would have appreciated the company to which they are consigned. In view of this, it might be argued that the label "existentialism" ought to be abandoned altogether.

In other words, existential philosophy is simply a label that describes a very specific kind of revolt in Western philosophy. Another existential scholar, Robert Solomon, writes:

It is a commonly accepted half-truth that existentialism is a revolt against traditional Western rationalistic philosophy....Existentialism is not simply a philosophy or a philosophical revolt. Existentialist philosophy is the explicit conceptual manifestation of an existential attitude--a spirit of "the present age."

Solomon here states a curious contradiction to Kaufmann's ideas. Existentialism is a philosophy that has several tenets, while renewing itself by finding different approaches to the same problems and set of beliefs.

Walter Kaufmann believes that many writers that were once considered "existential" are now obsolete or no longer considered "existential." Given that both of these critics have edited well-known anthologies on this subject, an example of this is that there are many writers included in Solomon's existentialism anthology that are not included in Kaufmann's; Kaufmann is speaking about philosophers specifically being existentialists in the manner of how the philosophers approach the idea of rebellion. Solomon, on the other hand, includes the philosophers that Kaufmann considers to be existentialists--Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, etc.--and additionally carries several playwrights and writers not considered by Kaufmann: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and Arthur Miller, to name a few.

I conclude that while existentialist tenets may be present in other disciplines, such as theology, psychology, and literature, the presence of these tenets do not necessarily make the authors existentialists; however, the influence of existentialism is unarguably present in other disciplines, including musicology. Industrial music, as specific genre of popular music, is in many ways an expression of existentialism in a musical outlet.

The second term that needs to be clarified is "industrial music." While industrial music can be described as a musical revolution that is still taking place; like the term "existentialism" it is a difficult word to define. Any definition can range from something very specific (any band on the now-defunct Industrial Records label) to something very broad (anything that does not subscribe to traditional rock paradigms). I wish to take a moderate approach, that the earlier example, bands that were signed to Industrial Records, is a premature definition of an early movement in the revolution of industrial music; and the latter example would refer to post-rock music, which I consider to be an inclusive word that includes avant-garde and industrial music.

It is generally agreed by the majority sources on industrial music that industrial music typically fits any combination or all of the following musical characteristics: heavy percussion, synthesized or manipulated vocals, and cut-and-paste construction. I will now argue that industrial music is also a phenomenon of existential philosophy; in other words, industrial music, like many other forms of art and the academic Humanities in the twentieth century, was influenced by existential philosophy and existentialist attitudes in art and the world. More specifically, existentialism manifests itself through the notion that "god is dead" in industrial music. This idea that "god is dead" comes directly from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's book, The Gay Science.

Nietzsche will be remembered most of all for his philosophy of God, and more specifically, the Christian GodCthe God of the sick and the weak. The following is Nietzsche's famous story of the "madman":

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"CAs many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter....The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed himCyou and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea?....Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

This, according to Nietzsche, is a message for the future, concluding "I have come too early...my time is not yet." Nietzsche puts this message into the voice of a madman, "whose message falls on deaf ears," as what he has to say is too shocking and comical for the crowd to take seriously--but the madman has the last laugh, according to Nietzsche, as the madman is correct in what he has to say.

Does this mean that God has literally died? Critic John Mark answers, "[i]t is really something that has happened to man; God has died because we no longer accept him." Existential philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote that "Nietzsche does not say 'There is no God,' or 'I do not believe in God,' but 'God is dead.'" The majority of scholars, however, believe Nietzsche an atheist, who says that the idea of the Christian God, like Zeus and other Gods before, has died; that humanity must find something more stable to rest and reassess its values upon.

Regardless of what is specifically understood in the story of the madman and the ambiguous statement, "God is dead," one thing is certain to Nietzsche: the Christian God is either dead; or, like other gods, does not exist. The important idea here is Nietzsche's treatment of the Christian God as an absurdity, that is, the enemy of life and nature. This idea has greatly influenced the lyrics of industrial musicians, especially in those of Nine Inch Nails and Gary Numan.

Industrial music is in a mode of being philosophical. Almost every industrial bands' lyrics are religious, anti-religious, philosophical, or nihilistic. In Gary Numan's and Nine Inch Nails' lyrics that reflect an influence of Nietzsche's "death of God" motif, the religious tone of the lyrics are sometimes simultaneously anti-religious. Gary Numan stated in a Rolling Stone interview:

I'm not religious, so I've been exploring anti-religion viewpoints. Not anti--I'd say more the idea of religion, just asking, "What if God is this?" I haven't found anywhere to go as a source, so I read bits of the Bible and watch the odd program here and there, all while making notes on my reactions.

While Numan is not necessarily interested in denouncing religion, he appears to be interested in discovering new ideas in his music by writing lyrics that consider a dead God.

One of Numan's early songs, "This Wreckage," plays with this idea, wondering, 'if God is dead, what does that mean?' Numan sings, "so what if God's dead/we must have done something wrong/this dark facade ends/we're independent from someone." Here, Numan wonders if God is dead, and then concludes that if God is dead, humans will then have independence from the institutions that hold them hostage with religion (much like a modification of Martin Luther's idea of 'the Babylonian Captivity of the Church').

Numan obviously does not believe that God is literally dead, as he often sings about killing God, something that couldn't literally be done. In one of Numan's few love songs, he sings that he would "close the dead eyes of God/if they offended you." While Numan does not mean this in a theological sense, the influence of Nietzsche is obvious. Even in Numan's song where he explores the mind of Jesus being called by God, much like in Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ, Numan sings:

I heard it in my sleep

A voice more dead than old

I thought I'd known the fear

But then it touched my soul and said,

"You will pray for me

Bow your head to me"

....

And so it comes to this

Death or eternity?

Or would you like to pay

For all humanity?

Do you believe in faith?

Then choose, heaven or hell or me?

A shadow in the sane

The final treachery of God

....

"Betray the world for me

Lose your soul for me"

While the line "a voice more dead than old" refers to an insignificant, or dead, deity; the idea of God playing Jesus as a pawn in the "Angel War," as Numan calls it, without free will, is an existential idea. In other words, Jesus experienced an existential crisis in a debate of whether to follow the destiny that is planned for him or choose free will. This notion that man has free will but is tantalized by the reward of another world is referred to by Numan throughout his lyrics as "the lie of your Father."

Numan refers to religion as a "sacrifice" of "reason for shame," which is also a very Nietzschean idea. A totally superstitious religion, then, needs to be abolished and replaced with something more true, something has both a root in and relevance to the world. Numan sings:

I'll drive a stake

Through the back of your heart (oh Lord)

I'll pull down your temples

And burn every word (Father)

I'll kill all the angels

That show me 'the light' (Jesus)

I'll drift into darkness

And tear out the soul of God.

In this song Numan expresses his anger in the superstitiousness of the traditional Christian religion. While, as I mentioned earlier, it is literally impossible to destroy the divine as such; the metaphorical point that is being made here is that the irrelevance of the traditional Christian religious tradition has made it possible to make such important things as the existence of God and religion able to fade into insignificance.

Nine Inch Nails, an extremely public and popular industrial one-man-band, also toys with the idea of the death of God; however, he refers to religion, like Numan, as "the lie." Most notably, Trent Reznor (the "one-man" of Nine Inch Nails) sings in a song intelligently named "Heresy":

he sewed his eyes shut because he is afraid to see

he tries to tell me what i put inside of me

he's got the answers to ease my curiosity

he dreamed a god up and called it christianity

your god is dead and no one cares

if there is a hell i will see you there

When Reznor sings the line, "your god is dead and no one cares," although the "your" in relation to "god" is hardy noticeable in the actual song, the lyric is included in the liner notes to the album. Reznor, then, is writing about a god that exists in someone else's interpretation of the absolute, not necessarily his own. This lyric as a whole suggests Nine Inch Nails' wish to rebel against traditional, blind, and superstitious religion; comparing religion--what Numan called the 'sacrifice of reason for shame'--sewing one's eyes closed and dreaming up an easy answer up to the difficult questions about the existence of God.

Nine Inch Nails, like Gary Numan, as mentioned earlier, both call institutional religion "the lie." Reznor sings in "Terrible Lie," "i'm all alone in this world you must despise/hey God, i believed the promises, the promises and lies," asking the age-old interrogative of 'why do bad things happen to good people?' Reznor continues, alone to face the world in the eyes of a dead god, "you made me throw it all away/my morals left to decay/how many you betray/you've taken everything," contemplating the absurdity of his conclusions about traditional religion. He concludes, "I want so much to believe/I need someone to hold on to....hey god i really don't know who i am/in this world of piss," crying out to a supposedly dead god and hopelessly giving up. The metaphor that is employed here, "this world of piss" is an expression of Reznor's interpretation of the Nietzschean idea of humans as "man's monkey," that humans in the earthly world are spiritually no higher than the literal urine of God.

Finally, Nine Inch Nails attack those who follow the dead god blindly and mindlessly. Reznor again sings:

i speak religion's message clear and i control you

i am denial guilt and fear and i control you

i am the prayers of the naive and i control you

i am the lie that you believe and i control you

i will take you where you want to go

i give you all you need to know

Taking the personae of traditional religion ("Mr. Self Destruct"), Reznor blatantly states that he is the perpetual "No" to life, just as Nietzsche wrote about Christianity, who "gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated--into a vice." Furthermore, he calls the believers "naive" and paints a picture of Christians that are blind sheep in a flock; and as mentioned earlier, they want to "sew their eyes shut because they are afraid to see." Reznor continues:

you had all of them on your side, didn't you?

you believed in all your lies, didn't you?

the ruiner's got a lot to prove he's got nothing to lose and now he made you believe

the ruiner's your only friend well he's the living end to the cattle he deceives

Here, Reznor goes so far to call the blind followers "cattle," just as Nietzsche called those who follow Christian morality a sign of weakness, the "herd instinct." This is also very similar to Numan who calls the religious "faithful" the "blind."

In conclusion, there is most definitely an influence of existential philosophy as manifested in Friedrich Nietzsche's "death of God" motif in industrial music. While the two influential industrial musicians that I have examined, Gary Numan and Trent Reznor, are not necessarily existentialists, their art reflects a very intriguing connection to existential philosophy.

Altizer, Thomas. The Contemporary Jesus. New York: Suny UP, 1997.

Bozza, Anthony. "Raves." Rolling Stone 762 (12 Jan. 1997) 42.

Hubben, William. Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka: Our Prophets of Our Destiny. New York: Collier, 1952.

Jaspers, Karl. Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity. Trans. Charles Wallraff and Fredrick Schmitz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965.

Kaufmann, Walter. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Meridian, 1975.

Mark, James. "The Challenge of Nietzsche's Atheism." Theology 88 (July 1985) 272-281.

--. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Anti-Christ. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Rpt. in The Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ. London: Penguin, 1990.

--. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966.

--. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Nine Inch Nails. Pretty Hate Machine. TVT, 1988.

--. The Downward Spiral. TVT/Interscope, 1994.

Numan, Gary. Exile. Cleopatra, 1998.

--. Sacrifice. Eagle/Cleopatra, 1994.

--. Telekon. Beggar's Banquet, 1980.

Raschke, Carl. "The Death of God the Father." The Illif Review 35 (Spring 1978) 55-64.

Solomon, Robert. Existentialism. New York: Modern Library, 1974.

Thompson, Dave. The Industrial Revolution. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Cleopatra, 1994.

This paper appears in Exordium, a journal published by the University of Queensland.