Industrial Music

This I think is fairly on-topic, as there's a fair amount of music out there that incorporates technology in some severely hefty ways and also deals with monstrous themes. Given as I'm not one of those people who's like "I listen to bands that you haven't heard of, I'm more hardcore than you!" and I don't spend much time ferreting out obscure bands because I haven't the time, most of these bands are no doubt at least familiar to you.

There is certainly a lot of retarded music that has no point, but I think there is a strain in Industrial music over the last 20 years or so that deals with the question of technology and how it affects people's lives. Back in the late 1970s a band called Joy Division appeared, inspired by writers such as Kafka, the main thrust of their work was a political analysis of what it is that makes modern society so unique and confusing, including technology, propaganda, communications technology, the post-industrial revolution social system, and so on.

Skinny Puppy seems to have a similar message (they were one of Canada's hugest acts in the 1980s) though they're a lot more cryptic and bizarre.

The most popular vender of this type of music is obviously Nine Inch Nails. They have one song called "The Becoming" (I'll post the lyrics) that seems to deal with a person entering into a machine-like detachment to avoid those pesky emotions, quite a bit like Spider Rose actually.

And closer to home The Tea Party, back when they were half-decent, wrote the album Transmission which they described as "The question of what becomes of the soul in the face of technology."