Wax trax industrial accident1/12/2024 Wax Trax! planted the seeds for this movement not just in the edgier corners of big-city scenes from Chicago to Berlin, but sprinkled them across more sheltered communities via college radio and mail order. But in their wake, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, White Zombie and other Wax Trax! disciples commercialized the sound and sold millions of albums. And Wax Trax!’s body-slamming brand of electronic music led to the rise of industrial music in the ‘90s, a genre classification that usually got an eye-roll from Nash and many of the Wax Trax! artists accused of inventing it. The Chicago noise and punk bands inspired alternative rock. In the ‘90s and beyond, house underpinned the European rave scene and EDM, which rose to a stadium-level genre in the last decade. Clubs such as Exit, Neo, Berlin, Medusa’s and the Music Box played a broad mix of records and hosted artists from these scenes. Simultaneously, Chicago was giving birth to deep house, a grittier, soulful variation on disco, in clubs helmed by DJs such as Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, and incubating a punk and noise scene that included pioneering bands such as Strike Under, Naked Raygun, Effigies and Big Black. Just the band names alone conveyed that raised-middle-finger spirit: Mussolini Headkick, the Revolting Cocks, Sister Machine Gun, 1000 Homo DJ’s. That attitude underpinned everything, including album covers and merch. “If they share anything, it’s an attitude.” “Our bands are generally loud, hard, uncompromising, relatively noncommercial, but to say they all sound alike is like saying William Shakespeare writes like Ogden Nash,” Nash once told me. Wax Trax! was less about a unified sound than a shared vision that permeated the music, lyrics, artwork and videos. This was punk made with machines, noise you could dance to, violent yet absurd, catchy yet pummeling. The damaged music and wicked humor reflected a point of view that transcended genre boundaries. Wax Trax! Records’ emergence in the ‘80s amid the death grip of AIDs, the arrival of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics and the specter of Cold War nuclear Armageddon wasn’t coincidental. “So we thought, ‘OK, now how can we retire at the tender age of 23?’” “We worked lousy jobs in construction and got tired of it,” Nash once said. Nash and Flesher, a gay couple who fled Topeka, Kansas, in the early ‘70s, didn’t set out to change the world, just tilt things a little bit in their direction. “Oh, you’re the guy who likes Suicide? Wait till you hear This Heat!” Or they’d be working the cash register and educating anyone who walked in about their next favorite album. The owners instigated parties and hosted in-store meet-and-greets with the cult acts they championed. If you were a regular, you’d keep running into people who didn’t fit in anywhere except here: “There are so many of us? Who knew?” Wax Trax! not only had all the cool records no one else thought anyone would want, it became a hangout where bands formed and information about underground concerts was shared. A community that liked fringe music and transgressive humor, a community that identified as gay, trans, punk, misfit or “other,” a community that found solace in glam, dirty disco, girl groups with magnificent beehives, rockabilly of the impolitest sort (Hasil Adkins anyone?) or a Liquid Liquid 12-inch, among other esoteric pleasures. First in Denver (1974) and then Chicago (1978), the Wax Trax! store was more like a neon-lit musical club house for a hidden community. When is a record store not just a record store? For Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher, Wax Trax! was always about something more.
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