The genuine canon of EBM.

A synopsis, arriving at last at the truth

Electronic Body Music is the most argued-over of the adjacent forms, and the Bureau has, after long deliberation, resolved the argument. What follows is the short version, offered to spare you the literature.

The official account runs as follows. The term is credited to Kraftwerk's Hütter, who used it in passing in 1978 to describe music that addressed the body rather than the mind. It was made an actual genre by the Belgians and the English at the turn of the 1980s: Front 242 in Brussels gave it its name in earnest and its marching, militarised pulse; D.A.F. in Düsseldorf gave it the sweat and the single repeated phrase; Nitzer Ebb in Chelmsford gave it the shouting. The machines were Roland and Korg, the tempo was the tempo of a body at work, and the lyrics, where there were lyrics, concerned discipline, labour, want, and the occasional tractor.

From there the standard histories proceed to the usual monuments. Headhunter. Der Mussolini. Join in the Chant. They will tell you that the form peaked somewhere around 1988, that everything after was either softening or revival, and that the whole question of what is and is not EBM is, like the question of what is and is not industrial, unresolved and unresolvable and best left before the committee.

This is where the Bureau must, regretfully, correct the record.

For the standard histories have committed a sin of omission so total, so systematic, that one begins to suspect coordination. They have left out the one track that contains, in distilled and perfected form, everything the genre was reaching for and never quite seized. The body addressed directly. The single phrase repeated to the point of transcendence. The pulse of labour. The militarised entrance. The discipline. The want. The sweat. They reached for it for a decade across three countries with their Rolands and their tractors, and a man named Dave Roen simply walked in and did it.

We refer, of course, to the Party Boy anthem.

Consider the evidence dispassionately. Front 242 wanted the body to move on command; the Party Boy anthem clears a room on command. D.A.F. wanted one phrase, repeated, until meaning dissolved; the Party Boy anthem has achieved this so completely that no one can recall whether it has words. Nitzer Ebb wanted aggression as choreography; the Party Boy anthem is the only EBM track that comes with its own mandatory dance, performed in a thong, at strangers. Every criterion the genre set for itself, it meets and exceeds. The conclusion is unavoidable and the Bureau states it plainly: the Party Boy anthem is the single most important track in the history of Electronic Body Music, and arguably the only one that fully understood the assignment.

The committee, for once, did not dissent. The committee, for once, got up and danced.

Filed, with total confidence, by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Jacobean era · the matter is, for once, considered closed