The Bands Between Genres: The Pioneering of Electropunk
One of the harder questions to answer when you were in an underground band was also one of the first questions everybody asked.
What kind of music do you play?
For some bands, this was easy. Punk. Metal. Ska. Hardcore. Goth.
For Retard-O-Bot, Screaming Monkey Boner, and others, the answer usually required several words, a few broad hand gestures and eventually some version of, ‘You should probably just hear it.’
The band Retard-O-Bot formed in Tampa in 1999 around programmed beats, abrasive synthesizers, punk energy, guitars, screaming, jokes, samples and whatever else seemed entertaining and rebellious at the time. Depending on who was describing it, Retard-O-Bot could be electronic, industrial, punk, alternative, post-industrial, synthpunk cyberpunk, nerd punk, or some amalgamation of several to explain.
Twenty-five years later, the classification problem still exists. Apple Music files Retard-O-Bot broadly under Alternative. ReverbNation has described the band as Alternative / Electro / Punk. The band itself now uses electropunk and post-industrial.
None of those descriptions is particularly wrong. Bands like ROB, SMB, MSI, and others liked being genre-benders. But when it was the mission of a label to sell the music, this posed a significant challenge.
Genre Wasn’t Just Something Critics Argued About
Genre can seem trivial until you have to sell a band.
In the 2000s, a genre label affected which promoter might book you, what bands you could reasonably open for, which magazine might review the record, what section of the record store you landed in and whether the person reading your press kit understood what you were trying to do before reaching the second paragraph.
A band that fit comfortably inside a scene inherited some infrastructure with it. Punk had punk clubs, punk promoters, punk labels and punk audiences. Industrial had its own clubs and touring circuits. Metal was huge at the time had several ecosystems depending on how precisely everyone wanted to argue about metal.
Things became less convenient when you are trying to do something new.
Retard-O-Bot lived in that problem for most of its original run.
A punk crowd could hear too much electronics. An electronic crowd could hear too much guitar. An industrial listener might hear something far too goofy to fit the expected mood. A conventional rock bill could look at the keyboards, samples and programmed elements and not get it at all.
Then the band would play, and sometimes the energy and presence would make it all click. Categories stopped mattering, at least when everything went right. If it didn’t go right, you could get booed, heckled, which often made for comedic opportunities for the bands to think on their toes. Or worst case, you could get threatened or into a physical altercation. This was the 90s and early 2000s, anything was possible.
They Weren’t the Only Ones, Electropunk Emerges
A loose network of bands operating around the same period had similar problems.
Mindless Self Indulgence is an obvious example. Depending on where you look, the band has been categorized as industrial metal, electro-industrial, punk revival, rap-metal, industrial dance and alternative rock.
Later references have increasingly used electropunk as a convenient umbrella.
Chicago’s Tub Ring was even harder to contain. A single record could move through surfy keyboards, heavy guitars, pop hooks and abrupt stylistic detours before a listener had much time to settle in.
Screaming Monkey Boner, later Screaming Mechanical Brain, came from another corner of the same broad touring universe, mixing electronic programming with heavy music and a sense that genre boundaries were use like walls by the Kool-Aid man, just break through them! Oh yeah!
These bands were each unique. That is precisely the point. They could share audiences and stages without sounding like variations of the same act.
What connected them was less a rigid musical formula than a willingness to use whatever worked for them. Often times, the weirder the better.
The Trouble With Being Easy to Compare
When a band doesn’t fit neatly into an established category, people tend to solve the problem by comparing it to the nearest recognizable thing.
That can be useful. It can also follow you around for years.
If a new band had frantic electronics and punk vocals, someone compared it to Mindless Self Indulgence. If a group changed genres three times inside one song, Mr. Bungle entered the conversation. A theatrical industrial act could quickly inherit references to Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM or whichever larger artist happened to give the listener a usable point of reference.
Those comparisons helped people understand unfamiliar music, but they could also make a whole ecosystem look more derivative than it actually was.
Two bands could share drum machines, synthesizers and a sense of humor while having completely different songwriting instincts. They could arrive at similar sounds from different backgrounds. They could influence one another, tour together and still make records that behaved very differently.
Retard-O-Bot certainly had recognizable neighbors. Apple Music currently places Mindless Self Indulgence and Screaming Mechanical Brain among its similar artists.
But listening only through the comparison misses some of what made the period interesting. There were a lot of musicians taking pieces from scenes that had previously been more separate and throwing them into a type of music soup.
Sometimes the soup smelled funny, but the results were often really interesting.
Genre Gets Much Neater After the Fact
One funny thing about music history is that it tends to become more organized as it gets older.
Listeners do it gradually. Bands that once seemed difficult to categorize begin appearing together on playlists. Old message-board terminology gets replaced by newer genre labels. Streaming platforms identify overlapping audiences. Younger fans discover five artists at once and reasonably assume somebody must have had a name for all of this.
Sometimes there was a name. Sometimes there were several. Sometimes nobody agreed.
Electropunk has become increasingly useful for describing one branch of this music because it immediately communicates the basic collision: electronic programming meeting punk attitude and energy. Retard-O-Bot now openly identifies with the term and describes its music as electropunk and post-industrial.
That label makes more sense today than some of the descriptions bands accumulated while trying to explain themselves twenty years ago. It also covers a lot of territory.
Genres work best as maps. Problems start when people mistake them for fences.
Being Between Scenes Could Hurt
There was a practical downside to all this freedom.
Scenes supported their own. If your band clearly belonged to hardcore, there was already a national network of hardcore bands, promoters, labels, zines and fans that understood the language. If you were firmly industrial, there were clubs where the DJ already knew what to play before and after your set.
A band between genres sometimes had to earn acceptance from several audiences without fully belonging to any of them.
Retard-O-Bot could tour with an industrial band one month, experimental rock the next and something closer to punk after that. This created opportunities, but it also meant constantly introducing yourself. The audience from one tour didn’t automatically understand the next one.
There was no perfectly defined lane to occupy. Commercially, that can be exhausting. Creatively, it can be liberating.
Nobody could tell you exactly what an electropunk record was supposed to sound like if hardly anyone agreed on what electropunk was. So you kept making it up. And inadvertently making history in the process.
The Weird Bills Were Often the Good Bills
One thing the old club circuit did particularly well was force different subcultures into the same building.
Tour packages weren’t algorithmically precise back then. Local promoters filled openings with whatever good band they knew. Touring artists needed support. Friends put friends on shows. Sometimes the resulting bill made perfect sense. Sometimes it looked like somebody had drawn three names from a hat.
Those oddball nights could be incredible.
A fan came for one band and accidentally saw another that they never would have searched for themselves. Someone expecting metal encountered synthesizers. An industrial kid heard experimental rock. A punk audience discovered that electronic music could still erupt into a mosh pit.
Retard-O-Bot benefited from that mixture.
The band eventually toured and played with artists including Mindless Self Indulgence, Combichrist, Black Light Burns, Foxy Shazam, Tub Ring, Psychostick and Screaming Mechanical Brain, Bile, Crossbreed, American Head Charge, Atom and His Package, The Medic Droid, and many more. That list makes more sense if you think in terms of overlapping audiences rather than strict genre taxonomy.
The common denominator was often simply that the bands were intense, strange, theatrical or difficult to put beside ordinary rock music. That was enough.
Then the Internet Put Everything Next to Everything
Streaming has made genre both more important and less visible.
Behind the scenes, classification helps recommendation systems decide what a listener might want next. On the listener’s side, though, music can move between categories with almost no friction.
You don’t have to walk from the industrial section of a record store to the punk section anymore. There are no sections.
A playlist can move from an old Retard-O-Bot track to Mindless Self Indulgence, Screaming Mechanical Brain, an obscure MySpace band and something released six months ago without explaining why those things have been placed together.
That may be particularly good news for bands that spent their original careers answering the question, ‘So what exactly are you?’
The answer can now be: listen.
The Advantage of Not Fitting
There was a time when being difficult to categorize could feel like a professional problem.
It confused booking agents. It complicated press descriptions. It made it harder to know which audience was supposed to claim you.
But genre confusion can age surprisingly well.
Music built too precisely around the rules of one moment can become inseparable from that moment. Bands that borrowed indiscriminately sometimes ended up with fewer period-specific rules attached to them.
Retard-O-Bot records from the 2000s contain plenty of evidence of when they were made, but they’re also full of combinations that don’t sit comfortably inside one historical box. That may help explain why younger listeners can stumble onto the catalog now without needing much instruction about which scene it belonged to.
For years, being between genres meant having to explain yourself. Twenty years later, it may be one of the reasons the music still has somewhere to go.
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