Electric Metal: Baby Rivetheads (or how to raise an industrial child)

[Baby Rivetheads]
Or how to raise an industrial child...

Industrial Baby

Imagine the scene: you're happily (angrily?) stomping round your local shopping mall with an evil smirk on your face, quietly recollecting with some satisfaction the sound that raver made as you ripped its still beating heart out (or you told it to go away, whichever). Suddenly you see a terrible sight: children. Not industrial children, not even trendy-goths, but teenyboppers, mini moshers and grungers and pop-punksters. These children may even be dressed in bright colours, and wear clothes worshipping the false idols of Britney, Blink 182 or Kurt Cobain. Even more disturbingly, you might even happen to find out that in the latter case the child in question has never even heard Nirvana - it's just a fashion thing.

Shaking and trembling, overwhelmed by all these corrupted children, you stagger away, visualising them ten years later when they've grown up and work in telesales or accountancy and are - god forbid - "normal". You finally manage to crawl home and hide in the dark and spend the next week sitting in the corner, shaking and frothing at the mouth whilst contemplating neutering yourself with the electric carving knife so that you don't risk a child of your own turning out this way. However, never fear, there is another way: raising an industrial child. Here are our pointers:

1/ Start early. If possible, at the moment of conception, and definitely whilst the child is still in the womb. Note: if you are going to try to raise an industrial child it's preferable that your partner is a rivethead too. Any influence exerted by a non-rivethead parent may just confuse and corrupt the child.

2/ Play industrial music to the baby constantly, thus familiarising it with the music you love. As it grows it should come to love the music too and - especially if that was what it heard whilst in the womb - will find industrial music reassuring.

3/ Kit the baby out in boots ASAP.

4/ Ignore anyone who tells you dressing a baby in black is creepy.

5/ Make the baby's mobile out of wire, cogs, chains, bolts etc.

6/ Buy it a selection of industrial T-shirts. Even if the smallest size available still looks like a marquee on the baby, never mind. It'll grow into them.

7/ Encourage elitism in the child.

8/ Ban pop music and mainstream TV in your house so the child has no damaging influences from these areas. Under no circumstances should you ever allow your child to view anything like the Teletubbies or the Tweenies or that f***** purple dinosaur. This will warp the baby's fragile mind for life (well I find anything with adults dressed in huge brightly coloured suits bloody disturbing).

9/ Good toys for the baby (regardless of sex) are: toy construction equipment and tools; model cars; kiddies keyboards, anything designed to encourage babies to play which has bells, buzzers and all kinds of other fun and noisy things on.

10/ Bad toys for the baby (regardless of sex) are: dolls, fluffy animals (unless it's a toy dog called Chud), anything that plays lullabies or anything with bright flashing lights (do you want your child to grow into a raver?!).

11/ Aim to have your child computer literate by 6 months old.

12/ Names are all important. Name your child after your industrial idols, as long as your idol has a distinctive name (something like Bill or Peter is way too ambiguous, so should be avoided). If your baby is a girl, you may be somewhat stuck for choice though, though many names could be used for both boys and girls. Good names include: Genesis (I guess this *could* be a girl's name), Cevin (this probably couldn't), Nivek, Sascha, Alien, Rudy, Cosey, Blixa and so on. Or you could use names like Neo and Trinity from your favourite industrial-related movies.

Album or song titles might provide inspiration too. Depends whether you *really* want to lumber your kid with a name like 'Rabies' or 'Nihil' (I happen to think those are pretty cool names; something like 'DOA: The third and final report of Throbbing Gristle' probably won't really work though).

Or choose something rivet-esque. Examples of these types of names would be names like: Cyber, Dystopia, Elite, Elektro, Kemikal (note spelling), Steel, Angst, Scrap, Mechanise (or Mekkanise, I guess), Anger, Neon, Caustik-Acid. And so on.

Alternatively, give your child a number instead of a name, thus mocking the system that wishes to turn us all into statistics anyway.

13/ As soon as the baby grows hair, shave half of it off.

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