POP MUSIC : It’s the Industrial Evolution : Is it the most fundamental change since punk rock? The wail of a doomed generation? Some call it death disco, or just noise music. But after 15 years, it’s an overnight success.

When directors of a certain type of hip noir movie want to demonstrate that their protagonists have penetrated the heart of the nightlife underground, a show by “industrial” rock ‘n’ roll band Nine Inch Nails might be the kind of thing they have in mind.

Nine Inch Nails’ slick, alienating spectacle is kind of flashy in spite of itself, and it leavens the usual gloomy thudding with hooks, choruses, melodies and other bourgeois stuff like that. Plus, there’s usually moody backlighting enough to make Adrian Lyne look like Preston Sturges.

A lot of people got their first look at “industrial” music halfway through last year’s marathon “Lollapalooza” shows, when Nine Inch Nails took the stage, memories of an Ice-T set fading away, the sun riding low in the summer sky.

Nine Inch Nails’ auteur Trent Reznor, reed-thin, almost green-complected in the dimming sun, whipped and thrashed, knocked over his band’s instruments, howled angrily into the void.

Nobody had ever seen industrial music in the light of day before. Live, most industrial bands’ stage shows rely heavily upon glowing billows of fog and pulsating planes of colored light--but it hardly mattered during “Lollapalooza,” so intense was the sound.

Monstrous electronic disco beats were so loudly amplified that they seemed almost solid--like something you could put your arms around--and were washed with jungle drums and shrieking feedback guitar. It actually felt a couple of degrees cooler when the music stopped for a bit between songs. Even Reznor’s back-up musicians looked terrified. It was as close to the anarchic assault of primo rock ‘n’ roll as it may be possible for . . . er, disco . . . to get.

Not a lot of people paid much attention to the middle-of-the-road banalities of Siouxsie or Living Colour after that. Not even Jane’s Addiction in its chaotic death throes could really compete. Many Nine Inch Nails T-shirts sold that night. And Nine Inch Nails is far from the only industrial band out there.

“If I could predict the future, I’d spend my days at the track, not behind a desk,” says New York music lawyer Michael Toorock, who represents almost every industrial musician you can think of. “But I can tell you that industrial music is no fad--it’s going to be around for a very long time. These are the smartest group of musicians I’ve ever worked with.”

Call it death disco, call it noise music, call it the danceable wail of a doomed generation. Industrial rock ‘n’ roll, after 15 years, is suddenly an overnight success, with a young, fanatical audience, a swarm of hits, and a Los Angeles radio station that actually sometimes plays the stuff (MARS-FM).

Industrial rock’s ascendance isn’t a foregone conclusion. In fact, Reznor himself was reserved about its prospects in a recent Spin magazine interview: “I agree that the buzz of this little subgenre is getting bigger. . . . But I don’t think that the genre as a whole is solidified enough;I don’t think there’re enough good industrial bands right now to start up a big thing.”

Record companies see it differently. They’ve been fighting like cats over this music, much of which was on the Chicago independent label Wax Trax until recently. As of March, industrial bands Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Nitzer Ebb, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Front 242 and the Revolting Cocks have major-label deals.

Some of the juiciest music-industry gossip of the year has revolved around Interscope Records chief Jimmy Iovine’s herculean attempts--apparently successful--to sign Nine Inch Nails to his label.

Some people have called industrial disco the most fundamental change in rock ‘n’ roll since punk rock, though even they aren’t really sure why. Other people just call the stuff fascist, perhaps referring to the typical industrial-disco obsessions with power and control, or perhaps to the genre’s extreme formal rigor.

Industrial bands differ almost as much from each other as they do from the mainstream, but pretty much have in common the boom-whack drumbeats of disco, full-on pumping double-time bass lines, anguished megaphone-sound vocals and shrieking ejaculations sampled from Churchill speeches, exploding buildings--you name it. It’s all played at either insanely fast or agonizingly slow tempos--there is no middle ground. Your parents wouldn’t like these records.

The industrial genre may differ from depressed Manchester dance music, house music or certain forms of heavy metal chiefly in its malicious, confrontational intent--it might be based on the same brand of white college-boy alienation, but its lyrics are angry instead of wry, its artists are less Happy Mondays-glib than Black Flag-out-to-kill. They mean it, man.

“There has to be danger,” Reznor has said. “Rock ‘n’ roll deserves that. . . . Wanting to be a rock star (today) is as (safe) as wanting to be a fireman or an astronaut. . . . It’s like being a doctor, only you get more girls to take their clothes off for you.”

Most industrial frontmen go for the tortured-soul thing; most behave on stage as if they would like to be considered for the part of St. Sebastian in some Robert Bresson bio-pic. In interviews, they are as likely to mention literary reference points--Burroughs, Baudrillard, J.G. Ballard--as musical ones. The vocals sound as if the singer has just swallowed a quart of Liquid Drano . . . but sound really good.

Sometimes it seems as if there are only about 20 guys playing all this stuff. Alain Jourgensen, who started as chief producer for Chicago-based Wax Trax Records, is the lead singer for Ministry, fronts the Revolting Cocks and has produced Front 242, Skinny Puppy and KMFDM as well as his own bands, most of which now are on major labels.

He also formed Pailhead with Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye, Lard with Jello Biafra and begat the ever-popular 1000 Homo DJs with members of Revolting Cocks and Lead Into Gold. With the possible exception of Einsturzende Neubauten and Nitzer Ebb, every major industrial artist in the world has passed through the Wax Trax studios.

“In the mid-’80s,” said Wax Trax President Jim Nash, “Wax Trax wasn’t trying to fit into a market niche, it invented one.”

A lot of these guys are in a lot of these bands. Martin Atkins was in Ministry, but is in Pigface, Killing Joke and--maybe--Revolting Cocks.

Chris Connelly, who started out in Scotland’s shaved-head proto-industrial Fini Tribe, is a solo artist as well as a current member of Ministry, former member of RevCo, and of this month’s version of Pigface--a band completely made up of Jourgensen collaborators from Nine Inch Nails, Revolting Cocks, Skinny Puppy, Thrill Kill Kult, Killing Joke and Ministry.

“These artists have a sense of community that is unprecedented,” says attorney Toorock. “Not only are they not suffering by going into and out of each other’s projects, they seem to be rejuvenated by it, to become better musicians. The rest of the industry, which says you live or die as a band, would be aghast.”

Live, none of these bands seem to have the same lineup twice--sometimes there will be three drummers and four guitar players with Ministry, for instance, an intense, powerful sound that’s even more overwhelming live than it is on the records.

Industrial music started out in the late ‘70s as a highly unpopular form of punk rock, noise that was as abrasive as possible, noise that was divorced from any sort of musical context save one: It was performed by musicians in nightclubs. Late-’70s performances by Non, for example--which basically played processed tape loops of women screaming, at volumes high enough to melt most PA systems--emptied the most crowded punk clubs in 30 seconds flat. (Promoters finally learned to put Non on last.)

The genre first arose in the worst sort of industrial wastelands: Sheffield, Dusseldorf and the parts of London that appear in no guidebook, in “Repo Man” Los Angeles and the grimmer industrial neighborhoods of Brussels.

In the beginning, there was Throbbing Gristle, a late-’70s London art collective that turned to “music” in the wake of the punk-rock thing. Leader Genesis P-Orridge had visited Los Angeles a couple of years earlier as a performance artist, and was himself greatly influenced by Austrian performance artist Hermann Nitsch, who had achieved a kind of notoriety for ritualistic performances in which he covered himself in pig’s blood and miscellaneous animal viscera. In interviews, P-Orridge has claimed that TG’s goal was to play so loudly that sound waves could actually be seen, and has also claimed that it succeeded.

Throbbing Gristle’s first album, “Second Annual Report,” was pure noise, a melange of synthesizer screech and found industrial sounds, layer upon layer of dense racket that has been compared to the sounds made by half-a-million rattling radiator pipes.

The music of Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire, which started around the same time, was moodier, less dissonant, and involved actual instruments alongside its tape loops: It had a dark soundtrack quality at times, and was usually performed in the dark, accompanied by scratchy films.

The Berlin band Einsturzende Neubauten performed its compositions with the aid of jackhammers, belt sanders and dynamite; Australia’s SPK inflected its grinding industrial noise with its members’ gruesome medical obsessions: SPK played the musical equivalent of David Cronenberg movies. Artist Mark Pauline’s nightmare cabarets of pestilential, physically threatening, chemical-spewing machines were the landscapes for which industrial music seemed custom-designed.

It was Cabaret Voltaire that made the quintessential discovery that once a beat is introduced, you can get depressed high-school students to dance to anything. Armed with this fact, the bands mutated into sort of gloomy disco excursions. Throbbing Gristle split into three distinct units devoted to house music and the occult, all still popular: Psychic TV, fronted by P-Orridge; Coil, fronted by Peter Christopherson; and Chris & Cosey, more or less the Paul and Linda McCartney of the post-industrial underground. SPK became disco-fied, too.

The second-generation bands, which formed in the ‘80s, included Front 242 from Brussels, Young Gods in Zurich, Skinny Puppy from Vancouver and Nitzer Ebb from Chelmsford, England. They moved closer to the industrial music of today: intense dance beats, apocalyptic lyrics, tape loops from the fingernails-on-the-chalkboard school. Skinny Puppy’s Nivek Ogre, who cringed from the proscenium as if he were starring in a particularly claustrophobic Beckett play, became the first industrial rock star.

Most remixes and production were done by a small cadre of producers: Rico Banning, Adrian Sherwood, Roli Mossman and Jourgensen, each of whom had dozens of records to their credit. This was state-of-the-art technology reduced to its rawest animal form, and many of these songs became improbable dance-floor hits.

Ministry evolved from a new-wave synth-pop band into a one-man production house--Jourgensen--and he built the Wax Trax stable into an industrial-music machine that at one point was releasing a dozen records a month. (Most of them were studio projects rather than bands; most of them were also pretty dreadful.)

The ‘80s also gave painful birth to Laibach, the musical arm of a Slovenian arts collective. Based in Lubjaina, formerly in Yugoslavia and now the capital of Free Slovenia, Laibach specialized in deconstructing history, using industrial disco as a tool. Its spectacular Robert Wilson-esque disco opera “Baptism,” which compressed a thousand years of violence and oppression, may not have been what makes an American 15-year-old’s heart beat faster, but its anarchic version of the entire Beatles “Let It Be” LP--minus, of course, the title song--and its six versions of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” brought a perspective to that music no one would have thought possible.

This is harrowing stuff. And the watershed Laibach LP, “Opus Dei,” presented the band as the best militaristic death-disco heavy-metal group the world has ever known. Next month, Mute is releasing “Kapital,” Laibach’s summation of the end of communism.

British group Head of David, whose creative force Justin Broadrick later went on to form grindcore industrial band Godflesh, was really the first group to combine industrial textures with tortured metallic electric guitars, the live rock ‘n’ roll thing. Various groups, especially Ministry, became greatly influenced by the sound . . . which more or less codified the form of what we call “industrial” now.

The best industrial bands use state-of-the-art musical technology to produce ear-splitting sounds that are as anti-technological as possible--the effect has been compared to smart bombs aimed at a munitions factory. In short, industrial dance music is first and foremost rock ‘n’ roll.

The genre even has its very own “Whole Lotta Love”--Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole,” a bleak anti-love song that is at least as angry as “I’m Too Sexy” is banal. When the PA system blasted a tape of “Head Like a Hole” during the interminable wait before Guns N’ Roses took the stage last fall, half the hard-rock fans in the Forum awoke from their stupors and stood up to dance.

And if industry insiders are to be believed, this summer will see the new albums by Ministry (“Psalm 69--How to Succeed and How to Suck Eggs” is the title) and Nine Inch Nails doing for industrial music what Nirvana’s last one is currently doing for grunge. Nine Inch Nails and Ministry are sort of the Run-DMC’s of industrial disco, the bands that took a dance-rooted form and grafted it to heavy rock ‘n’ roll, making it palatable to squadrons of fans who might have disdained the music in its pure form.