The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, Mars & D.N.A.
No New York
And once again, Brian Eno rears his head. While finishing up some More Songs About Buildings And Food work, Eno happened upon one of New York City's true underground rock shows. He ended up taking four of the bands he heard with him into the studio for the purposes of--Ian McKaye, hold your breath--"documenting" the sound he'd heard. No extra production willy's or nilly's were needed. The sound was called "No Wave", a refusal of what Eno was doing with David Byrne, a dismissal of punk, a rejection of disco, a sound that can't be fully explained even with the music in hand and on stereo. No New York wasn't the first avant-garde rock record ever, but it also wasn't an album with a lot of antecedents, and it wasn't a sound that was very popular, if you're going by album sales or the amount of time it was only available on the out-of-print circuit.
So fucking what, we say to that.
The years are alive with albums that are absolutely nothing like everything else--2007 saw one of the few true "rock" albums, where a European musician recorded time-lapse audio of actual rocks gathering fucking moss, 2008 had an album where a bunch of people with Down's Syndrome sang atonally over bizarre, discordant synthesizers, and 2009 already has it's own "..the fuck?" with The Happiness Project, wherein the guitarist from Broken Social Scene mashes up interviews regarding how people define happiness with music in a fashion that sort of begs the question of how much money the label Arts & Crafts actually has, and how difficult it must be to get some of it out of them. The difference here is that, unlike that aforementioned trilogy, No New York is out-and-out fantastic music, no matter that it took years for anybody to pay attention to it beyond the circle that already was in the know. That doesn't mean that it eventually got "popular"--namechecking Lydia Lunch aside, you don't come to this stuff planning to nail cool stickers on your chest, and it isn't an acquired taste, either. Noise music, avant-garde, no wave--that's the sort of stuff that you either have the desire and make-up for, or you don't. That also doesn't mean that there's something "wrong" with you or your taste if the cacophonous sound of No New York doesn't turn you on--obviously, nobody should need to tell you that, but the popularity of equating "this wasn't for me" statements with "so something must be wrong with you" is just about as widespread as the churlish mentality that liking what a lot of people don't give a shit about is a sign of being a intellectual heavyweight. Simply put, No Wave wasn't, and still isn't, for everybody. No New York is no different--the vocals are, for the most part, impossible to figure out without an internet connection (they were printed on the interior of the record sleeve, meaning you had to rip the cardboard in half to get to them back in 1978), few of the singers can actually "sing" in the accepted definition of the term, the improv/noise heavy aspect of the squalling instruments and crashing cymbals can stress even the biggest Wolf Eyes fans, and the raw and rough sound quality of the recording make it sound at times like you're hearing this stuff through the flimsy drywall separating you from a selfish teenager's attempt to "rock". But No New York was a special album, and it remains an undeniably important product of music-as-history: as Eno intended, it's one of the few true capsulations of what was happening at the ground floor of a still-controversial movement. While you'd probably learn more about No Wave by watching documentaries like Kill Yer Idols, the most direct route, and the one that the artists themselves would prefer, is by going to the source: what the hell did it sound like? Now that it's the era of the mp3, the answer to that question is just a few keystrokes away.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
You and No New York were meant to be together.
Posted by: Marty | 2009.05.11 at 15:22