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During
a family holiday trip to Florida one Christmas, my cousin
asked me about what it was like going to clubs like CBGBs
and Max's Kansas City. He read about punk in Bananas,
a magazine he got at school, and it looked pretty crazy to
him.
"What
bands have you seen?" he asked. "Have you seen the Ramones?"
No, I told him, but I saw Shrapnel, who were friends of the
Ramones. "They're in my issue of Bananas!"
He jumped
up and ran to his room to grab the magazine. And there, towards
the bottom of the photo of Shrapnel, was the back of my frizzy
head.
"That's
me." I said, half-embarrassed and half-excited.
The rest
of my family gathered around the magazine. Luckily, no one
questioned how a 14-year-old was getting into CBGBs, and no
one could see the empty bottles of Budweiser on my table.
By the
time I saw my head in Bananas, I was more of a no wave
girl than a new wave girl. I rarely went to CBs anymore, preferring
the dissonant bands that played at places like Tier 3 and
the Mudd Club. Conversations about music between me and my
much-older friends rarely included discussions of the Clash.
We were more excited by bands like TuxedoMoon, Model Citizens,
Y-Pants, Theoretical Girls (featuring avant garde composer
Glenn Branca), and DNA. At clubs, I enviously watched the
angular college-age hipsters—usually sitting sullenly
through songs by the Teardrop Explodes and the Yachts, drinking
and smoking and glaring through curtains of slick hair—jump
up and danced in a spasmodic frenzy when Medium Medium's "Hungry
So Angry" would play. I could never be as cool as those thin
white dukes and duchesses of nihilism.
 Some
of the energy and philosophy of the no wave movement is conveyed
through the lush and bleak black and white photos in No
Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980, the
new book by musician Thurston Moore and music critic Byron
Coley. People are sneering, contorted, drunk. Hardly anyone
ever smiles. The anger is obviously exaggerated, to put a
humorous slant on the real anger many people felt. We were
not starlight and golden, like the hippies. We were young,
loud, and snotty.
The text,
presented by Moore and Coley in direct quote format with very
little commentary, provides tremendous insight to the family
tree of no wave. It's as if readers are following a stream
of piss from Stiv Bators and watching it flow to Lydia Lunch,
the Cramps, the Voidoids and Von LMO. The interviews reveal
that the no wave bands were much more interconnected than
anyone on the outside suspected. Despite the book's minimal
page count, No Wave is dense with information, and
features over 100 beautifully printed photos.
I was
hoping to find my nappy head in one of those photos as some
proof that I was maybe cooler than I thought I was, but I
was nowhere to be seen. But readers who aren't me won't be
disappointed with the selection of no wave luminaries like
Anya Philips, DNA, James Chance, Richard Hell, and even legendary
guitarist Robert Quine, "inventor" of the noisy and chaotic
punk guitar solo.
No
Wave is a beautiful tribute to artists who rejected the
pretty pop music of punk and new wave and presented a new
dark and gritty alternative. Interviews with Richard Hell,
Lunch, James Chance, and Ikue Mori tell the story of this
brief but highly influential musical blip. Without no wave,
there would be no Sonic Youth, no Pixies, no Nirvana. Industrial
music would have just consisted of gothy dance tunes. Contemporary
bands like Liars and Ex-Models carry on the no wave tradition
of nihilist discord.
No wave
New York was always gray, always cold. The streets were damp,
desolate and reeked with putrid decay. A cloud of doom hung
over the city. It was as if we were living in a nuclear winter.
Lydia Lunch confirms this in her foreword to No Wave,
writing, "It felt like the apocalypse had happened. It felt
like this city was the end of the world." When faced with
the feeling that nothing mattered anymore, people have two
choices: bemoan their fate or embrace the freedom presented
by the lack of importance and do whatever they want. My nihilistic
tendencies led me more towards the "why bother" camp, which
is why reading No Wave was so bittersweet for me.
No
Wave hit me hard with regret. It focuses on a scene of
which I was a part, but only peripherally. I was too young
and too focused on high school to aggressively pursue being
part of a band and too lazy to take photos. I felt satisfied
enough to be friends with one band (not featured in the book),
the short-lived Ping Pong, featuring Margaret De Wys of Theoretical
Girls. Margaret scared me; she was an adult, and in my world
she was famous. Although I was very close with the other band
members (I used to date bassist Kevin Cunningham, if one could
call it dating), I don't think I ever said much to Margaret
beyond "hi." I hoped my silence could be intimidating, but
I imagine most adults were just annoyed by the glowering girl
with the heavy eyeliner sitting in the corner of shows and
rehearsals.
This
is part of why I found No Wave to be an inspiring book.
Almost every interview begins with sentiments like "I had
just moved to New York after leaving art school, and couldn't
figure out what to do…" The no wave scene was populated by
people who were outsiders even in the outsider music of punk,
but rather than sit around and gripe about it, they made their
own scene and even their own clubs, like Tier 3 and the Kitchen.
And the braveness of each musician inspired another musician.
Ikue Mori mentions how she thought of Lydia Lunch as a mother
figure, even though Lunch was younger than she was, because
Lydia had the guts to get up on stage and play guitar. The
no wave scene freed people who couldn't play very well from
the three chords of punk rock and allowed accomplished musicians
like Glenn Branca and Margaret De Wys and Brian Eno to collaborate
with those who didn't know the rules of making music.
The photos
in No Wave—many by Julia Gorton, Stephanie Chernikowski,
and Laura Levine—are at once stark and sumptuous, and
as dynamic and jarring as the music. People are at once ugly
and beautiful, and even thought they rarely smile, there seems
to be a sense of delight. One central lesson to be learned
from No Wave, is that even at the end of the world
it's not too late to make art. If these are the end times,
why waste them watching TV? Instead, the no wave bands used
their liberation to create the most abrasive, dissonant music
they could imagine. Despite the regrets about which authors
Moore and Coley reminded me, No Wave has inspired me
to think about the possibilities that remain.
(July,
2008)
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