A Treasure is Beached on the No Wave

Who would listen to that cacophonous, ugly and obnoxiously inaccessible noise of No Wave? The kids who were responding to the looming apocalypse of its conception, fellow misfits who identified with the whole messy slew of its pioneers, and then kids like yours truly, thirty years later who just think it’s badass. That’s who.

The June 2008 release, No Wave: Post Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980. is the most solid documentation to date about the bands and artists of the short-lived era. The book is a mouthpiece for the musicians directly related to the scene, offering interviews with all the major players. Musicians and rock journalists, Thurston Moore and Byron Coley, present the veteran accounts and all the content in a detailed, thorough and professional manner that brings legitimacy to such a raw and reckless acid trip of artistic expression.

No Wave focuses on the New York locale, and admits that New York wasn’t even the most conducive of cities for punk. It mentions only CBGB, The Ramones and one publication: Punk Magazine as the punk pearls in a city full of dirty clams. The musicians and artists involved who wouldn’t have come to being without their punk predecessors (hence post-punk) were all scrounging to live a less than comfortable lifestyle during a poverty-stricken generation that made performing that much more precious. Moore and Coley fill in the gaps and smooth the transitions as needed, but the book more than anything gives a voice to the kids — now middle-aged adults — in the New York trenches of post-punk warfare, including members of Mars, The Gynecologists, Beirut Slump and about 40 more. It’s like reading a collective diary. The narratives are all honest, matter-of-fact and unashamed.

The book begins and is laden with the testimonials of a couch-surfing, lip-giving teenage runaway who didn’t think about much more than inserting herself in this club that didn’t have a name or niche besides cultivated craziness, later deemed as No Wave. Lydia Lunch who would form Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and consequential projects had her entire body on the pulse of the New York underground pack that prowled at likely venues such as CBGB and Max’s. Both establishments have already met their fate.

The movement (or as it proved stagnation) is refreshingly liberating. It’s where proper training doesn’t take primacy over self-instruction (in fact, the book explains how the Cramps started when two members were seeking out band mates who had never even played instruments), where social order is maintained through disorder and where skepticism fizzles with unabashed displays of rawk. The No Wave breed manages to glorify living in filth, mutiny, destruction and having no sense of direction, validated by fans and contributors like Jean-Michel Basquiat, William S. Borrows and Brian Eno. Ironically, the artists didn’t have much of a choice but to live the way they did in a time of such stark deprivation from a suffering economy.

The culture comes off as simultaneously reprehensible and somehow coveted and desirable. The product of the culture, though, is head-scratchingly innovative and artistic. The music evoked a kind of motiveless release. It was not meant to uplift or persuade, but just simply to exist.

The book doubly serves as a black and white picture book of the usual suspects: rockers dressed up in the garb of mismatched lawn-sale ensembles, with heavy makeup and gargantuan, thick rimmed specs adorning their faces. There’s a fine line between the hopelessly geeky and the enlightened hip in respect to the group’s fashion. In any event, image was a factor of inclusion in the scene where a cool haircut could warrant a bass or drums audition.

The truth is, this book may not reach a whole lot of people, generally speaking, because the movement didn’t reach a whole lot of people in the grand scheme of things. The most resonating band that more resulted from the scene than started it is Sonic Youth. So chances are, if you don’t care for the music you won’t care for the book. But if you do, it’s a little bit like candy. If anything, No Wave gives its audience something tangible to connect to those four years of gritty creativity — a time capsule immortalizing it.