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Old 02.18.2009, 07:21 AM   #11
Moshe
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BehindtheBeat: Nasty, Brutish and Short

Valley authors Byron Coley and Thurston Moore pen a book on the New York No Wave scene.

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Thursday, February 19, 2009
By Matthew Dube
 
Andrew Kesin Photo

No Wave is a music scene of which even many ardent music fans have no knowledge. The movement—a collision of art, punk and avant-garde—lasted for only a short period, and was a self-contained and highly localized phenomenon, confined exclusively to New York City and its surroundings. While extraordinarily brief, it burned brightly, and offered a blueprint for many artists and musical aesthetes to follow.
No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980. was penned by two locals, musician Thurston Moore and music critic Byron Coley, both avid archivists and students of popular culture. The coffee table-worthy book is an obvious labor of love, and shines a light on this scantly-covered nexus of art and music, serving as a snapshot of a moment in time and space that could not and did not last.
Musically, No Wave focuses on the bands featured on the seminal, Brian Eno-curated No New York compilation—the Contortions, DNA, Mars, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks—who epitomized this amalgamation of noise, avant-garde, experimental and atonal sounds. These bands and their contemporaries set a template for bands like Liars, Erase Errata, and Moore's own Sonic Youth.
No Wave's vanguard also sought to shake up a culture that was stuck in a malaise. As scene luminary Lydia Lunch states in her introduction, "Post-Suicide, pre-Sonic Youth New York was the devil's dirty litter box. No Wave was the waste product of Taxi Driver, Times Square, the Son of Sam, the blackout of '77, widespread political corruption... and a desperate need to violently rebel against the complacency of a zombie nation dumbed down by sitcoms and disco." The very name of the movement was antithetical and reactionary, playing upon the perceived pop nature of New Wave.
The scene was populated and fueled by members of various disciplines, not just musicians; there were representatives from the worlds of dance, theater and visual art. While surveying the major movers and shakers of No Wave, the book also touches on some of those who intersected the scene, from Debbie Harry and David Byrne to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jim Jarmusch.
No Wave is rife with beautifully stark black-and-white photographs of the dens and denizens of this inherently New York phenomenon. The city serves as one of the book's main characters and inspirations: its subways, rooftops and diners all take turns at center stage. The venues featured within its pages are varied and gloriously degraded; the reader is placed squarely in filthy basements, apartments and clubs.
To accompany the candid and live photographs, Moore and Coley distilled hundreds of hours of personal interviews into an illuminating and cohesive oral history. The recollections are naked and honest, and the book bristles with the ecstatic energy characteristic of the scene itself.
The Advocate asked Coley to talk about the genesis and goals of his latest creation, and to expound upon the legacy of No Wave.
Valley Advocate: What was the objective when you set out to write the book?
Byron Coley: Well, it was to tell the story of a scene we had both enjoyed, albeit from the sidelines. We wanted to just lay out the connections and the personalities and let people talk. We also thought it was very important to not get into the new bands who refer to No Wave as an influence. We just wanted it to be the first and second generation bands—the No New York core, plus the SoHo bands, plus the ones that don't quite fit anywhere. But because we were dealing with Abrams as a publisher, we knew the basic idea would be to do an image-driven book rather than a text-driven one, so that was a factor as well. We also wanted the book to remain affordable, so that kids could pick it up and get some idea of what the actual scene was like.
You and Thurston Moore have collaborated on many projects—how did your working relationship begin and develop?
Thurston and I were both fanzine guys. He knew my work, I knew his. When he started putting out records with Sonic Youth, he sent me one with a note, and we started corresponding a bit. We met when I was living in L.A. in the early '80s and got along pretty well. When I moved back east, I got involved with restarting a moribund hardcore fanzine called Forced Exposure. The co-editor and I talked, and we agreed that the best band for the cover would be Sonic Youth. We went down and did some long interview segments, this would have been in '84-'85, and that started to be the place I crashed when I'd go down to the city. Our interests followed a lot of parallel lines—weird science fiction and noir fiction, hardcore punk, free jazz, electronic music, fringe folk music, underground literature and poetry. A lot of times it was just calling the other guy up to see if he had some money to kick in on an interesting project. It all just sort of goes from there.
How would you define No Wave as a scene? Was it an immediate reaction to New Wave?
Well, it wasn't really imagined as a scene until it was over. It was more a group of bands, many of them featuring untrained musicians, several of whom were friends of each other, all of whom existed in the far downtown reaches of Manhattan—meaning below SoHo—in the late '70s. They would have sounded very different if the New Wave bands had not happened, but there was a wide gulf between Patti Smith and Teenage Jesus in most ways. Still, they were more similar to each other than Patti Smith was to Journey, so you can read that however you want.
What about the importance of women in No Wave?
Well, it was unique, because it was the first scene that was thoroughly integrated in terms of gender, and one of the early ones in which there was no big deal made about women performing in purely musical roles as opposed to being "chick singers" or something.
Why do you think No Wave burned out so quickly?
Because it was music by non-musicians, or by musicians playing with non-musicians, it was not really identifiable as rock 'n' roll music in any standard sense. It had a functional artistic quality to it, which meant that it wasn't really designed to evolve. It was a head birth in many ways, born as fully formed as it could ever be. As players learned how to play their instruments more and more—and there are exceptions to this; some of the people were musicians of long-standing—their impulse seemed to be to move toward more standard forms. As soon as they did this, they were no longer really No Wave. They were No Wave-inflected rock.
Thurston Moore hosts a multimedia presentation and book signing for No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980. March 3 at 7:30 p.m. at A.P.E. Gallery, 126 Main St., Northampton, (413) 586-5553, www.flywheelarts.org. Donations accepted to assist Flywheel in the renovation of their new space at the Old Town Hall in Easthampton.
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