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White cannibals By Weasel Walter IN THIS ERA of shameless early-'80s revivalism, it is time to set the record straight on a crucial semantic issue. That Gang of Four-influenced stuff all the hep kids are listening to these days – you know, those gosh-darn dance beats with all that irritating, trebly guitar shrapnel heaped on top? You got your Rapture, their inferiors Radio 4, that group's inferiors Gogogoairheart, frat-boy cowbell bangers !!!, all the way down to high-hat hitting disco-punk bottom-feeders like El Guapo – it ain't no wave, so just stop calling it that. This sort of stuff is closer to what many critics used to refer to as post-punk. The term was bandied about in U.K. rags like NME to differentiate the abstracted musical aftermath beyond punk's barre-chord-fueled monomania. It encompassed everything from the anarchic Pistols offshoot Public Image Ltd. to gothic modernists Bauhaus to electronics abusers Cabaret Voltaire. Post-punk was yet another vague term drawing a line between the new wave and good old rock 'n' roll. Remaining much more open than the definition of punk, it could denote just about anything. No wave was actually a form of post-punk music in a literal sense, but what is called post-punk is not necessarily no wave. Post-punk never had too much on no wave as far as sheer extremity of rock deconstruction went. No wave was a tag invented for a specific aesthetic movement that came to pass during the second half of the '70s, mostly located in and around the Lower East Side of Manhattan. If we look at the archetypes of no wave – namely the bands that appeared on the groundbreaking No New York LP, Red Transistor, and groups led by guitar composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham – it becomes clear that metronomic dance rhythms really weren't an identifying factor. Dissonance and nihilism were far more characteristic of the small but influential corpus du clamor. The main reason the terms post-punk and no wave are used interchangeably has to do with the singular case of the Contortions. That no wave clan, founded in 1977 by extroverted saxophone cynic James Chance, initially took their musical cues straight from late-'60s, early-'70s James Brown funk, concealing it with no-chops-allowed noisemaking and free-jazz horn squealing. Now, funk is not necessarily disco, and disco is not necessarily funk. Disco, regardless of what else might be heaped on top of the arrangement, strove for a hypnotic monotony in the form of a constant, four-on-the-floor bass drum cushion. Funk, in its pure form, was always innately more aggressive and disjointed: from early Kool and the Gang to the Meters, funk thrived on a certain amount of wiry, hard-edged attack, more cocaine than quaalude. The Contortions, circa 1978, sought to sonically – and sometimes physically – assault the audience, not coo them into horny ecstasy. Regardless, they utilized a more conventional sense of pulse than most of their peers, and this facet would be pushed to the front in years to come. Meanwhile, across the ocean in the U.K., a gaggle of groups also integrated punk/DIY perspectives with black American musical influences. Considering the early works by Gang of Four and seminal cacophonists the Pop Group, there is clearly more emphasis on soul and funk elements than there is on disco. Not only did these bands avoid the easygoing 4/4 pocket of zombie dance music, but they also lent a conscientiously agitprop message to the proceedings. So when did the d word actually start to come into play on both sides of the Atlantic? The Contortions began to morph in the disco direction with Off White (ZE, 1979), credited to their dance-floor alter-egos James White and the Blacks. The Blacks seemed to mock the big beat, punishing it with even more sadistic guitar skronk and hateful lyrical emptiness. After 1980, later Contortions lineups would integrate more slick and straight-ahead funk and disco conventions into their sound, with Chance employing the cream of skilled second-string New York jazz players into his ever changing ranks. In the New York scene, most of the original no wave groups had long imploded by 1981, and a succession of experimental new acts began to place more emphasis on the beat. The early efforts of Bill Laswell's Material ran a wide gamut from repetitive minimalist funk to darkly invigorating new wave, all the way to piquantly free-improvised arrhythmia. Bush Tetras (featuring original Contortion Pat Place) actually made it on the Billboard disco charts with their 1980 debut single, "Too Many Creeps," a languid, loping groove sliced open with jarringly frequent guitar chopping. France's ZE Records invaded the Big Apple with a strain of "mutant disco" signings including polyglot zoot-suit review Kid Creole and the Coconuts, hilariously nontalented chanteuse Lizzy Mercier Descloux, pre-punk electro weirdos Suicide, and even no wave poster girl Lydia Lunch, whose 1980 Queen of Siam LP (Triple X) is an inexplicable hybrid of upbeat big-band music and rusty-razor-blade-suicide-note malady. As everyone in Manhattan seemingly began to become blinded by disco-illuminated dollar signs, even stoically uncommercial avant-garde jazzers started melding blatant dance grooves into their routines: Ornette Coleman's Of Human Feelings (Antilles, 1979) and the Joseph Bowie-led Defunkt's 1980 self-titled debut (Hannibal) are a few examples. In the case of Gang of Four, the actual disco didn't really kick in until their third album: 1982's Songs of the Free (Warner Bros.), featuring the strident "I Love a Man in Uniform." Perhaps there is some irony in layering socialist invective on top of booty-shaking backbeats, but was the real intent to create a musical Trojan horse? To sneak some substance into the Studio 54 bathroom for its own good? It's a little hard to say. Perhaps the legions of the new post-post-punk feel an instinctual need, passed down from some of their forebears, to pad their music with accessible dance beats in order to get those cash registers ringing. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like any of them have done it with half the intelligence of Gang of Four. Weasel Walter is in the Flying Luttenbachers. |
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