Brass Trax

You could easily dismiss No Wave, consisting, as it did, of heroin-addled New York hipsters dabbling in music and applying half-understood performance art ideas to riffs swiped from free jazz. You could damn No Wave with small praises, lauding it as the progenitor of Sonic Youth, Swans, mutant disco, and Jim Jarmusch movies. But you would be missing the point. No Wave was a brief but explosive moment of artistic experimentation. It was terminally nihilistic, and a lot of its artwork sucked. But its greatest achievements continue to deliver a jolting artistic impact.

No Wave began during the fiscal crisis of the late seventies, the period when New York City almost went bankrupt. Its members were situated in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an area of squalor and municipal neglect that bears little resemblance to the collection of boutiques and overpriced brunch spots that occupies the neighborhood today. Like the South Bronx, which was busy giving birth to its own artistic movement, the Lower East Side was pocked with the burnt-out husks of apartment buildings, victims of insurance scams. Drugs were rampant. Rent was cheap. It was a great place to live, if you were self-destructive enough.

Just to the west of the Lower East Side was SoHo, which wasn’t in much better shape. But it was also the home to New York’s artistic cognoscenti, of the galleries and performance spaces that made up New York’s official avant garde. Performance and conceptual art, experimental film, and nascent video were the order of the day. It was a world that had drawn many of No Wave’s central personalities to New York, but it was also a world that would not have them. Those on the Lower East Side felt the rejection keenly, and a spirit of anti-art would infuse No Wave. The movement bore a grudge.

No Wave was hardly the first artistic movement to reject art, and its most talented members were well aware of the fact. Eschewing the playfulness of Dada, No Wave gravitated toward Fluxus and the Viennese Actionists, artistic movements obsessed with violence, bodily harm, and sexual confrontation. Indeed, to attend a No Wave concert was to put yourself in harm’s way. James Chance, of Contortions, had a habit of attacking audience members, including, infamously, critic Robert Christgau’s girlfriend. Lydia Lunch sang songs about orphans who marched through the snow with bloody stumps for limbs. No Wave aimed to provoke.

Provocation has a way of becoming tiresome, and No Wave often did. But one series of concerts, held at the Artists’ Space in 1978, was enough to convince no less an authority than Brian Eno that the scene was worth documenting. Eno caught the shows while he was in town to produce the Talking Heads album More Songs About Buildings and Food. The final two days featured performances from Mars, DNA, Contortions, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, bands that cast a spell on Eno. He stuck around the city for months, recording the four bands, and the record he released, No New York, became the great document of the scene.

The album was significant, in part, for what it left out. Suicide, the electronic musicians who had taken Lunch and Chance under their tutelage, didn’t make the cut. Neither did Theoretical Girls, the entrancing minimalist outfit fronted by composers Glenn Branca and Jeff Lohn. (They were too arty.) Instead, Eno chose Contortions, Mars, DNA, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, four “research bands” (Eno’s phrase) the he thought represented the artistic moment.

Contortions

James Chance may have been violent and provocative, but he also wanted to be a star. Chance took the stage dressed in a suit and tie—his writhing stage presence would inspire Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities drawings—and he had enough charisma and style to repeatedly make the covers of New York’s underground newspapers. Chance was a small man, every account of No Wave mentions it, and his spastic and sporadically violent performances were all the more incongruous because of his size.

Chance and the Contortions played a speedy, spastic, angular music infused by funk. Chance studied alto saxophone under jazzman David Murray, and he played the instrument when he wasn’t singing. He aped, in broad strokes, the folksy skronk of Albert Ayler. “Dish it Out,” the opening track of No New York demonstrates his range: competent, by no means brilliant. It was the combination, though, the fusion of free jazz with punk and funk, which made the music sound so violent.

Listen to “Dish It Out” by the Contortions

Curiously, provocation aside, Contortions made music that you could sometimes dance to. The cover of James Brown’s “I Can’t Stand Myself” is a case in point. Anchored by a bassline that sounds like a speedball—stoned and spastic—and punctuated by screeching guitar flourishes, “I Can’t Stand Myself” has a driving bounce that could keep an open-minded dance party moving.

Listen to “I Can’t Stand Myself” by the Contortions

By 1979, Chance had signed with ZE records, an underground disco imprint. Contortions released its single album, Buy at the same time as Chance released Off White, a disco record credited to “James White and the Blacks.” The single “Contort Yourself,” which appeared on both albums, made its way into New York discos, but Chance never transcended his No Wave milieu. Despite a series of bands and side projects, Chance never arrived at the greater fame that he always craved.

Listen to “Contort Yourself” by James White & the Blacks

Teenage Jesus & the Jerks

If James Chance was the poster boy for No Wave, then Lydia Lunch was its diva. The day in 1976 when the pair founded Teenage Jesus & the Jerks might be the closest thing that No Wave has to a birthday. Lunch was a runaway from Rochester who blended quickly into the grungy Lower East Side. Quick friends with Alan Vega, of Suicide, Lunch soon found herself at the epicenter of No Wave. She appeared in films, staged performances, showed up at openings. And she fronted Teenage Jesus.

Chance had left the band by the time Eno arrived on the scene, and the recordings of Teenage Jesus don’t include him. It’s just as well. The band’s power comes from its overwhelming sloppiness; its remaining members plainly cannot play their instruments. Lunch, for her part, never learned how to play a guitar chord. Instead, she used beer bottles as an improvised slide, playing the instrument like a tool of atonal, percussive death.

“Orphans,” Teenage Jesus’s best known track, doesn’t appear on No New York, but the tunes that did make the record are probably more representative of the band. “Orphans,” for all its screeching noise and nauseating imagery, is uncommonly tuneful for Teenage Jesus. “I Woke up Dreaming,” which sounds like a drunken toddler banging on a discarded guitar, is more like it.

Listen to “Orphans” by Teenage Jesus & the Jerks
Listen to “I Woke Up Dreaming” by Teenage Jesus & the Jerks

Mars

Mars made chaos that sometimes sounded like order. The key to listening to a Mars song is to try not to listen to the way the various instruments interact with each other. It’s pointless. On “Tunnel,” for example, each performer plays at a different tempo, in a different key, possibly even in a different plane of reality. It’s like the cacophony that you hear when students in a marching band perform together for the first time. Except the one kid who is singing is also doped out of his mind.

Listen to “Tunnel” by Mars

The Mars sessions were the only recordings on No New York that Eno produced heavily. He recorded the other bands with a documentary detachment, but Mars’s music demanded more assistance from the studio board. Eno’s production has a deep illusion of space; the music sounds full, like it’s blooming. It has room to breathe, to stretch out. When the cacophony works just right, as it does on “Helen Fordsdale,” the various instruments sidle past each other, connecting obliquely. A flat production would have killed the music, made it sound like unrefined noise. Instead, Eno’s recording captured something essential about the band.

Listen to “Helen Fordsdale” by Mars

DNA

Though nebbish and nerdy on stage, DNA was almost the prototype of No Wave. Nonmusicians with little experience performing anything, DNA weaved together a studied art brut, oddly angular and complicated but completely idiosyncratic.

Listen to “Egomaniac’s Kiss” by DNA

“Egomaniac’s Kiss” is a case in point. The tune chugs along, like a rock song should, but at an oddly off-kilter pace. The stabs of guitar and keyboard are strangely timed and oddly, if confidently, phrased. The effect stretches time in a strutting, disjointed shuffle that is as alien as it is artful. DNA’s music was more interesting than that of many of its cohort, a fact that must have drawn Pere Ubu’s Tim Wright to plug the hole that Crutchfield would eventually leave. Lindsay and Mori would both maintain their interest in music beyond the demise of No Wave, eventually making their way into a different downtown scene: the one centered around John Zorn’s avant garde noise and jazz.

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