No Wave has never sounded as of-the-moment as it does now, thanks to a marked resurgence in bands expanding upon its signature sound (Liars, LCD Soundsystem, Glass Candy, Erase Errata, les Georges Leningrad) and a spate of reissues, the most vital of which is the Holy Grail of No Wave, Brian Eno’s seminal No New York, long out-of-print and much sought-after as the compilation that started it all.
No New York presents No Wave at its most uncompromising. Four bands — Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance and the Contortions, DNA, and Mars — are represented by four songs each. Pulling no punches, the occasionally intimidating, always remarkable compilation is all sinew and no filler. No wonder that Island, Eno’s label, balked when it heard the music and proceeded to dump the compilation out on its bargain-bin label Antilles. More than 25 years later, this music hasn’t lost its bite or its ability to shock.
Leading the way was Lydia Lunch. Her first order of business was to dismantle punk’s over-reliance on, as she put it, “tired Chuck Berry riffs.” Through her first band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, she stripped the music as close to the bone as possible, making a minimal, atonal racket as aggressive as it was arresting. (How minimal, you ask? She chucked James Chance out of the band because his saxophone blare was too flowery.)
Perhaps the most theatrical of No Wave performers, James Siegfried drew on a background in free jazz improvisation and a keen interest in the sounds of Motown to create his alter ego James Chance; with his backing band the Contortions (and later, the Blacks), he created music as kinetic, danceable, and wildly charismatic as James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good).” The shock of the new came from Chance’s melding of Motown’s flair and showmanship with the jarringly nihilistic ideological pose that informed his every unhinged howl.
DNA’s music was stunning in a way that Duchamp’s “R Mutt” must have been to everyone at the Armory Show. On songs like “Blonde Redhead” and “Detached,” Arto Lindsay spoke in tongues, his throaty shriek matched by his inventive guitar, which threw off shards and sparks. Somehow the chaos was brought to order, anchored by Robin Crutchfield’s keyboards or Tim Wright’s bass.
Compare either volume of Soul Jazz’s lovingly researched New York Noise compilations with No New York and you can see the tonal breadth of this music — from the aggressive minimalism of Mars, to the startling, oddly delicate rawness of Ut and early Sonic Youth, through to the extroverted, kitschy humor of all-girl percussion band Pulsallama (once described as “12 girls fighting over a cowbell”). In their hands, even dance music became confrontational, playing out like a philosophical inversion of disco’s beatific, up-with-people optimism. If disco seduced you into giving yourself up to the beat like a sacrificial lamb, No Wave’s coruscating, electric pulse fought you every step of the way. And yet there was something irresistible about it too. It could be forbidding, yes, but just as often it was raucous fun.
