Look Back Anarchy
The No Wave Story Part II
Section One: A Selected No Wave Discography
Album Title: Blank Generation
Artist: Richard Hell and the Voidoids
Year of Release: 1977
Embedded Song: Blank Generation
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Moderator cut: image removed
Album Title: Buy
Artist: The Contortions
Year of Release: 1979
Embedded Song: Contort Yourself
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Album Title: Guitar Beat
Artist: Raybeats
Release Date: 1981
Embedded Song: International Operator
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Album Title: Shut Up and Bleed
Artist: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
Release Date: 2008
Embedded Song: I Woke Up Dreaming
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Album Title: Boom In The Night
Artist: Bush Tetras
Year of Release: 1995
Embedded Song: Too Many Creeps
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Album Title: Theoretical Girls
Artist: Theoretical Girls
Year of Release: 2009
Album Title: A Taste of DNA
Artist: DNA
Year of Release: 1981
Album Title: Luncheone
Artist: 8 Eyed Spy
Date of Release: 1997
Album Title: The Lounge Lizards
Artist: The Lounge Lizards
Date of Release: 1980
Note: The forum rules only allow 10 images per post so the rest of the discography has no cover album images.
Title: Stranger Than Paradise (Film Soundtrack)
Artist: John Lurie
Date of Release: 1985
Title: The Big Gundown
Artist: John Zorn
Date of Release: 1984
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Section Two: Selected No Wave Anthologies
Title: No New York
Artists: The Contortions, DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
Producer: Brian Eno
Year of Release: 1978
Title: N.Y. No Wave
Artists: James Black and the Whites, Mars, Lydia Lunch, Suicide, The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Ross Yemen
Producer: Diego Cortez
Year of Release: 2003
Title: New York Noise
Artists: Arto Lindsay, Material, Liquid Liquid, James Chance, Glenn Branca, Bush Tetras, Defunkt, ESG, Theoretical Girls, DNA
Producers: Topper Headron & Jean-Michel Basquiat
Year of Release: 2003
Each of the three anthologies are interesting because of the different background of each anthology's producer.
No New York: Brian Eno more or less randomly selected the artists based on the bands he saw perform at the Artist's Space underground music festival. Eno was pretty much a dilettante to the No Wave scene and omitted a lot of worthy bands in his anthology. The narrowness of Eno's selections pissed off a talented No Wave bands who were worthy of being included on
No New York.
NY No Wave: Producer Diego Cortez was a grassroots promoter of No Wave music from it's earliest beginnings at the Artist's Space. Cortez was Brian Eno's creative advisor on the
No New York album in 1978. Cortez is also curator of a largest library of films, books, record albums, and memorabilia of the No Wave movement. This collection is the most inclusive of all the No Wave anthologies.
New York Noise: The
New York Noise producers were Clash drummer Topper Headron and the celebrated visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The collection was put together shortly before Basquiat's death in 1986 but was never released until 2003, when there was a resurgence of interest in No Wave music. There is more of an emphasis on the early Eighties, post-implosion No Wave scene.
If you look at the release dates of many of the albums, you'll find that many were released several years after the 1977-1981 hey-day of No Wave. Many of the No Wave artists never released proper studio albums and didn't appear in album form until their singles were anthologized several years after the collapse of the No-Wave movement.
Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth points out that by the time Eno's groundbreaking 1978
No New York anthology appeared, the No Wave in New York was beginning to implode. The music was so radical and extreme there was really nowhere to go with it except mainstream. By 1980, bands like the Bush Tetras, the Lounge Lizards and the Raybeats had refined No Wave music into a form that wasn't a painful sonic assault on the ears of the listener.
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Section Three: Films about No Wave:
Kill Your Idols (2006) is a documentary film about the downtown music scene in New York. It covers bands like Patti Smith, Television, Gogol Bordello and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but most of the screen time features interviews with No Wave icons like Lydia Lunch, Suicide founder Alan Vega, Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Swan's founder Michael Gira.
Stranger Than Paradise (1984) was the second full length feature directed by Jim Jarmusch who was linked with the No Wave movement. The movie is a satirical look at the mainstream culture and embodies the nihilistic values of No Wave. The leading man in the film is John Lurie who played in several No Wave bands. Jarmusch has gone on to achieve mainstream respectability and has won several awards for directing indie films like
Broken Flowers,
Dead Man,
Coffee and Cigarettes,
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and
Down By Law.
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Section Four: Books about No Wave
No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (2006) The table top book provides a visual history by Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and co-author Byron Coley.
No Wave (2007)- Marc Masters' is perhaps the best linear history of the No Wave movement. Masters' book traces the history of this influential genre from its most famous names down to its many offshoots and sidetracks. From early pioneers like Suicide and Glenn Branca, to forgotten treasures like Red Transistor and Bush Tetras,
No Wave charts all the cracks and crevices of a surprisingly diverse movement.
New York Noise (publication date unknown) is a table top book collection of photos by Paula Court. It covers the entire development of the downtown N.Y. rock scene but a large portion of the book is devoted to No Wave.
The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 (2005) Former
Soho News reporter Marvin J. Taylor covers the downtown scene before, after and during No Wave phenomena. In the
Downtown Book editor Marvin Taylor has selected a generous number of essays and reviews of the No Wave scene, as it unfolded, flourished and imploded in the late Seventies and early Eighties.
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Section Five: The Thurston Moore Interview
As a bonus treat I offer an full length question & answer session interview with ex-Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore on the history of the No Wave scene in New York. This Q and A session was part of a book signing event at the McNally Robinson bookstore on July 11 2008. It's perhaps the single best interview I've come across on the No Wave scene. It has a long run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes but any No Wave fan will be fascinated by Moore's insider story as a participant in the No Wave movement.
I loved the part when Thurston Moore describes telephoning Brian Eno to get information on the
No New York album he produced in 1978. Eno drew a complete blank and had a total loss of memory about the basic facts of the album.
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Section Six: The No Wave Map
The
No Wave Map which is a family tree the No Wave movement was too big to fit in the journal space but you can view it on this link:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3.../nowavemap.gif