New Musick I
(for life on rewind/fast forward/play/record/stop)
[Sounds, November 26, 1977]
Program: present data suggest punk saturation/ obsolescence in its present form. Stagnation. Shock tactics used to gain space / attention, now redundant. Projex: post-punk projections, contrails. Print out as follows:
Suggest that healthy future of mainstream punk assured. Already the term redundant as new paths are charted. More overt reggae / dub influence, for starters. Also fresh energy from regional centres, where they keep the faith purer, and the USA. Any unity of the audience regretfully wishful thinking in our private future, so the several strands delineated below (which’ll all “cross over” of course) will be able to co-exist happily or otherwise in the record shops, zines and your hearts.
Your roots are showing, honey. Right now it’s Iggy / Ramones / glam / R&B / 60s garage, to simplify. Major untapped (re-)sources for the future: the obscurer side of the psychedelic explosion. Don’t forget they all began in 66/7 with their Bo Diddley mutated through the Yardbirds cops. Of course, accelerated and more knowing: the ways we get fooled again are always slightly different and maybe someone learns something & has a good time in the process. Also (suggested by Greg Shaw) not as an experience but as a form. Pere Ubu. C’mon, who needs LSD? We’ve all mutated that far in ten years. Look what’s in the air and come out the TV set…
Cleen teeth beat groups cleaning up and minting millions from where the Groovies left off and starting where the Jam got boring. Synthemesc nouveau pop (rilly lashing out on the categories here) and “FUN” along the way but so ultimately dire.
American reaction’s already been mentioned but it’ll be a lot weirder: we don’t know what we’ve started. The spectrum: from the clean teens above to Satan’s motorcycle slaves or whatever…
Aha! Somewhere in all there the New Musick. Think of it rather as ‘texture’. Sublimity (as in sublime, and subliminal). Nuclear night-dreams. Waking thought sleep. Sensurround sound – Roi Iggy is so much older now than he was then. James Williamson to Bowie/Eno. Uh-huh. Numb-out. How’s this? “The absolute destruction of all the values it believed in, the total loss of its position in the world, has put the UK in a psychotic position – suffering from a mass nervous breakdown. One sign of that is a total inability to face reality.” Oh. Now I’m blinded I can really see…
So catatonic bleakness. Withdrawal from our acceleration. Starting maybe from integration of avant garde techniques into the Velvets by John Cale – from the opposite prism the 24-hour technicolour dreams of the Pink Floyd and others that set the Garmans on their course to the outer limits: Amon Duul / Can / Kraftwerk / Faust (a few). Nico. Moving to mirrored isolation / mesmerisation – no feeling… Looking for a TV plug after the bomb’s dropped. Or pur sensurround, but active: sound all-out to promote spontaneous physical reaction: Throbbing Gristle, Devo.
Or to harsh urban scrapings / controlled white noise / massively accented drumming – areas explored by the Subway Sect / the Prefects / Siouxsie and the Banshees / the Slits / Wire among others…
“It all sounds the same to me / manufactured in a factory” – Yes. That worries. Remoteness is fine, but somewhere in the energy of punk lies some kind of life-force. Love the stone wall impenetrability erected by what this paper sees fit to term ‘New Musick’ (Aaaaah, the absolutes so loved by the rock press and our “advanced” civilisation). But there are enough cocoons around already to make the idea of more unnecessary. Who needs it? Oh yeh, remember that I don’t know and if anyone else does, they aren’t telling: categories help lazies in their search for the nouveau-nouveau. Lights on in your head, dip: open the box. Don’t take the money. Look where categorisations – punk / black/ white / MOR / “England” / “Europe” get us…
Excuse me, It’s too late to be late again. World awaits the next conceptual leap analogous to that one in the 50s that shifted ‘leisure’ entertainment from movies into music…