A Brief History of No Wave
by James Ammirato
New York has always been an innovative city. Millions of people stacked on top of each other combined with the “freedom” afforded by the U.S. can only mean a mass of creativity, and artists have thrived there ever since it became the metropolis that it is. On the musical side of modern art in the mid-20th century, John Cage was leaving his arrangements to chance and/or the I Ching, The Velvet Underground was busy creating drone music and noise rock, and La Monte Young was the epicenter of the “downtown music” scene of the early-70’s, tuning pianos months before concerts and then virtually destroying them during a five-hour set. Music was changing, it was getting riskier, and people in New York were among the first to truly push the envelope and explore its possibilities.
“No wave” is defined as a short-lived movement that took place in the late ’70s and early ’80s, almost exclusively in New York, more specifically the Lower East Side of downtown. The movement is different in that the members of the original no wave movement were incredibly resistant to it being defined as such, with people like James Chance of the Contortions being quoted as saying “AARGH!!! NO!! I DESPISE movements!! I'd never be part of any movement!” The term itself is a tongue-in-cheek play on “new wave,” a simultaneous movement featuring artists like Talking Heads, Devo, and Elvis Costello. What truly defined no wave, however, was its attitude; negative, nihilistic, anti-anything other than itself. Said Teenage Jesus and the Jerks frontwoman Lydia Lunch on such nihilism, “What did we come out of? The lie of the Summer of Love into Charles Manson and the Vietnam War. Where is the positivity? I'm supposed to be fucking positive? Fuck you! You want positive, go elsewhere. Go find a different lie.”
In its purest form, the music of no wave is nearly unlistenable. Atonal, dissonant, soaked in noise, it never aimed to be ‘good.’ The difference between punk and no wave is that the punks didn’t know how to play their instruments and were trying to make something good out of it, fast and basic, easily consumed by the youth. No wavers didn’t know how to play their instruments and went in the opposite direction, instead making disgusting sounds purely for the sake of chaos. The ethos of no wave wasn’t far from punk, staunchly anti-commercial at its core, but no wavers would never associate themselves with the punks. To quote China Burg of no wave band Mars, “...This incredible rock’n’roll … became totally co-opted, and became a commercial entity. And personally, I just hated it. So this idea to bring music back to that kind of spirit and not have it be a music industry phenomenon was very appealing.” They didn’t want to be commodified, they didn’t even want to be liked. And they weren’t. According to Contortions drummer Don Christensen, “There was kind of a consensus around that we were artists. We were happy to stay underground and not get involved in this careerist idea.”
No wave was a creation of “Artists Space,” a loft building in Tribeca opened in 1972 as a platform for emerging artists of the time to engage in social dialogue and simply create. The space held shows, and in 1978, they hosted an underground rock festival featuring ten bands spread out over five days. Among those in attendance was Brian Eno of Roxy Music, who at this point was a well-established solo artist, and who had just recently released his first ambient album, Ambient 1: Music for Airports. The idea behind his ambient work was that it should be “as ignorable as it is interesting,” an ideology that works just as well for no wave. Impressed by what he saw at the festival, Eno proposed the idea to make a compilation record of no wave bands to capture the scene when it was at its most fresh and volatile. The record was No New York, released in November of 1978. Included on the record was James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and DNA. The record was not a hit, of course, and never would be, but it preserved the sounds that some of the most key members of the scene were making.
Meanwhile, artists like Suicide were experimenting with non-guitar music, instead opting to use drum machines and synthesizers to create their own version of no wave. Their debut record, Suicide (1977), is a fantastic document of rejection, a collection of songs that would go on to influence bands like Joy Division and Bauhaus. There was Glenn Branca, an avant-garde composer who used alternate tunings and drone music in combination with noise to create his magnum opus, The Ascension (he was also quoted calling Alan Vega of Suicide the godfather of no wave). Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks continued making solo music and film, and befriended not only Glenn Branca, but Thurston Moore as well, and would end up featuring on Sonic Youth’s song “Death Valley ‘69” seven years after No New York.
Sonic Youth is an interesting facet of no wave, due to the fact that they were one of the few bands to survive the movement and keep making music through the 2000s, with their lineup nearly unchanged since their conception. In the beginning, they were just like everyone else, twentysomethings with guitars that didn’t know how to play them, living in New York. Their debut album Confusion Is Sex (1983) is a harsh, raw display of auditory assault, and sounds nothing like Goo, their album from less than ten years down the road, which would feature Chuck D of Public Enemy. Their evolution was quick though, and despite their strange tunings and noisy delivery, garnered an audience and grew rapidly, soon becoming one of the more prominent noise rock groups in the U.S.
The thing is, no wave ended as soon as it began. When something like a movement is driven by nothing but the people within it, with no financial support or ideas to grow, it can quickly die. The people making the music knew this, and they didn’t care. The idea of no wave wasn’t for it to last, that’s part of why it was named the way it was. It was just a raw explosion of creation in a time of lawlessness, in a city that is essentially still an anomaly. It was one of those moments in music history where everything that was trying to be said was said in such a short period, it simply happened in the right place at the right time.