Say Yes to No
Featured Album
Around 1978, a handful of bands in downtown New York City who all knew each other tried to answer the central question of post-punk: “why does rock music have to sound a certain way?” The groups that came to be identified as the “no wave” scene rejected every kind of orthodoxy of pop music, from tunefulness to conventional instrumental skill – what the Ramones and other punk bands were doing, by contrast, was practically bourgeois pop. A lot of the no wave semi-musicians were visual artists, and they followed the lead of contemporary visual art by discarding prettiness in favor of bluntness and bleeding-raw dramatic gestures.
The scene’s central document was the No New York compilation – four quick, dissonant, shockingly bracing songs apiece by the Contortions, DNA, Mars and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, produced by Brian Eno. It’s been out of print for decades, although eMusic’s got half of its contents: remixed versions of Mars and Teenage Jesus’s complete studio recordings are respectively compiled on 78+ and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, the latter now credited to the band’s hellion of a singer, Lydia Lunch.
If you’re interested in dipping a toe into the icy-hot no wave pool, try Teenage Jesus’s screechy debut single “Orphans” and Mars’s wobbling nightmare “Helen Fordsdale.” The “fifth no wave band” – for those who like to count such things – was arguably Glenn Branca‘s early group, the Static, whose excellent, clangorous single “My Relationship”/”Don’t Let Me Stop You” is on Branca’s Songs ’77-’79 collection. eMusic’s also got the most challenging no wave record: John Gavanti, a thoroughly bizarre shriek-and-clunk “adaptation” of “Don Giovanni” by members of Mars and DNA.
The most notable label to shamble out of the no wave swamp was ZE Records, founded in 1978 by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban. The current ZE catalog, which recently came to eMusic, includes a fine compilation called NY No Wave, which includes contributions by members of all four No New York bands (check out DNA side project Arto/Neto’s bizarre “Pini, Pini”), as well as other members of their circle, like Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Suicide and Rosa Yemen.
What ZE’s most remembered for, though, seems at first like it’s way over on the other side of the pop spectrum: disco tracks by the likes of Was (Not Was), the Waitresses, and Kid Creole & the Coconuts. In fact, those bands were asking almost the same question as the no wave crew: “why does dance music have to sound a certain way?” That’s a bit less of a rhetorical question, because the easy answer is that you have to be able to dance to it.
Beyond that, though, anything goes. ZE’s three Mutant Disco compilations collect a lot of the smart (and smartass) dance records the label put out. Resident genius August Darnell was at least partly responsible for a lot of them: he masterminded the Aural Exciters ‘”Emile (Night Rate)” (say it out loud), Kid Creole & the Coconuts ‘acid-tongued calypso-disco jam “Annie I’m Not Your Daddy” (with its backing singers chanting “Ono-, ono-, onomatopoeia”), and the clever and enormously influential proto-house production on “Deputy of Love” by Don Armando’s 2nd Ave. Rhumba Band.
Another star ZE act asked a third version of the question: “why do no wave and dance music have to be two different things?” When James Chance‘s rapidly mutating band was on No New York, it was called the Contortions, and they originally used the same name for their debut album Buy, which is now credited to James Chance & the Contortions. But it’s the same killer record: nihilistic and kinetic, sexy and sex-loathing, its crushed-disco rhythms twisted but solid as steel cables. The band promptly changed its name to James White & the Blacks – Chance always loved playing with loaded racial politics, from the cover of James Brown’s “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)” on No New York onward – and released the less frenetic, more groove-based album Off White.
The hidden gems of the ZE catalogue are two albums by Cristina, the single-named recording alter ego of theater critic Cristina Monet. Her first album, Doll in the Box, is pretty much a Brechtian interrogation of disco and what its baseline assumptions say about sexuality and power; it’s also jubilantly fun disco, especially its covers of the Beatles ‘”Drive My Car” (which she sings in a Marilyn Monroe-inspired voice) and Peggy Lee‘s “Is That All There Is?” (which was originally withdrawn thanks to the song’s indignant composers). Its follow-up, Sleep It Off, is herky-jerky new wave with Cristina adopting the persona of a soul-dead socialite. As I suggested elsewhere a few years ago, Paris Hilton really needs to just cover the whole thing.
It’s somehow appropriate that the ZE band that went on to the greatest commercial success was just about the weirdest act on the label (and not even from New York). The Detroit-based Was (Not Was) were a funk group at heart, but they refused to take anything seriously – other than, occasionally, politics. Their single “Tell Me That I’m Dreaming” was a New York club standard built around samples of Ronald Reagan‘s first State of the Union address; their albums, written and produced by childhood friends who renamed themselves Don Was and David Was, were half soul blowouts, half post-rock novelty songs. The song Was (Not Was) kept coming back to again and again, beginning with their 1981 debut album, was called “Out Come the Freaks” – their two eMusic-available albums collectively include ten versions of it. They were freaks themselves, aficionados of disco and punk rock and pure silliness. And even though they had nothing in common with the violent rush of no wave from a few years earlier, the initial waves of ZE’s discography had cleared a path for them. They knew the only way they had to sound was the thumping chaos in their heads.
