The Noise Piece (Director’s Cut)
An early ghost of this, needing work, arrived at The Wire in summer 2001. Edited at speed as The Wire moved offices, to hit an arguably meaningless deadline — the 20th anniversary of the publication of Lester Bangs’s ‘A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise’ (Village Voice, 1981) — a version, much curtailed, appeared in issue #211. Their needs and mine didn’t coincide; time pressure made successful combination impossible. What ran was super-condensed, and a bit joyless, slabby and point-missing: a hostile reader-letter ran in #213, saying it privileged "cruelly witty entertainment over serious investigation": but really it wasn’t even that good. This rewrite feeds changes suggested by the Wire edit into the original structure, but more importantly deals with hard questions fired at me since, by Don Allred, Sterling Clover, Alex Thomson but above all Frank Kogan. It’s gone long again. I guess anniversaries are a machinery for getting you to put the stupid pencil down...

The RISE and SPRAWL
of HORRIBLE NOISE

"No guarantee the stimulus will be perceived the same way"
"Save up all your old newsPA-PERS/Save and pile’em like a high skySCRAPER"
As he works on his leatherware in his charnel-house basement in Thomas Harris’s 1988 thrill-kill pulp best-seller The Silence of the Lambs, sensepoint to his world but no one else’s, the song that grisly girl-skinner Jame Gumb sings is Fats Waller’s ‘Cash for Your Trash’, from Ain’t Misbehavin’: "Save and pile’em …" Harris makes a point of noting the fact — the exact record-collector detail — but is far too wily a pop stylist to explain why it’s this song he picked for Gumb to squall, and not another. That’s our job...

When noise is sold you as the featured theme, the only thing you can reach and use to disturb — meaning to disturb yourself, of course — is what isn’t said… Before and during the Tunisian insurrection of 1952-56, against feudal leadership and French colonial presence, Alia, quiet heroine of Moufida Tlatli’s 1994 movie The Silences of the Palace, plays courtly lute in the palace, at the behest of the bland and vacuously cowardly Bey. A decade after the revolt, a citizen now, not a slave, she sings — beautifully — in a large mediocre supperclub, at the indifferent behest of businessmen on the pull and the tourist trade. The freedoms that the two strands of music, pre- and post- uprising, promise, are both utterly dependent on the respective constraints of the world before and after, radically changed as these constraints seem. Art-house director Tlatli is quite as reticent as Harris as to how this soundtrack is to be read. Why this song? Why this soundtrack? The cleverness of the explanation that you yourself supply —collector-dom as a disease in Harris? loveliness as a trap in Tlatli? the delusion of refined art or deep knowledge as psychic shelter? — is a percipience you then happily project away from yourself, dear listener: only the author-artist and I grasp this, we two against the stupid world...

Previously on ‘Music from the Death Factory’
“You probably can’t stand the stuff, but this stuff has its adherents (like me) and esthetic (if you want to call it that).”
—Lester Bangs, ‘A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise’, Village Voice, 30 September 1981
Published 20 and a bit years ago, Bangs’s ‘A Reasonable Guide’ made bid to pin down exactly what this then-new idea — music-as-noise, music so blaring-hostile-ugly that it’s more or less a public offence — might be: which people were committing themselves to making it, what he and others loved in it, and maybe even why. And to keep things real he delivered a handful of you-heard-these-before examples — from Xenakis to ‘Sister Ray’ to rap — with a semi-serious consumer guide to follow…

The precise this-stuff event that made him want to write the piece no longer matters to the world, perhaps. Certainly it’s not a detail of his life that clingy hagiographer Jim DeRogatis bothers boring us with. Here was an essay named for one of Bangs’s many lifework-summarising book projects (all unfinished because none started), but in Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, it still only fetches up as one among many many titles in the biog’s roomy appendix. Which is to say, if ‘A Reasonable Guide’ ever threw around ideas as an essay — if Bangs ever threw around ideas as a writer — then you’ll have to do the work to de-squirrel them yourselves, from the 40-odd exhaustive archiver-friendly pages Let It Blurt devotes to listing his complete published works. From 225 interview contributions (from friends, rivals, enemies, exes and passing pundits), DeRogatis boils out only endless glum details of lovelife, alco-binges, body odour. As a book about a writer, Let It Blurt sucks. Glibly dividing the rockwrite world into Chinstrokers and Noiseboys (not to say thinkers and thugs), it elects the latter — Bangs, Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches make three — as the only real rock critics by definition. Why? How? What do they say or do? That you should think to ask demonstrates little but the academic wankiness and redundancy of that pink sac you call your brain. Right?

Right. On 29 April 1982 his musician friend Nancy Stillman discovered Bangs dead in his apartment. On his record deck was the Human League’s Dare, LP hit of that winter, just bought, and actually still revolving, the needle crackling in the run-out groove. Just think — for a moment — of Bangs’s own ambivalent hate-shaped fascination with the synthetic in its myriad forms; just relish this bandname, this LP title, this rich (daft, hideous, unlikely) coincidence. Now go write your own Bangs bio.

Things Best Left Undead: oh no!! Foxy Glam Power! OH NO!!
Previously on DAPHNE & CELESTE UNLEASHED: the feisty duo play Reading Festival so they can meet and possibly fuck Eminem, but encounter the traditional Reading gesture of disapproval, when the audience throws cider-bottles full of piss — as well as meat, pasta and a gutted rabbit. Now read on...
D: “Actually they validated us. Running to the front of the stage and throwing all of their possessions at us was pretty much a way of saying ‘Hi, you’re making an impression.’”
Interviewer: “The crowd were a primitive tribe, making offerings to the gods.”
D: “Exactly…”
As it happens, there is a plausible candidate for the "this-stuff" event that inspired the essay. In June 1981, three months before ‘Guide’ appeared, a young Thurston Moore had curated the nine-day Noise Fest, at White Columns art centre, Spring Street, NYC. Little of this survives today, besides a rare-as-phlegm’s-teeth tape (Noise Fest, ZG Music 5) featuring a nascent Sonic Youth (Moore, Kim Gordon, Anne DeMarinis, Richard Smith), Rudolph Grey’s Blue Humans, and Borbetomagus, along with a scad of other No Wave and post No Wave groups that didn’t even make it into the 90s, let alone out. In the year 2000 — as NoiseRock attained its Elvis-Pistols age-range majority — S.Youth released Goodbye 20th Century, their wordless cover-band guide to what they chose to see (and poo to what you think) as the roots-flow from experimentalist noise-minimalist Fluxus-framed pre-rock — Cage, Cardew, Maciunas, Oliveros, Ono, Wolff et alia — into the never-yet-well-named-or-mapped territory they have moved through with such ease for two decades. A terrain which evolved, over time — as all repeated fuck-you gestures will and must — into a world with fars and nears, highs and lows, softs and hards, a right and a left, a true and false, a further up and a further in...

Reliable Maps of Boiling Hell #41
Stefan Jaworzyn’s Scum List is a second-hand mail-order catalogue. Its verminously funny opinions — about everything from King Crimson to Art and Language, Philip Glass to Collin Walcott, Z’ev to Caroliner Rear End Hernia Puppet Show — alchemise a mere inert saleslist into a personal chronicle, of whiplash ambition, puzzled hurt, feigned malice, buried hope, manipulative deadpan, seductive omission. Rebellious jukebox yeah: triggers don’t just dance, they argue (with Jaworzyn, with one another). Then they fight.

Garbage is a Rhythm Too
“In the meantime, any time the New York Dolls played within a 150-mile radius or something like that I would go see them… I don’t think I actually saw them until [the first LP] was out, but I was reading the Village Voice and they reported on them. The Dolls always got very mixed press — the Voice was giving them good press, and Creem, but everyone else was saying ‘This is utter garbage and trash and they’re only doing it for the money.’ A really weird thing to say.”
—Frank Kogan interviewed by Scott Woods, my itals,

In 1965, Gillo Pontecorvo’s faux documentary Battle of Algiers ends as women in veils plant bombs and the colonists lose a war against the colonised. As the camera spirals out, ululation spreads across the city, in threatening celebration of a longed-for birth. In 1972, Claude Faraldo’s anarchic post-’68 comedy Themroc ends somewhat more ambiguously, even sardonically: a highrise and a policeman are gutted, the proletariat joyfully reverts to caveman cannibalism. The camera spirals out over Paris, as gleeful human wolfhowls spread. The end of all oppression is the end of all civilised restraint, including — clearly — civilised language... In 1977, confusing the self-adoring cartoon cannibal howls of Themroc with the alert, yearning warrior-calls of Algiers, a soixante-huitard’s error if ever there was one, Jacques Attali published Bruits, translated in 1985 as Noise: the Political Economy of Music. By turns scholarly and idiotic, ingenious and fraudulent, Noise presents its political economy as "a succession of orders (in other words, difference) done violence by noises (in other words, the calling into question of differences) that are prophetic because they create new orders, unstable and changing". If an "order" is a regime, built on social distinctions, refusal of such distinctions manifests as noise, he claims: history has been a cycle, of resistance and absorption, control and subversion, in which music arrives to channelise manifestations of anti-social disturbance, as prophecy of a new restructured order, which the former dissidence, now in power itself, accepts. The violence of an anti-music is domesticated into a new shared code, out of which will emerge...

In 1995, Xena: Warrior Princess supplanted the fifth or seventh or 31st mutation of Star Trek as the cult TV hit in most playfully adaptive squabble with its best obsessive-projective scholar-squirrel fans. In particular Xena faced head-on that Trek phenom which its producers could never not quite acknowledge — and thus never quite blood-drain — but knew too they could not afford legally to harass: Slash Fiction. The word came from a 70s samizdat genre known as "K/S" (‘slash’ for short), as created with clandestine passion by American housewives, and exchanged, in secret, and brimful devotedly, at Trekkie conventions: the lovingly written, drawn and xeroxed porno fantasies concerning the hardcore feeling sexlife of Kirk (K) and Spock (S). Come the internet, come the realisation of a medium exactly perfect for such sad nerd madness — translation: such brilliant, thrilling, damaged half-loyal, half-disenchanted belief in art and power and want and hurt and beauty — and an instant massive upswell in slash activity. Every movie and TV series you can name is shamed by its own unofficial slash groundswell, which is to say, redeemed by it: from Starsky and Hutch to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from Inspector Morse to Power Puff Girls. By no means all of these feel free enough or smart enough to feed off the slash feedback loop, to mine or explore the net-porn fantasies of semi-connected fans: but those that do — because they’re flattered; because it gives them a genuine window into fan-soul reciprocation and hunger and resistance and nutball basement scholarship, via the unconventional invention the form requires to keep itself alive — have given the supposedly passive spectacle of television an unexpected S&M twist. Even in the 70s, Sword and Sorcery was already an avant-garde playpen for such abstruse post-Stonewall queer-porn parodist-theorists as Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany and Fritz Leiber: Xena features a 5’ 10" martial-arts feminist horsewoman, who saves ancient Mediterranean kingdoms and battles Olympian Gods, and is kept from the worst of her formerly evil Royal self by her adoringly bossy blonde bard of a sidekick Gabrielle. It came into being as an offshoot, at the behest of viewers, when Xena appeared — still evil — in Hercules: the Legendary Journeys: instantly spawning followers, it bartered Jo’s and Sam’s and Fritz’s libertarian crypto-cultism into campy leather-Lesbian myth-revisionist "mainstream" fantasy, tiresome and goofy until suddenly — because completely unpoliced, because no one except the fan cared, because it could be — smart and shockingly absurdly out-of-nowhere great. And Xena’s delirious signature mannerism? The thrilling, trilling birth-cry from Battle of Algiers, what else?

And the meaning of this echo? What’s glimpsed here, exactly? What’s foretold?

Mere Fun Never Enough: Contort Yourself
“If you start with illegitimacy as a big criterion for a song, like if it’s loud and noisy and hurts your father’s ear, then all you need is to think real hard about the illegitimacy of ballads to your ear and you got yourself some more nice illegitimacy, you take it where you find it, it’s all usable, anything and its opposite.”
—Richard Meltzer, ‘The Big Cheese’, Crawdaddy c.1969.
Now Attali’s book contains one idea that certainly travels: its title. Read as much or as little as you like into it, and you can make it the touchstone of the superiority of your taste, moral, political, even musical (maybe). The vaguer it stays, the freer you are, the better for everyone.

It travels because, however newly named, it’s one of the golden oldies in aesthetics — the phenomenon of the Sublime, that combo frisson of awe, fright, satisfaction and pleasure, which stopped being avant garde about a quarter of a millennium ago, round about the time Edmund Burke said, "A clear idea is another name for a little idea", while all around edgy folks swooned before the immensity or violence or dreadfulness of chasms, volcanoes, stormclouds and shadows; and Hugh Walpole — on a forests-and-mountains walking tour in the Alps — got to see his beloved pet poodle being gobbled up by a wolf.

All of which transfers surprisingly neatly into the world of sound: as a stance in which beauty abets the social, where clarity is complacency, and deep intuitive hard-to-fathom attraction to cataclysm, chaos, shock or bereavement reflects darkly inarticulate and self-buried doubts about the settlement as is. Consider now the borderline where music turns to noise, noise to music, says Attali: this is the line where the power that shapes the world can be glimpsed. Within, music is soothing sweetness and codified harmony, everything in its place, changeless and eternal: anything arriving in from outside the ordered stockade, from the rest of unmusical sound, is an obnoxious, unwanted intrusion, a disturbance, a hint of violence, or more. At the line itself, the point where the codes that determine music’s identity congeal, where the excluded seems suddenly fascinating, there we glimpse possibilities, of other ways to listen or to be. "Music makes mutations audible": music, considered in terms of the noise it is currently domesticating, is prophecy.

Now it is beyond easy to poke holes in Attali’s actual arguments — or to put it another way, it is quite extraordinarily hard to distil Noise down into coherent, fair précis: it is a shifting, miasmatic mess, a kind of writing-as-noise, and you are extremely likely to find yourself not explaining it so much as adapting and improving it, or else selecting from it to match your own pre-established requirements, to mock or to cheer. Is this borderline geographical or psychological, for example? If you’re on the outside and you listen to the civilised harmonies inside, do you hear them as noise? D’you hear outsider noise as harmony? If you hear something that sounds like noise to you, can that tell you which side of the border you actually are? And how the hell d’you even know where the borderline is?

Noise was written, or at least conceived, at a time when barricades were still up, recent battlelines only too obvious: the late 50s, 60s and early 70s were nothing if not a convulsive return of the Romantic Sublime, when techno-managerial bureaucratic rationalism — waging war in South East Asia, in Watts, in Prague — was challenged by the Shock of the Primitive, when peasants and children and jazzmen and rockstars and revolutionaries and madmen stood side by side, indivisible if not quite indistinguishable, and stopped the Mighty Capitalist Terror Machine in its tracks. Or something. If Attali’s borderlines are defined politically and economically, this is only what the book’s title would lead you to expect. Except of course if you can already draw this insider-outsider distinction, by appropriate recourse to a history of economics and/or politics, why d’you need to be listening out for "noise" at all? What is it telling you? Is Noise itself theory-as-noise to established political economy? Or does it just confirm what you already knew?

The answer is both: you choose, dear reader. As a systematic exploration of a theme, Noise is a junkpile of conflicting apothegms, many of them quite out of kilter with the main idea. As a dynamically crosswired intervention of cultural impressionism and radical intuition, it’s a tiresome, nervous rigidity of dated formalisms. To tie down how a selection of activities might have counted as noise historically, Attali sets out a three-stage map of music, as follows: first, the Order of Sacrifice, then the Order of Representation, then the Order of Repetition (there’s a fourth, Attali’s attempt at diagnosing the prophecy -noise of our own times, which he extremely confusingly — or perhaps archly — terms the Order of Composition: we’ll come back to this). As a historian, he delivers spasms of Gothic fantasy, as plausible to us — if also as attractive — as Xena: Warrior Princess. In STAGE ONE, the Ruling Order — of pharaohs, sultans, pitiless demonic aristocrat-predators — celebrate their monopoly of power (the right to kill, solely theirs) with drums and pre-valve trumpets announcing rituals of sacrifice. By STAGE TWO, such sacrifices manifest only in representation: it is the era of the rule of effete bourgeois respectability, where fat and flouncing burghers disguise their complicity in exploitation and injustice by a show of attraction to a music of harmonic-polyphonic elaboration, which mirrors this new ruling order’s power to organise and gather. The audience arrives to view itself viewing an orchestra, an opera, a composer/conductor star, a concert-hall spectacle, in a smug love-in of civilised self-approval and high-cult appreciation. Then in STAGE THREE… but already we have enough difficulties to deal with.

It isn’t that these generalisations are worse, especially, than any other sociological abstraction. The problem is that we are specifically being asked to listen carefully to noise, and then being hurried away from any actual listening we might attempt. We are supplied with several generalised hand-me-down definitions of noise-as-disruption, in which one drunken street-musician stands for all drunken street-musicians: actually defining or discovering or examining noise ourselves, in the concrete and the materially particular and the perverse, is hardly encouraged. Even keeping it canonic, are Beethoven and Schoenberg and Xenakis all elements in the noise that disrupts the Order of Representation? And if Beethoven was disrupting the Order of Sacrifice and the Divine Right of Kings, what kind of a prophet was he exactly (Eroica was written a century-and-a-half after King Charles I was executed by Cromwell’s revolutionaries)? Turns out that vanguard composers supply noise from inside the stockade anyway, courtesy music’s "autonomous logic" ("Each network pushes its organisation to the extreme, to the point where it creates the internal conditions for its own rupture"). Question: what’s clarified by describing every new unasked-for sandwich brought to the ongoing picnic as "rupture"?

A clear idea is another name for a little idea. Burke — the avatar of organic change, and no friend of revolution — insisted that the Sublime rests directly on the vicarious. This apparently sardonic crux, of fearful experience at a comfortable distance, would get tremendous paradoxical torque within Romantic and Gothic theory: as sensibility struggles to encompass realities beyond its immediate and limited ken, it generates a deep and conflicted fright-fun tremor, explodes the tidy systems of taste, appreciation and understanding, and — fighting to master apparent obscurity — unfolds itself into an understanding of the self in the world, the world in the self. Hence difficulty or darkness as the road to moral profundity, and mere chirpy diversion as a prison, even a crime.

Whereas Attali, buried in anecdotal quotation and a tangled battle of clichés, provides us with an early out, a sly reversal away from any longer, deeper, revelatory mindfight. Yes yes, civility is a fraud: provided we’re not actually Wynton Marsalis, we’ll always be somewhat drawn to this oldest of Gnostic stories, in which present order secretly covers for eternal bandit lawlessness. Now invoking history, now timeless psychology, Attali plays games which circle a central absence: the evasion of the exploration of any idea that what was radically thrilling about the social structure currently everywhere (including every part of his story which isn’t fabulous Xena-myth) was that it disrupted and supplanted capricious hereditary despotism with (the promise of) order and justice? How do you represent the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary phase without amping up its sexiness, a political incorrectness too far in the mid-70s? Adorno, by contrast, insisted we cannot understand Beethoven if we ignore this context... and saw somewhere in all music what he called the "promise of reconciliation". What if it’s this promise that makes harmony the aspect of music that most people most enjoy? Do we really have to kid ourselves we’re siding with Today’s Designated Revolutionaries by faking ways to distrust and reject harmony, when we actually don’t? The ululation in Battle of Algiers may well jangle the blood with a promise of chaotic mayhem, but what disrupted the colonial order was a compacted marriage of seemingly conflicted things: the threat of a better world to come — a beckoning non-violent space beyond mayhem — was combined with organised (and armed) resistance. To the resistance, the citywide calls were not noise, but code.

Isn’t the hook in Noise simply that organisation is a front for criminal malfeasance, and hey! so’s that classical shit your parents like, dude? Except when we look hard, it’s all clever little exceptions: if we extrapolate, what art music aren’t we able to cast as a once-daring historical-aesthetic noise-rebel breakthrough? Hasn’t a designated romper room been set aside for all reactionary bourgeois pleasure — that no one need feel left out, for example, for secretly still digging Schubert? Or Sinatra? Or Sting? Attali aims for a history of change and dispute and possibility: but paradoxically enough, by subtly pandering to the reader at the ground level of any musical specifics, he squelches the unstable, thrilling, transformational promo-slogan energy of his title.

Alalalalalala sheeeyah!
JazzActuel: A collection of Avant Garde/Free Jazz/Psychedelia from the BYG/Actual Catalogue of 1969-1971 (Charly Germany, 3CDs, selection by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley of Forced Exposure). Is Free Jazz best served, then, by being treated as a species of bent rock, pre-cog Iggy rather than post-whatever Armstrong? Isn’t it (in fact) saved by being thus served? Better Moore’s or Coley’s scholarship d’abîme than the deadly Ken Burns kind, so grown up it died and went to Julliard. In 1969, a Pan-African MusicFest in Algiers gathered everyone from Braxton to, um, Gong: the live recordings made there were the start of the BYG/Actual catalogue. Well, face it, the AfAm Cultural Nationalist dimension seems on a level today with Solidarity among Dark Metallers: we’re Viking Warlock Orcs from the Justified Nation of Niflheim. So the power has folded back to where it probably always actually was, mostly — the groove — and only Unapologetic Squirrel-Skinning Specialists know where to cut through to it, and set it briefly free.

Today’s Secret Metaphysic: Have a Bleedin’ Guess
“6. I have heard this record characterised as ‘anti-human’ and ‘anti-emotional.’ That it is, in a sense, since it is music made more by tape recorders, amps, speakers, microphones and ring modulators than any set of human hands and emotions. But so what? Almost all music today is anti-emotional and made by machines too… Besides which, any record which sends listeners fleeing the room screaming for surcease of aural flagellation or, alternately, getting physical and disturbing your medications to the point of breaking the damn thing, can hardly be accused, at least in results if not original creative man-hours, of lacking emotional content…”
—Lester Bangs on Metal Machine Music, ‘The Greatest Album Ever Made, Just in Case You Wondered’, Creem, March 1976
In the mission statement to Let It Blurt, DeRogatis says that there are the "two-thumbs-up consumer-guide careerists who treat rock’n’roll as mere entertainment and the academics who drain it of all the joy and fury", and then there’s Bangs and "a joyous or cathartic roar and a defiant fuck-you to the bland and bullshit culture at large." So far, so easy-target: Bangs was a Wild Thing; critics [x] and [y] are not.

Except don’t we also have to look at how the Noiseboys actually use noise as an idea? When R.Meltzer — renegade Yale philosophy student and sometime Fluxus acolyte, writing about Elvis in Crawdaddy in 1969 — argues that "the illegitimacy of ballads to your ear" provides you with "more nice illegitimacy": this "nice" being a "defiant fuck-you" to the culture-at-small. OK, if the prank is the negation of academic seriousness, then the negation of negation is the end of fun forever (until someone forgets). But seriously, exactly how anti-serious ARE Meltzer’s pranks?

Between 1965 and 1970, he was compiling The Aesthetics of Rock, his murky, cheeky, intermittently unreadable monument to Dylan and the Beatles, and the effect-here-now on America (on Meltzer-as-America-then-there) of the first Brit Invasion. "This is a sequel, not a formulation of prolegomena," the book begins, a rogue librarian’s gleeful human wolfhowl aimed at the Dead White EuroPhilosophers about to get all gobbled up — by the magic of the self-tripping legit-illegit flipflop, which if you enjoy kidding yourself you can claim didn’t also help shape Bangs’s style. Left unsaid: its (nervous or pedantic or promiscuous or subtle) presence in all the rockwrite that’s mattered since…

In DeRogatis-world, the major drain-it "academic" is Greil Marcus, responsible (we’re told) for de-roaring Bangs when he edited the 1987 Bangs collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung — The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’n’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock’n’Roll. Here’s what DeRogatis is skirting, from Marcus’s intro to Psychotic Reactions: "‘I double back all over myself,’ [Bangs] said in an interview with [DeRogatis], who had asked him if his approach to rock’n’roll was based on the conviction that the music wasn’t art. ‘We can talk about the trash esthetic, all that... Of course it’s art.’" Which the academics-who-drain — for sake of argument, me — may know to call Heraclitan dialectics or some such, and which thug-thinkers, to protect their street-image, will call jokes. Either way, Meltzer’s and Bangs’s reversible slipknots are key and core to the material itself, its reason, its hunger, its soul. Not just that it sets them free, but how it sets them free... (In the index to the Aesthetics of Rock, Nietzsche comes just before 1910 Fruitgum Co., but Miguel de Unamuno comes right after Ultimate Spinach: rock leaves the tyranny of the alphabet untouched...)

Plainly the four pages of ‘A Reasonable Guide’ deliver better writing than Attali’s 150-odd — since when was that going to be a contest? But is it better thinking? If it’s not what he says but how he says it, well, this is not typical, classic Bangs (where he’d hurl himself into the heteroglossolalian vortex of his own mind, and we saw it working — doubling back all over itself, sometimes painfully — as he wrote). The second half really IS a consumer guide, for god’s sake: a tidy record-collector list of things he enjoys telling us he enjoys. And the first half is salted with music so obvious/famous (in Bangsland, his own fanzone) that it can pass unexamined: Cage, PiL, electric Miles. Except that there is thought-motion in the piece: a context is gently asserted, in which the obnoxious practice might be justified, politically, aesthetically, sociologically — then just as gently backed away from. Yes, rap fans do play boomboxes hyperloud to fuck up whitey; yes, St Mark’s Place eateries do play Teenage Jesus and the Jerks so SoHo bohos can feel at home. Horrible Noise: war with yr neighbours, chilling with yr friends — or vice versa, maybe.

Inadvertent Maps of Everything Ever #36
“Glam took vampire hunger as its counter-ideal to [Woodstock’s] affirmative Aquarian love-in, and reflected the Undead’s reproduction strategy — a recruitment drive thick with mutual hostility, manipulative envy, sentimental denial and endless role reversals — straight back into the fan-star relationship it was so pitilessly modelling.”
—Mark Sinker, ‘Here’s Looking At You Kid’, Sight and Sound, September 1998
Published in 1988, Anne Rice’s novel Queen of the Damned became a film in 2001, and vehicle for the beautiful young R&B diva Aaliyah, who died in a Caribbean planecrash before release. Following the surprise success of her debut novel in 1976, Interview with the Vampire, Rice’s Vampire Chronicles — which reach back centuries, sketching an origin and a lineage for the predator-icon, as well as a specific history triply motored by class warfare, need and nascent aesthetic sensibility — demand to be categorised a Political Economy of the Undead, mapping the effects and meaning of a myth-image as it’s unearthed, received and transformed, by the vast lonely anger of her primary readers. When locked away in a book form — the book is an ancient media technology, without effective real-time feedback — Rice’s idea of Goth, reserve army of the star-struck as social threat, remained more potential than presence. Re-emerging in punk and porn and TV and the net — as readers set aside the book that sired them, acting out in slash-enabled media, Goth at war with itself in the Digital Age — the Vampire Chronicles project bilked aristocrat rage onto the shy outcast, amplified and glamorised unappeasable hunger and loneliness, pent up today in worldwide loops and circuits, leading the unending Sadean perversity party from the fugitive catacombs up onto a stage that anyone could mount (even a dorky vampire who can’t sing: as a star in the movie, LeStat is a hopeless and talentless prick). Fan-readers turned moviemakers transform this novel (as loved by fan-reader Hollywood-haters) by allegorising the social fact of reading itself: does the encounter with the Undead Word leave you vampire or victim? Which melodramatises the meeting of beloved original with trashed cash-in, of established cult novel with soon-to-be cult movie, of star with audiences, as a war in plain sight, of victim-vampires with vampire-victims, and then compacts this conflict into the image of Aaliyah’s perfect reborn unGothic soulwarrior body.

A Certain Hefty Quota of Osmotic Tongue Pressure
Rock Gomorrah, a 1980 Lester Bangs/Michael Ochs book proposal, was to be a collection of "every verifiable incidence of pig-fucking in the 25-year history of rock’n’roll" (Let It Blurt, p244)

Negative Dialectic: the Thinking Man’s Techno-Goth
“As harmony grows ever more complicated today, musical art seeks out combinations more dissonant, stranger, and harsher for the ear. Thus, it comes ever closer to the noise-sound”
—Luigi Russolo (My excuse for going with such worn-coin quotage? I discovered it defiantly heading a webpage called GRINDCORE IS ART…).
So how can you not just feel affection for a micro-worldlet that likes one of its own genre sub-streams to be called ‘Sludge Death’? A subculture which generates three-word bandnames as — as what? as ironic? no, as exact — as Estuary of Calamity, Old Man’s Child, Long Voyage Back, Mythological Cold Towers, Gardens of Gehanna, Julie Laughs Nomore...? Popular winner: Thou Shalt Suffer — money back if you actually enjoy the show! Personal favourite (very dry, takes a moment for the attitude to switch in): Long Winter’s Stare. Then there’s Holy Book of Nothing, Forgotten’s Answers, Thorr’s Hammer (note all-important second ‘r’), Intestine, Depresy, Godgory, Nungrovel, Obsessive Libraries of Crazed Riot, and — and this is exactly what Edmund Burke was talking about — Anal Cunt.

Of course in 1991-92 or thereabouts — the Year that Broke Punk in America? — lauded moshpunk label Earache made Death Metal very cool indeed avant-wise, by conjoining Napalm Death with Messrs Zorn and Laswell: when juxtaposed with Carcass, Morbid Angel’s stupid worldview paraded around, intendedly or innocently or whatever, in cute-quote mouse-ears — and suddenly everyone in unDeath eyeshot was able to behave as if this super-chic avant-aggression hadn’t come up by way of the ultra-naff.

Like every kid blowing a raspberry is the Warning Trump of the Lords of Misrule? Sometimes noise is just the creak of an ancient well-loved secure structure settling a bit…

The Political Economy of Total Rubbish
“A noise is a signal that the sender does not want to transmit”
—Abraham Moles, Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique, p.79 < br> The flipflop trick Attali plays to get us down with his THIRD STAGE is his cleverest by some way. Repetition, he argues, emerged with the means to record. Now spectators no longer gather; instead, individuals stockpile. Music, controlled by sound engineers and statistical analysts, becomes a one-way, chart-bound monologue: the audience is silenced, before the amped and programmed chatter. Desire is controlled, channelled, neutralised. In his own words, from the prospectus: “Fetishised as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: deritualise a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialise its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalise its consumption, then see to it that it is stock-piled until it loses its meaning. Today music heralds — regardless of what the property mode of capital will be — the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore. But at the same time, it heralds the emergence of a formidable subversion, one leading to a radically new organisation never yet theorised, of which self-management is but a distant echo.” This way whatever you like to argue you hate (Coltrane, Zappa, the Clash) can be “repetition monologue” — monologue, so unlike a book, right —and what you enjoy and others hate (Level 42, Tool, Destiny’s Child) “foretells the social mutation to come”…

Not that Attali’s spry conman’s delivery stops here. The timing (1977/85) and framing were (by pure luck) masterful: written before Punk Broke in the UK (but arriving after it mended again) it simultaneously validated it (punk as noise-prophecy of social mutation to come) and validated itself (as written prophecy of noise mutation to come: punk). Better still was the anglophone re-contextualisation: it arrived in English tailed and topped with essays by clever feminist musicologist Susan McLary and ubiquitous fake-marxist media-slut Fred Jameson. Attali’s actual analysis of rock culture fails to anticipate any such development — introducing him after the fact, McLary bravely covers up for him, more than somewhat bending his position in the process. But then anyone who reads beyond the title itself has to do an awful lot of bending.

The Retold Dreams of Others
“If you start with legitimacy as a big contaminant for a song, like if it’s ‘meaning’ laden and pseudo-intellectual and impresses the teacher’s pets who write for the Village Voice, then all you need is to think real hard about the legitimacy of silly noise rants to your ear, and you’ve got yourself some more legitimacy, all is polluted and destroyed, anything and its opposite. Except that Meltzer’s never admitted to himself that he has anything to do with this legitimising process.”
—Frank Kogan, ‘Roger Williams in America’, Why Music Sucks #13, April 2001

OK, time at last to meet this essay’s secret comedy hero, one Abraham Moles, author of Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique, a 1958 Ford-funded socio-scientific study of art, once acclaimed, today forgotten (actually murkier than Meltzer, it’s a lot less cheeky). Yannis Xenakis — greatly drawn to the defiant fuck-you of hardcore mathematics — loved the book and liked the man. Guy Debord’s Situationists were so disgusted at what they considered an earnest-academician easy target that they staged a rehearsal of the 1968 events two years early, a sit-in/walk-out, at a Moles lecture at Nanterres in 1966. Viewing him as a poodle, denouncing him as a "pinhead cybernetician", they seized on a cybernetic category-polarity discussed in Théorie de l’information: ‘Originality vs Banality’. With typical niftiness — their spiteful genius for turning strong elements in a victim’s output against itself — they wolfed down just one word and spat it back at its author. They cut up his map of aesthetics, to strand Moles in a banlieu called banalité.

Jumpcut ahead ten years: as the Dolls exchange the slut-trash look for red leather commie noise — disturbing no one — the Ramones entirely détourne the word "pinhead". Suddenly Moles discovers himself a proud member of the community of the damned: gabba gabba one of us. Wasn’t he always? Central to his perception esthétique is this definition: "A noise is a signal that the sender does not want to transmit". A neat and possibly odd and intriguingly subversive trope: it takes the basic cybernetic claim — that a message requires signal and noise to be readable, that it contains signal and noise and nothing else, that part of the "noise" in a handwritten note, say, is the colourfield of the paper itself, against which the letters stand out — and injects the reader’s own will, in which noise, being as essential to readability as signal, can deliver messages within messages, intended, unintended, whatever. Another year, and Attali, self-appointed hero-successor to the Sits, makes needy bid to co-opt back into an either-or of harmony versus noise, as if a message of pure noise (or even pure signal) could even exist: "To make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill."

Hence the pivotal section in Noise, titled with startling and innovative daring The Banalization of the Message (as with a lot too much pro-Situ jargon, Moles’s socio-aesthetic technicality has gradually désouffléd with overuse back from insult into bad journalism). How d’you measure the signal-to-noise ratio of the banal? Don’t you have to compare how the message received compares with the message sent? Attali’s argument pays no attention to such requirements: "the presence of debased songs in our environment has increased. Popular music and rock have been recuperated, colonised, sanitized. If the jazz of the 1960s was the refuge of a violence without a political outlet, it was followed by an implacable ideological and technical recuperation: Jimmy [sic] Hendrix was replaced by Steve Hove [sic], Eric Clapton by Keith Emerson… The singers of the 1950s are back in fashion in the 1970s, and today’s children enjoy their parents’ records." Last sentence? Completely untrue — but so what anyway?

Exactly what unspoken, unwitting noise crackles out through Attali’s need to hype up the generation gap (a marketing device by any other name)? To inscribe high rock-crit orthodoxy into his radical thesis: Jimmy [sic] Hendrix rocked because he was "the refuge of a violence without a political outlet"? What, and ELP suck because they’re not? This isn’t history or prophecy, it’s just gutless hedging, into which anyone can read whatever they choose. Yeah yeah, the Sex Pistols burst in on and vomited over the uninviting hi-tech kitchen at Prog’s crapped-out party: of course Jameson and McLary make this their intro-outro context, in their ex post facto advertorial for Noise-you’ll-believe-the-academy-can-pogo. Books are no less commodities than records, but the allegedly pervasive effects of such commodification are often strangely overlooked when it comes to quasi-leftist writing, even when the same process is announced — idiotically — as emptying recording of meaning ("This is utter garbage and trash and they’re only doing it for the money"). How carefully staged-managed and blurred is this item of punkoid taste orthodoxy: ProgRock as the gumby decadence of 60s anti-formal improv expansion-exploration? The Return of the Unsaid: nothing Attali the bad critic pursues is allowed to implicate the bad writing of Attali the critic. Noiseboys versus Academics? The names change but the borderline between then stays stubbornly fixed...

Arbitrarily turn on bad throwaway TV, meanwhile, and you maybe one time happen on a far more exactingly accurate and suggestive picture of the gap between the wide-open 60s/70s and the constrained decades that succeeded them: Channel 4’s tossed-off and trivial Top Ten: Progressive Rock, announces itself a self-consciously silly late-night nostalgia cash-in chart-guide, to Bloated Rock Dinosaurs Slain by the Coming of Punk (Genesis, Tull, Floyd, the same old lame old list…) — except that the supercompressed collage of TV laziness reconverted the dead, in the name of the grabby and the goofy, back into oddity, ultrajagged energy, freebased noise: noise as symbolic aggression, noise as mockable foolishness, noise as bogus threat, noise as the threat of the bogus, noise as passive aggression, noise as contained aggression, noise as bizarro square-excluding shared fun, noise as forgotten boredom, noise as what-the-FUCK, noise as unmeant blip-and-you-miss-it so-what who-cares, noise as the crackle of vanished technologies, noise as the crackle of coming technologies, noise as who-knows-where-the-hell-we’re-taking-this?, noise as haha-Jameson-you-fraud-theorise THIS, utter garbage and trash and done only for the love of music and artistic respect and giving the audience everything they’ve paid for…

OK, so peg awake your eyelids while we yet again fete the Pistols, punk as noise-at-war-with-polite-society, noise as the re-establishment of difference, noise as constraining order for Prog’s self-indulgence. It’s our duty to suck up forever to these legendary radical dragon-slaying heroes, you know? Because they slew so much more than they knew: they divided pop off away from free. Inadvertently (or tellingly?) Hendrix offed himself, but what the hell shrivelled the rest of the 60s improv noise-vanguard back into mannered bonsai nubbin, if not the removal of its vast lumbering benign idiot-cousin bodyguard of pretentious gumby stupidity? A readable message has a fundamental condition of possibility, that figure be distinguishable from ground: if the ground be (genuinely) dispersed, whither the refuge of a violence w/o political whatnot? Without a Context of Abundance, a large enough space that you knew there was no point merely awaiting what you’d been told to expect — would it be smart? would it be dim? could you even tell? — the line between noise and signal is suddenly policed by all-too supportive and abuse-me cliquey approval, the avant-garde audience a self-consciously closed feedback world who reserve their hostility for culture they’re not even slightly open to or mobile in. Where "noise" is never "noise for us", where the violence of a separated world, the violence that polices the borders, is re-coded back into harmony: harmony now as hipster-speak for "noise which upsets lame squares".

The actual real word for "ugliness" that Excites My Ears is "beauty", of course. Except I daren’t say this, for fear of ultra-cool avant-hipsters telling me I’m the Culture Industry’s Bitch. So I invoke-invent-insist on some nice squares somewhere to find my beauty ugly, and shore up my shameful pleasures with new undisrupting safer rescue-meanings. What if declaring yourself unfooled, frantically stripping yourself of all possible idiocy, also murders all possible capacity to challenge anything much, yourself, your foes, your world? You see, some passersby don’t even get noticed in the noisewars: not punks, not hippies, not squares, not freaks, just harassed middle-aged working-class women on their way to clean up after someone’s stupid pogo party.... If NOISE is yr god, does this mean noise to "them", poor trapped prole boobies, or noise to YOU, self-walled up in your aesthetico-political Pigfuck Palace?

Unspoken antihistorical glitch: the quasi-industrial repetition of the word "repetition" in Attali allows us to forget to distinguish a shorter, more machinic ragtime from a shorter, more machinic punk from a shorter, more machinic techno. We don’t account for the (longer, less machinic) anomaly of the radical 60s in our master-map; we merely announce it, and rely on nostalgic kneejerk confusion to place it right. What if we did track this anomaly? What if we decided actually to map the borderline, and not just assume it to align with current edgy fashion? What if we went into the world of noise and actually listened: became noisepeople, with all the values and judgments and internal rivalries and prejudices, and gazed back out (or do I mean in?) to re-organise the nervelessly waiting world? Or listened with uncool Sits-target outsider and gabba-geek Moles, generalising his nice subversive Intention Principle: "A noise is a sound we do not want to hear"? Double this generalised legit-illegit version back over yourself, Bangs-Meltzerwise, and it reads, "A bunch of stuff blares out at you from speakers or screen, and something completely askew and exact and unexplained surprises you; you laugh or you dance or you _______" Why is this great? Because of the potential genius of the explanation you yourself supply, happily projected away from yourself: only the author-artist and we… With intention acknowledged as a two-way fight, noise is allowed to risk becoming signal, and signal noise; more exactly, listeners get to be heard as code-makers also, feral-sharp guardians of the quiet conditions of the possibility of their own unspoken understanding-intention...

"(in other words, the calling into question of differences)"
“Some of his pieces are electronics (e.g. the egregious Hibiki-hana-ma, 1970, which requires 800 loudspeakers for ideal performance), but most use human performers, thus restoring the personal involvement with sounds which his creative process tends to lack.”
—Kenneth McLeith on Xenakis, the Penguin Companion to Arts in the 20th Century, 1985

Impose a historical schematic on your subject, the overlooked, the despised, the feared, the dangerous: Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles are the better smarter mirror of Attali’s noise timelines.

STAGE ONE: Rulers of the Valley of the Nile, Akasha (= Aaliyah) and her brother-lover Enkil (= Elvis), spawn a race of vampires and unleash pitiless war on all flesh, hungry power without surcease, until even their own sired kind take fright, and contain them in the centre of the sun.

STAGE TWO: Organising violence in order to continue to exist, the economics of vampirism are established: by tasteful and modest restraint (quiet as the mask of the old loud) may the predator class teach one another to walk unseen and thus unchallenged among the prey. Akasha, potent, impatient, still trapped, absorbs-destroys Enkil.

“With No Language but a Cry”
In the post-war world, as Europe appeared to let go its colonies, its avant-garde — as foregathered round a yearly festival in Darmstadt — eyed a promising new territory: the machines that would soon be synthesising sound did so with the promise that, in the near future, they would be able to deliver any sound, and all sounds. Having set sail from tunes and time signatures years before, visionary composers now looked to land on this emergent continent, the territory of all the rest of sonic possibility, every noise not yet part of music. It was vast: could it be farmed? Mined? Tamed? (And what where do we look for the Sublime when the looming mass of the unknown-unknowable outside is recast as a page for the join-the-dots and colouring-in games of post-invasion taxonomy?)

Of all the post-war composers, only Xenakis had more than a faint understanding of the mathematics grounding the physics of acoustics — how notes relate to noise, the role of chance in communication, the statistical nature of mass events, the relationship between the atom and mass, the drop and the cloud — as well as how computers translate information into digits, every message made up of signal and noise. By contrast, with up-to-date but ill-digested communications theory pumped into Kontakte and his visionary 1957 essay ‘…as time passes…’, Stockhausen’s late 50s aesthetic is dense with avant-garde innovation and silly mathematical error: right at the limit of his muddled understanding, he made his best music. And Boulez never even finished his theoretical 1962 manifesto, Music Today, a bullshit masterpiece intended to undercut the rhetorical opposition of sciences he’d no interest in wrestling with, to free space for his own crystalline pre-quantum aesthetics. The old-fashioned strength of his music derives from its resistance to whatever shapes new science (such as stochastics) seemed to be pushing towards.

Welcome to bunkerworld, where the vanguard greats keep themselves unsullied, ears shut to the babble of outside progress/regress. No surprise that Xenakis, unable to work or think as if he was afraid of any science, hard or soft, old or new, was the first significant avant-gardist to be exiled from the Darmstadt ascendancy. And possibly rightly; he was mathematically competent, and so he accepted that there are limits to the rationally possible — perhaps such acceptance can never quite deliver; perhaps he knew too much about what could never be, and so stood off while the poorly informed blundered through, via fear and dodge and bluff and ignorance, into actually new music, noise-as-music, sound as a (yes, limited) symbol of unrestrained freedoms yet to come. Is this what brings him closest in sound and attitude to present-day avant-glitch noise tektronica, which pretends to play openly with the hidden protocols of the achievable — but a lot of the time stays obediently trammelled with them, within the unspoken hardwiring of the particular machine in use? If unconscious attraction to hard science existed in the Darmstadt set, it was as contrast, not avatar; science as an unintelligible blur-backdrop, for the new music to stand bold and enticingly wired and precise against: Composers Make Sense of Modern Knowledge. Reliable maps say "Here be Monsters!": and so you know to avoid them (though you also know this is what you are set on doing). Good maps allow you to travel as if you and the monster just swapped places. On the best, you will make it with Frankenstein…

Is There Anybody There?
Once I took someone to a Disobey filmshow at the Horse Hospital. During the Pan_sonic video she asked me a naughty question: “This is just an ordeal, isn’t it? It’s so ordinary. Do they call themselves Disobey because no one in this audience would ever dare tell how bored or fed up they were?” Actually we’re not still friends — but that’s another story.

#4 (for Joey and Dee Dee): Eat Kosher Salamis
“My most memorable childhood fantasy was to have a mansion with catacombs underneath containing, alphabetised in endless winding dimly-lit musty rows, every album ever released.”
—Lester Bangs, quoted by Greil Marcus, introduction to Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
“I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am.”
—Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting’, Illuminations, p59.

In 1988, ROIR printed a disclaimer on the insert sleeve to their cassette compilation The End of Music as We Know It (ROIR A1056), gathered together by a Maximum Rock’n’Roll columnist and a Pigfuck guitarist-producer: "The opinions expressed by Mykel Board and Steve Albini do not reflect in any way the opinions of ROIR, who have not listened to this cassette and have no intention of doing so." Last year, in the promo drive for Merzbox, the preposterous 50-CD retrospective of the complete noiseworks of Tokyo-born Masami Akita, Merzbow’s helmsman explained his life-project to Edwin Pouncey thus: "Initially I used to believe that Sun Ra had released more than 500 albums. So my goal was set at 500 releases. Later I learned it was not that many, around 120-something, or even 200. So now I aim for 1000." (Wire #198)

This Stuff Has Its Esthetic — If You Want to Call It That…
“I am the damned! I am the dead! I am the agony inside a dying head!”
—Michael Jackson, ‘Who Is It?’, Dangerous, Sony (1991)

Pigfuck (defn.): for a while in the late 80s, esp. if viewed from London, mid-America’s post-rock underground seemed like something out of H. P. Lovecraft. Look too closely at the cracks between the wallstones and you suddenly saw the portal you hadn’t wanted to: beyond it, figures lurked, some capering and cackling to their own dread music which you couldn’t hear. By the late 80s, the Pigfuck Nation emerged, truculent underground alt.stepchild of AmerIndie and Attali, a malicious anti-harmony post-everything prankster scene — Bangs its adopted ghost-lord of misrule — chronicled, occasionally also critiqued, in a dark mulch of proto-desktop zines: Options, Sound Choice, Factsheet Five, Maximum Rock’n’Roll, Forced Exposure, Chemical Imbalance, Why Music Sucks, collectively the unweaned, inbred descendents of Creem and a late-60s Detroit scene that had offhandedly nurtured the MC5 and the AACM, gleeful by-products of a self-exile that (from a distance) seemed impossibly attractive. But even as Pigfuck strove to put Bangs’s Wild Rumpus into horrible-noise effect, there was surely too often in its Attali-ism something pedantically unBangsian, something dutiful and enervating and ungenerous and scared — noise, yes, but not really very cathartic, and not really very defiant, a distrustful self-isolated milieu where strengths routinely had to be draped in clumsy disguising ugliness.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: NO PIGS WERE FUCKED DURING THE WRITING OF THIS ESSAY!!

And here in some of these zines — as of the late 80s — were the final available magazine pages open to the two surviving Noiseboys, Bangs’s one-time pals Meltzer and Tosches. Except they wrote increasingly by rote, ungratefully and unconvincingly. Imagine if they’d lucked into Slash Fiction instead, slipping the surly bonds of cool to touch the face of... what? But no, this had become their safe, designated space … And if the Forced Exposure/Chemical Imbalance noisescape was the soundtrack to their thinking, well, they sure didn’t seem to appreciate the fact much. Indeed Tosches quickly made his escape, to his bio Dino (which — sublime flipflop — proclaimed Hollywood-Vegas anti-rocker and ratpacker Dean Martin the truest nihilist of all), and then novels, which doubtless to a mindlessly militant Post-Everythinger constitutes mainland comfort and ease. Meanwhile, whenever a onetime Pigfuck Name (the Pixies circa ‘Debaser’, for the sake of argument) clambered through the surface towards wider energy, glamour, intelligence — transl.: potential sex with the mass-cult world — the PF Nation convulsed into envious resistance: as if to be astonishing to yourself was to sell out. The mass-shared pop-cult material to be used/abused — the material with power— was here set at such a distaste-filled kneejerk distance that there was just nothing to have fun with. (How many Rapeman gags are there?) From within Pigfuck, the attitude to pop culture as a whole wasn’t even love-hate anymore, so much as hate-indifference, and (soon enough) lazy ignorance. Lucky Bangs to die when he did. When Nirvana — in a matter of months — ‘Broke Punk in America’ (= made its continued mainstream presence undeniable), this pretty much wiped away the rationale of Pigfuck. The most common secret response was probably one of relief.

—on to part two—

© Mark Sinker 2001-02