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The Most Important Music Scene You’ve Never Heard Of

The Most Important Music Scene You’ve Never Heard Of

Public Opinion
July 18, 2024

A Note from Jack

A typical episode of Track Star is edited down from fifteen minutes to about ninety seconds. A lot of the stuff we cut out is me standing next to someone stupidly as they listen to the song in silence. Trust me, the videos are a lot more interesting once they’re edited. Every once in a while, however, the conversation goes on for much longer than the standard fifteen minutes. In the case of Thurston Moore, we probably chatted for ninety minutes. The dude is full of stories. If you’re not familiar with him, Thurston was a founding member of the band Sonic Youth. He was ranked 34th in Rolling Stone’s 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of all time. He is a genuine downtown New York legend and music legend and it was quite hard to edit down our conversation into a short video.

We have a new contributor to the newsletter this week! Matthew has been writing about music for a long time and has bylines in Pitchfork, Vulture, and Billboard. He wrote about the No Wave scene below. Plus more of my conversation with Thurston.

New York City's Short-Lived No Wave Scene

By Matthew Ismael Ruiz

Abrasive, dissonant, and atonal, the No Wave scene in New York City was a reaction to the so-called “New Wave” emerging in pop in the late 1970s. Less a movement than an anti-music gesture that discarded the blues-based rock convention in favor of free jazz, funk, and disco, groups such as Theoretical Girls, James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and DNA embraced noise, repetition, and a lack of melody. It was small, but nonetheless featured a wide variety of different sounds and styles—very few bands sounded alike. No Wave barely lasted 3-4 years, but its reverberations are still being felt.

The scene coalesced in the bleak, crumbling streets of the Lower East Side, a place largely abandoned by the middle class. It attracted a loose coalition of filmmakers, artists, musicians, and poets, lured by cheap rent and a culture of rejection: of norms, commerce, careerism…any sort of rules or classification, really. Many originally pursued painting, sculpture, or performance art, but it was the music scene that was open to the most radical ideas, and these outsider artists, inspired and empowered by the DIY, anti-virtuoso ethos of punk—yet sounding nothing like the punk rock of the time—were making music with extremely sophisticated intention but an almost complete lack of technique.

This multidisciplinary approach to making art took major cues from the Velvet Underground, which infused the chic funhouse vibes of Andy Warhol’s Factory with the minimalist drone experiments of John Cale and LaMonte Young. But No Wave’s clearest progenitor was Suicide, the electronic duo of Martin Rev and Alan Vega that had long orbited punk and new wave groups but was always weirder, darker, and antagonistic to its audience.

The moment crystallized during an underground festival in the first week of May 1978 at the Artists Space in Manhattan, a nonprofit gallery in SoHo. Featuring ten bands over five nights, the aforementioned Theoretical Girls, the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and DNA were joined by Terminal, Communists, Daily Life, and two groups fronted by Rhys Chatham, the Gynecologists and Tone Death. Brian Eno—well-known for his work in Roxy Music but also an in-demand producer—was in the audience, and moved by the artists’ imaginative perspective, he quickly sought to document it with a compilation. They named the record No New York, and shortly after its release, the scene had been dubbed No Wave.

But as fast as it coalesced, No Wave imploded. Within a year of the release of No New York, many of the groups had ended. And while the artists themselves didn’t necessarily go anywhere, the moment had passed, and the community splintered into various musical and artistic directions. By the early 1980s, James Chance took his new project James White and the Blacks in a more dance-oriented style, expanded by contemporaries like Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Liquid Liquid, and the B-52's. Glenn Branca (Theoretical Girls) and Arto Lindsay (DNA) leaned into the abrasive noise, a scene which produced acts like Swans, Bush Tetras, and Sonic Youth, fronted by a young Thurston Moore, who had spent much of the late 70s obsessed and absorbed by the No Wave bands and their disdain for convention.

No Wave was an idea, a reaction, not necessarily a movement that evolved. The energy that led to the explosion and almost immediate implosion was an important, self-contained moment in art history, something Eno understood implicitly from the crowd at Artists Space. Moore would later sum up Eno’s perspective quite concisely: “He knew it was this really interesting finished piece that was happening,” he said. “Where do you take it? You don’t take it. It dies.”

A Conversation with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth

Thurston: It's the Velvet Underground. I mean, the Velvet Underground, to me, were like the perennial New York City band. It's interesting because I heard Robert Christgau, the rock critic, the perennial New York City rock critic, talk about the Velvet Underground and how they weren't really part of a scene. Like, it wasn't like there was a New York scene where there were all these bands that sounded like the Velvet Underground or hung out with the Velvet Underground the way you had the Talking Heads and Patti Smith and the Ramones and Television and Blondie, and that was “the scene.”

But with the Velvet Underground, even though they were a part of the Warhol community, it wasn’t like there were a bunch of bands that were a part of the “Velvet Underground scene.” They were really singular. They kind of existed in their own void, in a way. Which kind of makes them that much more interesting. I mean, they were really a thing unto itself. Of course, they would become the one band that would be reflected upon when punk rock started sort of “happening” as the most important band. But at the time, they probably sold 13 albums, so, they were very marginal.

Jack: They were marginal. But is their music good?

Thurston: Yes, it's good because it's experimental. And experimental is always good because it's always about progressing, advancing. It’s taking the vocabulary there is in the music and letting it go to other places. So, they would investigate all these other ideas that were happening in contemporary art music: drone music, Eastern mysticism in the lyrics. They were remarkable in that way, because it wasn't like they had any agenda to accommodate any kind of success in the marketplace. They just existed as a band, wanting to put across Lou Reed's poetry and this kind of new music idea that John Cale had with the viola. They were remarkable. Like, if they didn't exist, we probably wouldn't be talking right now.

Jack: And it's popular. Like, it's not popular, but it has a pop sound. It's appealing. They're pushing it forward, and yet they're making stuff that sounds like “pop-comfortable.”

Thurston: They love the Beach Boys, but they also love Stockhausen. It’s like Razzles. It’s both a candy and a gum. That's how I look at it and least.

Thurston: This might be a stumper… Oh, is it Bryan Ferry? Yeah.

Jack: Roxy Music.

Thurston: Bryan Ferry, Roxy Music. When I was a teenager that was the only band that, when I would play it in my crummy little bedroom stereo, my mother would come in and say, ‘You know, I'm totally okay with all this music you listen to, this weird music. But that guy’s singing is really freaking me out.’ It just kind of made her skin crawl.

Well, you know, he's an art school guy, and he has this crooner persona. They were always a band that you weren't quite sure which way they were going with this stuff. Like, were they for real or was it a concept? But, you felt like he was truly a romantic. And so that was apparent. But also he was maybe taking the piss, as I say.

I love Roxy Music. Roxy Music was super important for me, especially, the third album, Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure. And then, Stranded. Stranded was a huge record. And the next one—Country Life— amazing.