Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [55]
So what's left? Nothing, and it's not heaven. “Everything seems to be up in the air at this time,” says David. The implicit answer in all these songs is that, given the hopelessness of the situation, we should also recognize how hysterically funny it is. In the Middle Ages the population of Europe felt so haunted and tainted by the Devil, so hopelessly damned, that they developed a predilection, as manifested in the paintings of Bosch, for taking all this damnation and redemption stuff as a kind of huge joke, with God, Satan, and the demons as cartoon characters. The closer you get to whatever you’re terrified of, the more it and your dread begin to seem like old friends, ergo terror decreases. David Byrne seems to be a sort of dowser's wand for neuroses and trauma, and as darkness looms over all of us, he strolls down its maw, placid, bemused, humming little tunes to himself. Sometimes I think Fear of Music is one of the best comedy albums I’ve ever heard. Which doesn’t mean the fear isn’t real. Byrne just reminds you that it's something you’re going to have to live with, so you might as well get a kick out of it while you can.
The Village Voice, August 20, 1979
A Bellyful
of Wire
Wire. Think about that word and what it has meant in your life, perhaps even the lives of your ancestors. Then think just how hot you’d be hoppin’ to get a chance to hear a group whose sound might live up to such euphonious appellation! Wire. The Sound of the ‘70s. Flat. Dead. Dull. Thud. Mud. Plod. Sod. But mebbe with a whiplash on the counterstroke.
Since this is The Village Voice, I will now insert my obligatory cross-cultural reference in record review (cf. past works of Messrs. Wolcott, Carson, Hull, etc.): Alfred Kazin said of Louis-Ferdinand Celine that, “He writes like a lunging live wire, crackling and wayward and full of hidden danger.” I don’t know that strictly speaking one could say that about the first Wire album, Pink Flag. In the first place, Celine was a fascist, or at least a voice of appeasement, and Wire's politics from their flag on down the pole are leftoid all the way like all good little British bands these days. (Which may be easy glory but at least beats the standard New York “Politics is boring, man.”) In the second place, the first Wire album was one of the deadest things ever recorded. It was so dead I bet if old Thomas Alva woulda heard it he mighta thought twice about twitchatangling the next century's ears up in all such hob-globular kfwaaaaaaat. It was so dead I was stunned to find myself putting it on my record player again and again, listening intently to those Ramonic thunderthuds 1:01 long and lyrics the likes of “Be good to your TV set.” But play it I did, and to this day I’m damned if I know why. Though I remember Joe Fernbacher once wrote a review in Creem of Angel's first album wherein he praised it by listing the various types of monotony extant and providing pointers as to which cuts on Angel's deeboo corresponded to which monovariant.
Chairs Missing, Wire's second album, available only on import, is, I am sorry to report, not monotonous. I still haven’t figured out why I’m sorry. (Louis Lomax to A. Warhol on national TV in 1966: “Do you represent the new generation of young people who are saying that everything is nothing?” Warhol: “Uh, no, we, I think, represent the ones who think nothing is something.”) They just don’t sound like a wire all the time this time. Sometimes they sound like several species of small furry animals grooving with