Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [56]
“I Am the Fly” sums things up quite nicely, I think: “I can spread more disease than the fleas which nibble away at your window display.” Hooray! Avis! Also, have you ever noticed how deeply all these new wavers are into dislocation of their bodily organs? I guess it all started back when Papa Lou had the unmitigated gall to crow, “But the funny part was what happened to her nose/It grew and grew till it reached all of her toes/Now when people say her feet smell they mean her nose.” That's poetry, buddy—let Allen Ginsberg shove his punkpomes up his own slothful rectum. Now we got severed limbs and fingers and a ganglial spew flyin’ all over the No New York album. Siouxsie and the Banshees as usual are getting in on the act (“Be a carcass—Be a dead pork/Be limblessly in love… In love with your stumps” etc. etc. etc. ad greenie-hock to the max), but it took Wire, Wire, and only Wire to bring it down to the gut level (well, actually a bit nor-east) in “Heartbeat”: Sound of sperm whale taking a slow piss, then thudthudthudthudthudthud, yes it's those li’l footpats, jus’ like “I Think We’re Alone Now.” As indeed we are, for: “I feel icy I feel cold I feel old. Is there something there behind me I’m sublime. I feel empty I feel dark I remark. I am mesmerized by my own beat like a heartbeat.”
Betcha never thought you’d live to see Beckett's How It Is souffled up into a rockin’ powwow jamboree! This cut, whose entire lyrics I quoted above, runs 3 mins 15 secs. And of course says it all. The nitty-gritty: a heartbeat. No suggestion of any of the romantic implications that organ's been saddled with so often. But Wire lay it on the line that aortic bivalves and nuthin else is exactly what's comin’ down the lyric-as-poetometaphorical-relevance chute. Well, there is the question of solipsism, but I think that word's a bit overworked lately, don’t you? Fact is, the earth's a solipsist by dint of the fact we don’t give much credence to anybody else being out there. So who cares if you, modurban consumer profile, wanna scuba down in your own little headphone dopepipe womb? A man's got a right to his privacy, which is why I don’t even mind that half of Wire's lyrics still don’t make any sense; communication was a misnomer in the first place anyway. The crucial difference is that whereas Pink Floyd wanted (pretended?) to take you to outer space (big deal, go watch Buck Rogers), Wire wanna isolate and dissect leucocytes. They’re into the micro rather than macrocosm. If Jerry Brown is our next president and doesn’t ask them to play at the inaugural ball I’m going to shoot him straight-on dat alpaca-furrowed brow. Rock critics need media attention too.
The Village Voice, April 23, 1979
Jello Biafra
Is No Cretin
It is no longer enough to be a hostile ugly yowling asshole. You’ll notice I left out “cretinous;” Jello Biafra is not a cretin. But seeing the Dead Kennedys at Irving Plaza Saturday night reminded me a lot of encountering Toronto's Viletones at CBGB in the summer of 1977. This guy Natzee Dog hung from the rafters, crawled all over the stage, and hurled himself on the first row till his body was one huge sore. Somebody asked me what I thought and I said, “Fine with me—in 1972 every band in the world was Grand Funk, now every band in the world is the Stooges.” I didn’t tell Natzee Dog that, though; I told him: “You guys were cooler with hockey haircuts.”
Now, however, it is no longer enough even to cut your body to shit: you have to have