Not swinging with a vengeance: Robert Christgau on new wave disco and hard bop, 1978

I wouldn't buy this either - maybe punk rock revived rock-'n'-roll verities (what were Ramones / Sex Pistols but heavier, more aggressive Chuch Berry tunes?), not new wave.

It also depends what you consider new wave; the Dead Kennedys were called a New Wave band at some point. I assume Christgau had the wherewithal to differentiate punk / new wave in 1978?

Frankly, I think Christgau rambling mostly here, and not making a lot of sense.

What do you think new wave disco might sound like?

Didn't Gang of Four et al answer this one?

These two sentences is where it all falls apart. Once again, Christgau's knee-jerk white-liberal guilt a) makes him incapable of appreciating "white people music" on its own terms without pointing out that he'd really rather be listening to "black people music", and b) forces him into contorted postures of backhanded praise for things he takes for granted in said "black people music" (in this case extremism, honesty and self-knowledge. He's quoted in Rock and the Pop Narcotic doing this w/r/t metal, claiming he admires metal's obsessiveness and one other quality I can't remember right now, but hates its delusions of grandeur; Carducci's reply is that any music that has obsessiveness and [other quality Christgau backhandedly praised before lowering the boom of Deanly scorn] is under no delusions.

If Christgau was worried about New Wave's being too "cool" instead of "straightforwardly emotional and expressive," there were almost certainly black performers pulling the same trick - he could have done a straight compare 'n' contrast. Instead, he chooses the straw argument, naming no actual names and simply contrasting "New Wave" and "disco," as though each was monolithic.

And just to pick one more nit, the phrase "And like the English punks, who love reggae as much as their own music," is wrong on a bunch of levels, starting with the idea that all English punks love reggae (fixable by removing that comma between "punks" and "who") and extending on to the idea that reggae is not "their own music" if they grew up on the same block as the West Indians who were playing all those reggae albums out their windows and entrancing young English kids.

I don't think he's rambling at all, not here. He's making some really interesting points. What I'm wondering is how accurate his "swinging with a vengeance"/"not swinging"/"not swinging with a vengeance" trichotomy is for the genres he names (and if so, which then are the genres that swing without vengeance?), and whether his analogies (disco to r&b, new wave disco to hard bop and soul jazz) make sense. I don't know enough about hard bop or soul jazz to say either way.

He never says this, Phil. He says he doesn't *only* want to listen to music by white people, which sorry, seems valid to me. (He also says "I believe new wave's aggressive whiteness is a strength," which seems like taking white music on its own terms to me.) And saying that the music punks make is "their own music" doesn't strike me as that big a stretch either (though sure, many of them did incorporate reggae into their punk) (and right, a few of them probably didn't like reggae at all. Though I think it's fair to say that British-punks-as-a-whole felt a certain affinity for reggae; it wasn't just scattered exceptions, it was Joe Strummer and John Lydon and Billy Idol on down. Complaining about comma placement is picking nits.) (And where the hell do you get the idea he takes "extremism, honesty, self-knowledge" for granted in black music? Right, Bob underrates heavy metal; nice to know Carducci got something right in his book. But guess what? Bob also overrates Pavement, who are just as white.)

Good point Phil on the non-specificity. To further illustrate this, let's do some find and replace:

#1
The main reason I've never bought that stuff about James Chance & The Contortions reviving the rock-'n'-roll verities is that James Chance & The Contortions doesn't sound very much like (good ol') rock 'n' roll. It's too "forced," too "frantic." It's this--combined with its disquieting way of coming on both wild (hot) and detached (cool), rather than straightforwardly emotional and expressive, another effect it often shares with bebop--that limits its audience, and it's this that makes it so inspiring aesthetically. This isn't just (blues-based) white music--it's White Music, or maybe even WHITE MUSIC. Which brings us back, strangely enough, to James Chance & The Contortions hegemony.

I believe James Chance & The Contortions' aggressive whiteness is a strength; I like its extremism, its honesty, its self-knowledge. But like the English punks, who love reggae as much as their own music, I'd consider myself some kind of robot if that was where my desires ended. And though I've made a case for all the black subgenres already, let me close with a zinger. Maybe, just maybe, if James Chance & The Contortions is bebop, then disco is rhythm-and-blues.

#2
The main reason I've never bought that stuff about The Ramones reviving the rock-'n'-roll verities is that The Ramones doesn't sound very much like (good ol') rock 'n' roll. It's too "forced," too "frantic." It's this--combined with its disquieting way of coming on both wild (hot) and detached (cool), rather than straightforwardly emotional and expressive, another effect it often shares with bebop--that limits its audience, and it's this that makes it so inspiring aesthetically. This isn't just (blues-based) white music--it's White Music, or maybe even WHITE MUSIC. Which brings us back, strangely enough, to The Ramones hegemony.

I believe The Ramones' aggressive whiteness is a strength; I like its extremism, its honesty, its self-knowledge. But like the English punks, who love reggae as much as their own music, I'd consider myself some kind of robot if that was where my desires ended. And though I've made a case for all the black subgenres already, let me close with a zinger. Maybe, just maybe, if The Ramones is bebop, then disco is rhythm-and-blues.

Huh?

listeners turned off by bebop included many fans of Ellington and Armstrong who all agree swung w/a vengeance. in turn Coltrane and Coleman sounded too frantic and un-swinging to many bebop fans...

swinging VS swinging w/a vengeance is a neat distinction but purely subjective and impossible to quantify I'd say.

hard bop = new wave w/both experimental tendencies and crossover potential while soul jazz = 70s funk party pleasing jams. IMHO.

was this written at the end of 77 or 78? as others have said, the meaningof new wave kept mutating every few months at this point.

I'm not sure why James Chance would make more sense than the Ramones, there. Why *couldn't* somebody in the late '70s think of the Ramones as sounding forced, frantic, and white? They didn't swing, they played really fast, they had no blatant blues or r&b influence, they sang about their basements in Queens. (Then again, I don't see why he couldn't also be including *No New York*, which I believe he mentions elsewhere in the essay as *part* of his definition of new wave.)

As for the contention that new wavers didn't swing "with a vengeance", this seems to imply that new wavers were deliberately anti-swing. I'm not sure this is true either. I just thing for the most part they were more interested in speed and volume and swing became more of an afterthought. It's hard to swing at those tempos, especially if you have rudimentary instrumental skills. But there certainly seem to be plenty of Clash songs, for instance (or Talking Heads or Elvis Costello) where they tried for some kind of swing feel (whether they succeeded is another matter).

I think his attempt to cast new wave as white music is problematic. Attempts to connect certain sounds or musical modes to skin pigmentation are always troublesome, because there seem to be so many assumptions that are needed to knit all the inferences and analogies together.

All that means is that Christgau didn't "get it" at the time. And I don't mean that in the pejorative sense - the guy's not fucking Carnac the Magnificent after all.

The original poster's question was, was he right? History would say no if you can't hear the great sea that time has placed between James Chance and The Ramones.

>there certainly seem to be plenty of Clash songs, for instance (or Talking Heads or Elvis Costello) where they tried for some kind of swing feel (whether they succeeded is another matter).<

True, though many of those may have come after 1978. (On the other hand, I'd guess Costello's most swinging album, and also his most frantic come to think of it, was probably *This Year's Model,* which just happened to win the Pazz and Jop poll the year of this essay.

m coleman, o nate, etc...How accurate is this sentence? Or is it a gross oversimplification? I've always kind of wondered:

>In the '50s, r&b coalesced with bebop ideas in styles called "hard bop" and "soul jazz." <

I'm still trying to figure out what about Chance he didn't "get."

His descriptions are something I'd apply to things that really were wild, and still sound so today (e.g. James Chance, Mars).

accurate, though more accurate for soul jazz. to my ears hard bop is more of a self-contained style or subgenre. the "head" arrangements on vintage Blue Note albums are catchy and pop-accessible, and they're inspired by big band swing as often as honking sax R&B. and the hard bop repertoire draw heavily on 30s and 40s standards and rarely on the rhythm and blues charts. of course vocalists were rare to non-existent in both soul jazz and hard bop, but instrumental R&B was pretty big at the same time. so it's all connected or coalesced.

# Ramones [Sire, 1976] A
# Ramones Leave Home [Sire, 1977] A
# Rocket to Russia [Sire, 1977] A
# Road to Ruin [Sire, 1978] A

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/indc/what/what.html

"One of the two reasons for the resurgence of so-called white rock—and let's note here that the frontman of list-topping Bloc Party is not white—is the decline of electronica, rock's principal competitor on the British charts for the last 20 years. Another, I suspect, is that NME's readership has gotten younger and is thus less inclined toward eclecticism. And there's one more possibility: sheer fatigue at the range of new subgenres, cross-pollinations, and over-hyped trends that will expire in a year or two."

Of course, all of this can be chaulked up to the non-specificity of terms. What constitutes new wave? If he had thrown one band example in there, we could've debated the merits of his argument. Instead I plugged in a few random names and all of a sudden we're debating whether or not he liked The Ramones.

>younger and thus less inclined toward eclecticism<

huh?

I don't know about that.

Chuck, I am interested in others people's responses. I just thought Christgau could help flesh things out more.

I do NOT agree with the attached online column by Mark Jenkins, and e-mailed him so, but I thought it was provocative enough that you and others might find it of interest. Jenkins was defining "eclecticism" by suggesting that older listeners were more interested in Japanese space-rock, obscure '60s English folk, or Indian ragas than young NME readers who he says and the NME chartsuggests like the Bloc Party and Kaiser Chiefs. ???

I'm not sure why that would matter, anyway. It seems like the important distinction would be whether the Ramones had more in common with the Beach Boys than with, say, Yes or Led Zeppelin. Which they probably did, though that still doesn't necessarily mean they sounded like early rock'n'roll. Maybe they were just inspired by the stuff (as were Led Zeppelin --it's been along time since we did the stroll and since the book of love -- and maybe even Yes, obviously, but in different ways) (hey, the opening of "Going for the One" is totally rockabilly!) (and Linda Ronstadt, who is mentioned in the paragraphs above, probably covered as much early rock'n'roll as the Ramones did).

(The only sense in which I really understand "swing" though is basically a technical one where a pair of eighth notes is subdivided so the first is accented more heavily and held for longer than the second. Does it have another meaning, beyond just a general feel that's usually a result of this approach?)

3xpost

>I do NOT agree with the attached online column by Mark Jenkins<

Good to hear, because, damn, what a dimwit:

>Music with rhythm and melody, and lyrics that express the agonies, pleasures, and uncertainties of adolescence. That's rock, mostly.<

Well, yeah, if you include teen-pop, hip-hop, r&b, country, metal, etc, as "rock" (which neither Jenkins nor the NME charts seem to do.)

Compared to "Teddy Bear," no, it doesn't. But compared to "Blitzkreig Bop" (or most of Pink Flag) it sorta does. Xgau's right that, for the most part, the new wave bands stripped away even more of the lingering old-time rock and roll trappings and replaced swing (being just just behind/ahead of the rhythm) with "drive" or "intensity" or something.

Where I think he got it wrong is that while I appreciate the disco love, I'm not really sure disco "swings." But I think of anything with four-on-the-floor as not swinging by definition. How wrong am I?

There's a harmonic aspect to it...usually jazz musicians soloing in 8th note lines straighten out their eighth notes over what the rhythm section is playing (or else it would just sound riki-tiki), but it still swings because of what they're playing.

The rhythmic thing gets complicated too, because a lot of stuff I think of as swinging and having a really good feel is closer to straight 8ths than triplets (like a lot of New Orleans music or Tony Williams), but wouldn't sound right if it was for ex. programmed in straight 8ths. It also has a lot to do with different instruments playing with different feels against each other (i.e. you can still swing 8th notes over a straight feel and vice versa).

It matters if you think, as I do, that new wave did revive rock-'n'-roll verities. To argue otherwise seems wrong-headed. But as I noted in my last post, Christgau sees this as more shaded than the excerpt lets on.

After reading the full text of the article, I have to say it's a good write and a good read that ends on a bad note; an attempt to paint all of new wave (which was so disparate by 1978 it could no longer be housed under the punk moniker) with a broad brush (WHITENESS), combined with a reaching historical comparison (one that he readily admits is flawed). It'd be interesting to know if he still thinks his new wave / bebop analogy is valid.

Greil Marcus top Pazz & Jop pick for 1978: Bryan Ferry's The Bride Stripped Bare. I'm not sure why that strikes me as just plain odd.

And Edward, I really think "punk" could be said to have revived rock-'n'-roll verities, while the specific "new wave" bands Xgau specifically lists don't -- the Talking Heads and Wire definitely do not sound more "rock 'n' roll" than the Pistols or the Dictators or the Heartbreakers. Television, maybe, but Xgau might've considered them new wave too.

And xpost, yeah, Tim, you're right (Eddie Cochran is also how I should've put it)

Here's a recent excerpt from his review of a movie doc on Arthur Killer Kane of the New York Dolls

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0543,fxgau,69413,20.html
by Robert Christgau
October 26th, 2005

"Arthur couldn't breathe and play bass at the same time," someone says early on, whereupon someone else explains that this is literal—Kane would take a deep breath, play a barrage of notes, stop, take another breath, etc. Kane's technique did improve. But his limitations were a precondition of the punk forcebeat; he influenced Dee Dee Ramone, who had more chops, and Sid Vicious, who didn't."

xpost

This thread has officially yielded to critspeak jargonese.

And Edward, I really think "punk" could be said to have revived rock-'n'-roll verities, while the specific "new wave" bands Xgau specifically lists don't -- the Talking Heads and Wire definitely do not sound more "rock 'n' roll" than the Pistols or the Dictators or the Heartbreakers. Television, maybe, but Xgau might've considered them new wave too.

Alex, if you read my first post in this thread, that's exactly what I said - then Chuck weighed in that the terms new wave and punk were probably interchangeable in '78. Christgau does start his article with, "Given my pure mania for what must now be called new wave--punk, I will never forget you--the fifth or sixth annual Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll ought to feel like a triumph, and in some ways it does."

It's still unclear. Christgau seems to be talking about the herky-jerk of spazs like Devo or Pere Ubu or Talking Heads or No New York when he talks about "too forced, too frantic", but that doesn't follow on from "new wave reviving the rock-'n'-roll verities." Did people actually think Pere Ubu were reviving rock-'n'-roll?

Maybe he was reacting to the confusion about what was going down at the time and trying to make sense of it all. '76 - '78 certainly was a heady time for music. I'm more inclined to think he was trying to generalize what was a pretty varied scene to make his larger point; which seems to be, don't ignore other types of music because punk / new wave is such a compelling force.

Isn't there some Bangs piece where he talks about the relatively subtle differences between The Beatles "Helter Skelter" and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks?

But they were! I mean, they were adding all sorts of different elements into the pot, noisy synths and postmodern alienation and weirdo vocals and all that good stuff, but listen to "Final Solution" and "Summertime Blues" back to back and tell me you don't see a direct sylistic lineage/homage. Less so after they got all the Laughner stuff outta their systems and not at all by the Thompson era, but the singles through as late as New Picnic Time - that is unquestionably rock and roll! A LOT of early punk was definitely modernized rock and roll, with all the rhythmic character that term implies.

yeah, I thought the vengeance thing was pretty clear (and a good phrase, actually.) Not just intensity -- *pissed-off* intensity (which, right, may not've always applied to Blondie or Talking Heads! And Blondie definitely had plenty of swing in their music, from the start. And they had moments that sounded like old-time r'n'r, too.)

"Swing" doesn't just mean syncopation. Hard bop didn't just have more extreme syncopation (which it didn't, always), it was a more drastic stylistic shift away from the prevalent style than perhaps other genreic shifts had been, and a lot of its development was dependent on making more of these kinds of shifts. It wasn't just working a small variation on what most people were listening to, it tried in some way to describe an opposite--"with a vengence" doesn't just mean "in a hostile fashion," it's shorthand for this kind of change.

So to say that "new wave" bands swung with a vengence, that doesn't necessarily mean that they got mean. In the new wave context, the narrative of rock is a series of eruptions followed by a slow (d)evolution into the hated "arena-rock," which is like agression ex post facto, drained of energy, just kind of lurching around in a parody of its previously fiesty self. So in a way, swinging away from this would necessarily entail not being agressive, not being angry young things. And it's precisely those bands mentioned above, Blondie and the Talking Heads, plus Devo and a few other collaborators, that have stood the test of time to my ears, whereas their angrier colleagues, who unless I miss my guess are the ones xgau favored, have become cliches. But at the time, the cartoony part of the Ramones, say, was their cheeriness, their pep, the stuff that set them most drastically apart from teh bloat. I think xgau's complaining about this and setting up disco as a perhaps purer expression of this kind, a much more drastic swing, one that ditches the old verities entirely instead of trying to adapt them to a new, oppositional standpoint.

I think he puts it in a kind of odious way--I also like to talk about white music and black music because I think they're useful categories but I think there's simply no way not to sense a value judgment in his application of those labels--but it's a valid point.

Again, where do you get the idea that he's just talking about those sorts of bands?

And doesn't he say earlier (in that other passage you quoted) that what's being revived isn't so much the *sound* of early rock'n'roll as its "wit and temper"? Why would that not necessarily apply to Pere Ubu? (I mean, I'm not saying I agree with it; I'm not sure the wit and temper of early rock''n'roll ever went away; it's all through early '70s hard rock, which didn't especially sound like Elvis Presley, either. But I'm not shocked somebody might think otherwise.)

Actually, he loved Blondie and Talking Heads (and the Ramones and the Vibrators -- that's who his "pure mania" line comes from - and Television and, a year later, the B-52s), so I'm not sure why you think he prefered the angry ones. (Though yeah, "pissed-off" was a bit of a reduction on my part, I do admit that.) And Bob was never a particularly huge fan of hardcore (which hadn't happened yet).

Wow, you REALLY read between lines. Actually, he prefered the Ramones to most disco, and I'm pretty sure their cheeriness and pep is part of why he loved them. Again, what makes you think he's saying that?

An interesting question is whether it retained its strengths, the wit and temper of early r&r, even its "agressive whiteness," after it mutated.

Televsion could play, but their inversion of anger manifested as a sort of resigned, catatonic thing. It wasn't being cool--it was getting across a sense of feeling dead.

Aside from a time period and journalistic convenience, I didn't then and don't now see what these bands have in common.

http://robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=jive+bunny

so teenagers did the lindy hop -- a swing-era step named after Chas Lindbergh -- to rock & roll? at the local high school dance? on American Bandstand? I have no idea, I was an infant during the late 50s and Xgau was a teenager but this seems incredible.

again his defintion of "swing" is highly personal and relative -- hard to pin down like the way we use "rock" i.e. so&so "rocks".

Whereas disco and r&b before it "have contributed so much to the general vitality of popular music" - the vagueness here I think is kinda intentional - this is popular music and hence vague insofar as it's inclusionist and practical. Disco's swinging or not swinging will depend on what works at any given moment (and hence we get the odd fact noted in this thread that disco can be both the most and the least funky music, even though I think most people would assume that disco is easier to describe as a discrete set of sonics than something like new wave).

Furthermore "the relationship of both styles to their audiences is unmediated by detailed attention from the mass media or informed critical scrutiny." I think this expands upon this idea that there is no "...with a vengeance" in disco in the sense that there is for new wave. Which is not to say that disco can't be intense, but that intensity isn't set up as a kind of test.

The extract appears to call for some sort of connection not just between these specific styles, but more generally b/w unmediated street populism and the sort of artful deliberateness of new wave. This is a very broad prescription, and one immediately wonders what successful and interesting music of the following ten years would not partially satisfy such a demand. Candidates for such a connection immediately spring to mind: hip hop and house/techno for example both seem like different takes of the notion of "disco... with a vengeance".

Again, where do you get the idea that he's just talking about those sorts of bands?

Because when he says "new wave doesn't sound very much like (good ol') rock 'n' roll" I can't imagine that he's talking about Ramones, Heartbreakers, Dictators, etc. LAMF is the best album the Stones never made. The Ramones from day one were At The Hop, aping 50s teen caveman doo-wop culture. If you're singing "ooh-ooh-ooh" and "oh yeah" over handclaps, you sound very much like good ol' rock 'n' roll. Take a listen to The Ramones "Rockaway Beach" or The Heartbreakers' "It's Not Enough" - sounds like good ol' rock 'n' roll to me.

Even though he says only Rockpile sound like good ol' rock'n'roll to him? Odd. Why is it so hard to believe his ears are different from yours?

These songs contain signifiers of good ol' rock n' roll, but that's not the same as being good ol' rock n' roll. There's a reason these songs wouldn't get played on "Golden Oldies" stations. Those are the things that set new wave apart from older styles ("old wave"?) - and so those are the things that Xgau is singling out as being part of the definition of what new wave is.

1971:
The main reason I've never bought that stuff about The Rolling Stones reviving the blues verities is that The Rolling Stones don't sound very much like (good ol') blues. It's too "forced," too "frantic."
(the Stones' guitars were waaay louder than Muddy Waters')

1978:
The main reason I've never bought that stuff about The Ramones reviving the rock 'n' roll verities is that The Ramones don't sound very much like (good ol') rock 'n' roll. It's too "forced," too "frantic."

On some level, these statements are all true. Anytime musicians apply jumper cables to a corpse, it sounds more forced and frantic than the original. That's part of the deal. Yet all three of these examples still loved / honored / mimicked the "truths" of their original sources.

Is is time to debate what "rock 'n' roll verities" are yet?

And James Chance didn't?

So let's exculde Chance and substitute instead DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus, Red Transistor. Now we're talking forced / frantic with a definite disconnect from any verities, rock 'n' roll or otherwise. Even Devo covering "Satisfaction" was more involved with fucking the corpse than honoring the past.

Side note; part of why Christgau never liked hardcore may have to do with its jacking up of punk / new wave rhythms to blinding speed, losing any sort of connection to a "natural" (read: danceable) rhythm. After Minor Threat or Bad Brains, The Ramones sound like they're playing in slow motion.

What's interesting is how the herky-jerk merged with dance / funk and produced the likes of Gang of Four, Au Pairs, Bush Tetras, and Killing Joke. Which I think points up the difficulty of breaking things down into white rhythm / black rhythm. Even during the disco era, electro-dance music became both very white (Kraftwerk, Moroder, Depeche Mode) and very black (Afrika Baambata, Cameo, hiphop) and cross-pollinated all over the place, even grafting with hardcore to form the nadir of Atari Teenage Riot (who I once saw open for the Wu-Tang Clan). So where does this leave LCD Soundsystem (aside from Grammy nominated)?

I'd also like to throw in that The Ramones, Patti Smith, The Clash, Talking Heads, and Elvis Costello get played on classic rock stations. Granted, not as much as Neil Young, Rolling Stones, and The Beatles, but they get played without much notice by the freedom rock brethren. Matter of fact, I've known construction workers jamming on Crue and Bad Company to crank up the radio when "I Wanna Be Sedated" comes on. Now, if DNA or Mars came on (or even James Chance) the radio would probably go "out da freakin' windah," as we used to say in Jersey. The bands' acceptance is a long-term populist perspective, and one that Christgau didn't have in '78 because of the market's unwillingness to embrace punk at the time it was actually happening.

There were extremes like Suicide or the Screamers. But The Ramones' approach was more typical. I recall most everyone I knew in these very loosely, later-described 'scenes' as liking The Commodores and soul groups with that James Brown sort of discipline. And everyone loved disco--no matter how much they publicly bitched about lifestyle issues--for the same reasons--mainly, the robotic pulse that could be reapplied to other situations.

In general, I distrust any notions of 'authenticity' and think arguing for it seems kind of anti-rock. I loved The Ramones for their great songs and brilliant intuitive sense of theater.

I don't think nearly enough people compare [name rock act] with, say, Liza Minelli. Depeche Mode comes to mind.

Tim, interesting you should bring up Hell. I put together "The Evolution of 'Love Comes in Spurts'" for another thread, but it's germane here. A zip file with 4 versions of "Love Comes In Spurts":

http://s54.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=20VZ6UBWDIKOA24HRKA7V7NW15

1973 - Neon Boys (beta version of Television) - At this point the song has a Velvet Underground feel to it. I guess "the groove" was still cool, nothing frantic here.

1975 - The Heartbreakers - From a demo session when Hell was in the group. The song's punkier, it demonstrates the distance that had been traveled in just 2 years, and it's much more accomplished rhythmically than say, oh, anything off the first Ramones album.

1977 - The Voidoids - By the time Hell committed this to vinyl for posterity, he had updated it, ostensibly to keep up with these new wave whippersnappers with their herky-jerk rhythms. Same song but Quine / Julian's staccato guitar interplay ensures you'd sprain something while dancing to it.

1977 - Heartbreakers again - The song was so good Thunders kept playing it (as "One Track Mind") even after Hell left. This version from L.A.M.F. sounds practically traditional after The Voidoids' bravura disco roboto.

2 years is an eternity! i have no argument. just wanted to point that out.

What created a neat friction was the way people were simultaneously reacting against those verities in terms of style and, for lack of a less pretentious word, puilisophy, they were also very much in thrall to certain aspects of those verities.

My group, The Quick (now available on inTunes!) and Blondie and The Jam in particular were utterly obsessed with mod Brit pop. And of course The Ramones were all about the Brill Building aesthetic.

This may be too tangential, but as A&R guys were freaked by all this music, as tame as it seems now, the goal became to find ways to control it--which often meant bringing in producers, who brought in their click tracks and time code generators which already somewhat technically challenged drummers struggled to play in time to. (The idea of BPM as marketing tool was new.) Which added more stiffness to performances.

Which is why I say they had more in common with The Beach Boys than The Theoretical Girls. The Ramones were about reviving the verities of sub three minute pure pop bliss. Their style was aggressive but the form was very much classic rock 'n' roll, bubblegum pop even. It wasn't their franticness, or emotional vacuity, or whiteness, that isolated them from success in '78 - the market (not to mention the music industry) just plain wasn't ready, for reasons no clearer today than in 1978 when Christgau was (soul-)searching for answers.

The click track stuff is not tangential, it's a really interesting wrinkle. Perhaps why, for all their rep as fast players, the first Ramones album sounds positively plodding?

But yeah--click tracks = sheer hell (until you get used to learning how to play around them.)

revive.

Sorry if I'm repeating anything on here, but in the 70s Guide, he quoted John Piccarella's definition of "forcebeat," something like "...faster than your body thinks it should": a bit against the grain, and reasons for that might well include renewing the vows, "the rock 'n' roll verities," by renewing the thrilling encounter and re-adjustment, rather than just rocking along in a complacent way, incl complacent boredom or even/especially misery, with auto-responses, pos and neg, wearing down the same way. So, even if we just go back to Jazz Appreciation verities like "swing was more for dancing, bop was more for listening"--we still run into all these dicey terms (which were always mostly for the convenience of us retailers, 'preciate it!)And once you teach or provide the possible possibilty of a new/re-newed way to dance, or swing or thrill (incl electric Miles, and later Dancing In Your Head/Body Meta-era Ornette,at the same time as no wave and early post-punk)then that begins to be taken for granted too, even as its thrill falls into its own kind of k-hole, followed sometimes by the automatic response of collectors like me (thanked again by retailers like me)But mainly the previous idea goes with the more idealistic side of punk-new-no-wave-post-punk etc, and there's also harshness, rigor for its own sake, or for a gnostic, spirit vs. body ideal, or blasting your glare through a world of assholes, or for "I've suffered for my music--now it's your turn," as Neil Innes summed it up. Not that all of these can't be honed as ideals, against the grain

But anyway I think that's what xgau, coming from the rock 'n' roll/rhythm 'n' blues, retail-race code/cultural filteration of the 50s and early 60s, and then seeing both things used, along with blues, early electronic experiments, etc in the Woodstock-to-the-Garden-to-Vegas Age of Rock, yknow Classic Rock, and wanting the thrill renewed, but still feeling it as against the grain, had in mind (and young Reynolds in Blissed Out, when he asks us and himself to abstain from listening to good ol' r&b for a while, although he's more into roiling atmosphere and texture, even/especially when he gets to MBV and Daydream Nation-era SY, much less ECM albums of the waterbed-in-the-monastery persuasion--so either way still a head. But also it's his path to renewal)

In other words, he bought it after all, even if/as he resists it, that's at least part of the point of going against the grain, to get people to do that, to go through that (and I say that having read [and bought the retail hell out of] the aforementioned 70s Guide)

And you do have to have some amount of experience to see or feel it as renewal rather than something new, becoming more problematic getting into the very post-50/60s experience of growing up with your parents' rock collection ("Pattern recognition gets us all in the end," observed Jane Dark, before jumping from the deadline train of Real reviewing, I think)

even if we just go back to Jazz Appreciation verities like "swing was more for dancing, bop was more for listening"

To what extent to fans use those musics for the reverse reasons, I wonder? I assume people listened to swing way more than they danced to bop, but who knows? (Free jazz musicians like Ornette later incorporated funk rhythms, as Don alludes, but did people even ever dance to Dancing In My Head?)

only Rockpile sound like good ol' rock'n'roll to him

And even they didn't, all the time. (Well, I never heard them live. But the Dave Edmunds LPs sound more like good ol' rock'n'roll than Pure Pop For Now People does. Or at least than most of it does -- by '78, it was the only Nick Lowe solo album, and the Rockpile LP had yet to come out either. But I'd say Nick, at that point, was more using old-style rock'n'roll -- in the same sense the Ramones, or Springsteen, were using it - than "reviving" it.)

he likes punk's "extremism, its honesty, its self-knowledge," but wishes it were less elitist and more inclusive. He feels it needs to mutate to survive, and lobbies for a punk / disco merger. Which, given the "disco sucks" sentiments of the rock crowd in 1977, is hardly as inevitable as it seems now. But it did happen, spawning what we *now* think of as "new wave," and also House, and Madonna, and post-punk, and electroclash, and millions of other things, including, for all I know, Ashlee Simpson

Ha ha, I just noticed this, from Sang Freud -- in 2005, no less, three years before Ashlee made her Lene Lovich album. Anyway, what I'm wondering is what punk-disco hybrids Xgau may have already been not noticing in late '78. Obviously, "Heart of Glass." I'm guessing on their second album Talking Heads were already taking tentative steps to incorporate disco (or at least soul -- they covered Al Green on it, after all.) There must be some obvious other examples I'm not thinking about. (I wonder where Bob thought Kraftwerk fit into this.)

Speaking of Lene Lovich, she had already worked with Cerrone and Chi Chi Faveles by the point, but as far as I know she had no punk/new wave credibility yet.

(From Ornette Coleman - Dancing In Your Head: Classic or Dud?:

I just remembered I'd BEEN to a party where everyone was dancing to this record.

-- Kris (aqueduct), Thursday, 6 February 2003 18:16 (5 years ago) Link)

Anyway, what I'm wondering is what punk-disco hybrids Xgau may have already been not noticing in late '78.

Hmm, Ian Dury, maybe? B-52s? Sylvester had made a move from glam rock to disco. Dr. Buzzard perhaps was heading ZE-ward.

"Rock Lobster" 45 didn't come out until '79, even as a self-released 45, right? Which was the same year Dury put out "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick," "Reasons to Be Cheerful" and Do It Yourself, at least in the States (were any of them out by the end of '78 in the UK?); don't think there were any disco moves on New Boots and Panties.

Actually, it occurs to me that Roxy and Bowie (and maybe certain other glam acts?) had been sort of sonically doing a punk-disco fusion for a couple years by then, in a way, though not intentionally.

As for Darnell, even if you consider his Kid Creole stuff new wave (he did mention "Mr. James White" in one song), that didn't come til a couple years later. Not sure if any Dr. Buzzard stuff counts....

From the 9/4/78 CG:

But the most irresistible of the bunch is "Rock Lobster"/"B-52 Girls," by the B-52s boys and girls, offering these pearls of surrealistic-surfer wisdom: "Here comes the sting ray/There goes the Man Ray/Here comes the dogfish/Chased by the catfish." I'm proud to be an American. . . .

Wow. I hereby eat my words; here's what must have confused me:

Pazz & Jop 1979: Dean's List

Singles
The Brains: "Money Changes Everything" (Gray Matter)
Michael Jackson: "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" (Epic)
The Clash: "1-2 Crush on You" (CBS import)
James Brown: "It's Too Funky in Here" (Polydor 12-inch)
Sister Sledge: "We Are Family" (Cotillion 12-inch)
McFadden & Whitehead: "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" (Philadelphia International 12-inch)
Kleenex: "Ain't You" (Rough Trade import)
B-52's: "Rock Lobster"/"52 Girls" (B-52's)
The Records: "Starry Eyes" (Virgin)
Machine: "There But for the Grace of God Go I" (RCA Victor)

And wikipedia says "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" was first released as a 7" on 11-23-78, though there's no indication I can see that Christgau heard it then. It was number one in the UK in January '79.

My wife says we both need to get out more.