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

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