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

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. . . .