why we don't hear the city in Siouxsie & the Banshees

Currently I'm revising and expanding an essay I posted here a year ago, about how Joy Division came to sound like Manchester, to present at the 2012 EMP Pop Conference next month. The artistic connection between Joy Division and their city of origin is clear and powerful for many listeners, but my argument is that the connection isn't necessarily immanent in the band's sonics or biography, nor was it the primary way to understand the band during their brief existence. "Hearing Manchester" in the music of Joy Division is really an aesthetic sensibility that developed well past the band's brief existence, through specific interventions by journalists, photographers, music industry empresarios, filmmakers, analysts, cultural institutions, city boosters, and place marketers.

I'm still working out some of the finer points, but the goal is to destabilize the conventional geographical focus on Joy Division and shed light on the ways that listeners find meaning in the 'placeness' of this influential band. To underscore how historically contingent this way of listening is, it's useful to apply it to another group from the same era that we don't usually associate with place at all: Siouxsie & the Banshees. Sure, go ahead and laugh—I'll admit this thought experiment is also an excuse to write about another postpunk group I equally adore—but also ask yourself why we don't snicker with skepticism when Joy Division is the focus of this aesthetic sensibility.

Placing the Banshees in pop-music history

STEVE SEVERIN: The start of '81 was a weird time in music because a lot of the old guard had fallen away or changed. The Pistols had finished and John Lydon had formed Public Image, The Clash were in America, and even post-punk acts like Joy Division had split. I remember Joy division's Closer coming out the same week as [the Banshees' third album] Kaleidoscope, just as their debut had come out the same week as Join Hands [the Banshees' second album]. It was as if they were always one album behind. People used to say that bands like Public Image, Joy Division, even The Cure were ripping us off, but I preferred to think they were having the same ideas as us but just a bit later. Maybe that's being a little generous, but I did feel they were kindred spirits to some extent (pg. 105).

For about five hot years between 1978 and 1983 Siouxsie & the Banshees were at the center of British pop music. During that time they gigged incessantly across Britain and Europe; they regularly topped readers' and critics' polls in the British music weeklies; and their videos and appearances on TV shows like Top of the Pops inspired a whole generation of youth, girls and boys alike, to reinvent themselves, their appearance and their purpose. Around 1983, as the Smiths presided over an austere indie tide in British pop music, the Banshees made small but steady inroads in the U.S. as a regular presence on MTV's 120 Minutes, culminating in their prominent billing on the first Lollapalooza tour in 1991.

You don't hear much about the Banshees anymore, it seems. It's possible that many alternative-music fans born after 1975 know nothing at all about them. Singer Siouxsie Sioux is invariably mentioned in British clip shows on women in rock, and she or bassist Steve Severin are often interviewed about their role in the beginning of British punk rock's explosion. However, the group has no serious critical biography (all the quotes in this essay come from Mark Paytress's 2003 Siouxsie & the Banshees: The Authorised Biography unless otherwise indicated) or substantial documentary (instead, there's no-budget material like this) befitting their massive influence in popular culture in Britain and elsewhere.

Nowadays their career is often reduced to a single achievement, "the original Goth band," as was the case in Simon Reynolds' otherwise excellent history, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. Possibly their post-punk bona fides are overlooked because the Banshees are more commonly associated with the moment of punk. As it's well known, Siouxsie and Severin were right there on Bill Grundy's "Today" show in 1976 when the Sex Pistols' volley of expletives made them overnight scandals, and the Banshees played their first gig in 1977, clad in punk-era swastikas with a young Sid Vicious on drums. But this chronology overlooks the Banshees' swift move away from punk's barre-chord traditionalism by the time their first recordings came out a whole year later: the pop burst of August 1978's "Hong Kong Garden" and the expressionist anthems of their debut album The Scream three months later. (Note the almost coincidental releases of the 'original' postpunk group Public Image Limited: the "Public Image" single came out in October 1978, and the debut album First Issue was released in December.)

With today's interest in "independent" rock, the Banshees may be further overlooked because they signed on to a major label, as did all of the first-wave NYC and British punk groups. Of course, so too did other postpunk icons like PiL, Gang of Four and Wire. Extremely wary of heeding record-label expectations, the Banshees were nonetheless inspired by the giddy cultural seige of 70s glitter rockers like Bowie, Bolan and Roxy Music.

SIOUXSIE SIOUX: Steven [Severin] was one of the first straight guys I'd met in a long time. He seemed like a fellow outsider. He wasn't macho, or scared by my directeness, and he didn't think my humour sick. Music was our strongest connection, especially Bowie, though I'd been more into things like Brass Construction and a lot of imported American dance music, because that was the stuff that was big in the clubs. Steve and Simon [Barker, another friend] liked a lot of that, too, but they were definitely responsible for broadening my tastes. I'd never heard Velvet Underground before—probably because I never read the music press, which seemed to be a boy thing—so he and Simon played some for me. When I heard Iggy Pop for the first time, I remember feeling outraged that an artist like that had been denied access to Top Of The Pops or the radio. "Shake Appeal" should have been a Top 10 hit! Later on, when we started making music, I thought it was stupid not [to] be on Top Of The Pops. I thought, "You're depriving people and not changing things" (pg. 29).

Maybe we forget the Banshees these days simply because it's difficult to name a quintessential Banshees album. I'd say The Scream is their most consistently excellent, but the Banshees aren't one of those groups whose oeuvre can be seen as elaborating the project established by a programmatic debut album, as it could be argued for greats like the Doors, the Ramones, or the Pretenders. (Of late, my favorite Banshees album has alternated between Juju and A Kiss In The Dreamhouse.) Yet there's something wrong about foisting the expectations of an "album band" upon the Banshees. Their breadth is maybe best captured on their singles—not just the typically great A-sides collected on 1981's Once Upon a Time (probably the best starting point for any newcomer), but also their wildly unpredictable B-sides (compiled on the 2004 box set Downside Up, a must for any Banshees fan).

Really, is there even a singular Banshees' sound? So many musicians cycled through the group, even in their early years, that there are few constants besides Sioux's voice (which developed from an untrained staccato yelp to yield quite sonorous tones when she so chose) and Severin's bass. Speaking of which, talk about a post-punk sound—by the very first recordings, Severin's throbbing basslines set the precedent for the signature front-and-center picking style Peter Hook developed with Joy Division around the same time. If most listeners today can't identify a Severin style as memorable as Hook's, it's probably because the bass never consistently dominated the tonal range in the Banshees as much as it did in the more minimalist mix of Joy Division. (In any case, Severin and Hook remain essential touchstones to any "goth" style of bass-guitar playing.) Indeed, in their first ten years of recordings, the Banshees were very much a maximalist guitar-based band. They made "big music, dead loud on stage" as occasional member Robert Smith recalled, or (I always liked this one) "banshee metal" in the words of an NME review of 1984's live Nocturne coined it. But Banshee fans could expect a wide range of dynamics from the band's different guitarists (John McKay's minor-key chordings, John McGeoch's flanged jangles) and drummers (Kenny Morris' cymballess stomp, Budgie's polyrhythms).

In any case, if you want to talk about "post-punk" in either an objectively chronological sense (i.e., musicians whose careers took off after punk's "year zero") or as generic criteria (i.e., rock musicians who explored the artistic openings made by punk's rejection of rock convention), the Banshees are right up there in the canon. Their musical and sartorial developments between 1978-84 years were as rapid and exciting as any band of the time. The fact that Britain could follow them in the pop radio and TV as well as record store, music weekly or nightclub made their impact all the greater.

Placing the Banshees in British geography

If you consider yourself well versed in the Banshees, then try thinking of an archetypal urban setting for the Banshees—a city landscape, street scene, or geographical landmark associated with the Banshees as depicted in song, photos, film, press materials or other visual media. Okay, maybe you thought of the ancient Pompeii described in "Cities in Dust" or the Venice backdrop shown in the "Dear Prudence" video, but what about a British setting that inserts the Banshees in or around their place of origin, the way a dozen iconic images show Joy Division on a snowy Epping Walk, in the tube station, against the exposed brick of their rehearsal space, etc.? That's not so easy.

Thanks to traditional punk histories, everyone knows where the Banshees are from: they're from the South London suburbs, as part of the "Bromley Contingent" that gave the Pistols their first genuinely subcultural fan following. True, Sioux herself actually lived in Chislehurst three miles away, and the Bromley Contingent tag was coined by journalist Caroline Coon while observing the Pistols and entourage at a Paris date, but fair enough—they hailed from London's geographical and cultural margins, where sticking out came easily for fearless, dissatisfied youth. Just as importantly, from there it was easy to travel to the city center, the journey itself being quite a subcultural ritual.

SIOUX: I was there [at a sold-out 20 September 1975 Roxy Music show at Wembly Arena] on my own, which wasn't unusual for me. I was quite independent. I didn't have people to go to gigs with, so I'd often trek off on my own. I got dressed in a purple-and-green outfit, with a huge fishtail-like bustle, got the bus to the train station, sat on the platform, perched myself in the train carriage and then traipsed across London. The dress must have been used in some vaudeville costume drama, but it seemed quite normal to me. I used to enjoy people staring at me and then me turning my nose up at them.


SEVERIN: I had a blond quiff, a tartan jacket, black drainpipes and platform shoes with shite crepe soles and black patent leather uppers which had two stripes, Adidas-style. i think that's why Sioux said to me, "You look very sporty." Fashion was very important. It gave you a sense of belonging, of being outside of everything, and at the same time being with your own gang. I went with my friend Simon Barker.


SIMON BARKER (friend): I'd actually met Sioux some time before the Roxy concert. Even then, I couldn't believe how amazing she looked. Her hair was in a really extreme cut, with colours dyed into it. Some people might think "Sioux" was an invention, but she's always looked incredible. She was a star before she'd sung a note.'


SIOUX: That was on Bromley South platform. I was coming back form London on the train and I'd bumped into a couple of school friends, Gillian and Patricia. Simon was with them, and though we didn't swap numbers we did remember each other.


SIMON BARKER: People say suburbia is suffocating, but we thought what we were doing was great. It was everybody else that was a bit boring. And we were so close to London, 20 minutes on the train, so we went to all the major gigs. It wasn't a big deal. Bromely is a middle-class suburb, and, while we'd get a bit of abuse from people, I can't say we felt intimidated. We just did what we wanted to do. When you're living in Bromley, it's not that dificult to break out of it. It wasn't some council estate in Hull. We saw The New York Dolls in Biba: we wouldn't have been able to have done that had we not been living close to London (pp. 28-9).

Neighborhoods and metropolitan distance within the metropolitan London area are of course significant bases of identity and community for Londoners. As these quotes suggest, Sioux and Severin were particularly invested in rejecting the straightlaced mainstream traditions they associated with their suburban origins; at least for these two Banshees, the central London of punk's ground zero provided the symbol and locus for their subcultural transformations. (As Paul Du Noyer write in In the City: A Celebration of London Music, "personal reinvention... seems to be what suburban pop is all about.") However, the Bromley Contingent's well-known history unfolded before the Banshees played a single note, possibly before British punk even had a name. ("I didn't like being called the Bromley Contingent," Sioux told Jon Savage [in The England's Dreaming Tapes, pg. 341]. "It was the beginning of the labels, really. It was nicer when it confused people.")

If it's unfair to consign the Banshees' music to Sioux and Severin's pre-band place and time, fast forwarding to the band's rapid ascent finds them in central London, where they worked through a succession of early musicians: fellow Contingent-eers Marco Pirroni from the North London suburb Harrow and Sid Vicious (né John Ritchie) from Hackney, the mysterious Pete Fenton, and finally, cementing the original line-up, the art-school hangers-on Kenny Morris (from Essex) and John McKay. Eventually central London became the band's residential base.

SIOUX: We were all living in fairly dodgy flats, usually around the Maida Vale area because Nils [Stevenson, the band's manager] had a place there. I was living in a flat in Croxley Road, Queen's Park, in West London. I called it Crocodile Road. It was a furnished one-bedroom flat with an electric meter that you had to pump 50 pences into. It cost 30 quid a week or something. We were having hit singles and top-selling albums and we were still living in these shitty little flats, but we weren't complaining (pg. 119).

The Clash might have composed a "Garageland" from such a geographical profile, but not the Banshees. How then does London as geography and place surface in their career? To begin, there's the fact that the Banshees picked up members who hailed from across the metropolis, which might make intrametro commonalities difficult to establish within the group. Especially once non-Londoners like Budgie (from Liverpool) and John McGeoch (from Scotland but with previous stints in London and Manchester) joined the group, the broad geographical category 'London' probably sufficed for all intents and purposes to locate the band in the subcultural and mainstream imagination. Furthermore, the historic pull and circulation of non-Londoners to London—in the Banshees' case, the fact that they could draw members from such a broad pool of musical talent—is further indication the city's geographic centrality within the U.K.

To underscore this geographical context for the Banshees' rise, compare it with Joy Division's emergence in Manchester. Like the Banshees, they too had a metropolitan relationship to 'their city'. Macclesfield (where Ian Curtis and Steven Morris came from when they joined the band) and Salford (for Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner) are some 20 miles apart, but it was in dingy central Manchester where they came together, rehearsed, performed and found common cause. (The conventions of JD criticism now compel me to quote "Shadowplay":"To the centre of the city where all roads meet/Waiting for you...")

Unlike the Banshees, however, Joy Division had the benefit of maintaining a stable line-up (at least after Steven Morris, their second or third drummer, joined the band), and a geographically parochial one as well. The experience of spatial displacement appears to have influenced the band's musical project (in particular, Sumner has talked about the sense of trauma he felt from his family's forced relocation to urban renewal towerblocks), but their biographical horizons seem to have been circumscribed to the Manchester region. With no backgrounds of immigration, higher education, extensive travel or other geographically complicating factors in their lives, the identification of the band members with Manchester can proceed fairly easily, at least retrospectively. (Ever wonder what would have become of Joy Division's legacy if Ian Curtis had lived on to move to New York City or Berlin?)

We should also acknowledge how the salience of geography in Joy Division's career has been fostered by Mancunians' long tradition of city advocacy and rivalry, particularly vis-a-vis London. In the punk/post-punk era under examination here, this would have been expressed as a lot of DIY activity "making a virtue out of a necessity" (as Dave Haslam writes in Manchester, England: The Story of a Pop Cult City) due to the music industry/media's concentration in London. We can credit this Mancunian boosterism (a motivating principle for Factory Records/JD manager Tony Wilson) for much of our interest in 'hearing Manchester' in the music of Joy Division. If the same sensibility seems contrived where the Banshees are concerned, that says something about London's social and cultural dominance as the unmarked 'city in your head' of the British cultural imaginary.

The urban ethos of Siouxsie & the Banshees

To return to an earlier question, in contrast to the iconography of Joy Division, why are there no famous images of Sioux et al. shown in their "native" London streets and so on? There's the legendary graffitti "SIGN THE BANSHEES, DO IT NOW" scrawled by zealous fans outside London record company buildings (I couldn't find any images of it online), but significantly this urban intervention happened before the Banshees' first proper recordings. Once they got signed, the massive body of Banshees imagery—documentary and promotional, generated by the band, their label, the music press and fans—characteristically avoids or obscures urban context of any kind. See for yourself and browse the extensive Banshees photo archive compiled by Peter Routley, from which I've borrowed the few "urban" pictures in this post. Visual images and associations of the band are usually interior and/or set at mid-range to close-up so as to exclude bystanders or (when the band is shown outside) identifying backdrop from view. It's interesting to think about why there's so little 'real place' surrounding the Banshees' music and visuals.

One reason stems from the fact that the Banshees were generally uninterested in any kind of social realism. Typical auto-didacts for the punk era, the band members acknowledged reading then-contemporary authors like William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Anthony Burgess, but the themes and images in their lyrics, artwork, videos and fashion generally drew on sources from pre-modern literature (Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Lewis Carroll), ancient history (the petrified ruins of Pompeii), and foreign settings (Saudi Arabia, Japan). The most contemporary source of imagery in their work is probably 20th-century Germany from Christopher Isherwood's Weimar-era tales to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp (and let's not forget those swastikas the band wore in their earliest appearances). If there's a consistent theme in their lyrics (which were usually written by Sioux or Severin separately), it's the exploration of the psyche's darker side: anxieties, obsessions, childhood fears, cognitive disorders, seductive fantasy, and so on.

Given these aesthetic inclinations, contemporary urban themes or contexts seldom appear in the Banshees' work. There's seldom room in their lyrical psychodramas for more than one or two characters, and rarely does their music identify particular tribalisms, nationalities, and collective identities, or speak of social conditions in then-contemporary Britain. To illustrate, let's look at two atypical songs that could conceivably nullify this hypothesis. 

The first is their debut single, "Hong Kong Garden," which Sioux has said she "mentally dedicated to my local Chinese takeaway in Chislehurst High Street, which opened when I was 12 or so and at a time when there were loads of skinheads around. I was so sorry for the racist abuse that the people who worked there used to get" (pg. 67). However, the lyrics to "Hong Kong Garden" struggle to communicate any social commentary; setting, action and viewpoint are ambiguous, as the narrative is preoccupied with summoning a swirl of decontextualized Asian imagery, much like the song's hook uses an ersatz Asian melody. I love this song, but nevertheless it's understandable how these lyrics could be interpreted as racially insensitive. I tend to think of them as simply ineffective, the work of a band still trying to find its lyrical footing. 

The second song is "Monitor," a highlight off the Juju album and possibly their most urban song in subject matter. The lyrics concern the use of closed-circuit TV in an uncivil society, suggesting the song is an uncommon attempt at social criticism for the Banshees. However, the music and lyrics emphasize the perspective of cognitive interiority—in this case, a voyeur's telemediated gaze out into an unidentifiable environment. A classic piece of banshee metal, "Monitor" sets McGeoch and Severin riffing sixteenth notes and Budgie laying down a Bonham-esque downbeat, interrupted several times by an extended rhythmic caesura that feels like a parabolic moment of zero gravity before the guitar commences to hurtle the listener back to earth. Punctuated by some of Siouxsie's most unrestrained caterwauling, "Monitor" viscerally conveys the glee of the armchair voyeur safely removed from urban disorder by technology as the violence and cruelty 'out there' become the fodder for sadistic entertainment 'in here'. But while listeners might have little difficulty grasping the real-world relevance for the song, the lyrics dwell upon the subject's gaze upon the CCTV monitor, where stationary viewpoint and video-signal noise prevent the identification of particular people or places, making the monitor's feed more snuff film than urban documentary.

There's nothing aesthetically inferior or politically wrong with the Banshees' disinterest in explicitly referring to the social conditions and urban environments of their day. Far from it—the visual and thematic bricolage found on every Banshees album and every constume change by Siouxsie is potent in large part because the band drew inspiration far beyond the here-and-now of their era. Nor is there anything sociologically noteworthy about the thematic and perspectival tendencies of the group (or, since lyrics are most relevant here, the individual lyricists Sioux and Severin). But if we pull back from the group to focus on their cultural phenomenon—as mediated via recording, performance, video, press coverage, merchandise, clothing, and especially the productive consumption of fans and onlookers (a thousand Siouxsie clones, a million notebook scrawls and bedroom shrines, etc.)—then we see a much broader collective investment in/construction of the band's significance. It's here where we can glean further insights into the Banshees' urbanism—not in terms of their place of origins, but the social relations that constitute the urban via the occupation and representation of public space.

Here I need to bring gender to the forefront of the discussion, specifically in terms of the iconic figure that Siouxsie Sioux has cut in popular culture. Much has been said about her complex negotiation of femininity; a charismatic, visually striking frontwoman, Sioux has carefully controlled her appearance and performance so as to resist objectification by the male gaze. She's beautiful and glamorous but signals little about her sexuality (at least until those publicity shots of the Creatures, her side project with Budgie, were greeted by considerable controversy). On stage and off, Sioux seems to have been undeterred by male opprobrium and the threat of violence that traditionally enforce a submissive role for women in public space, if not exclude them from public view altogether. Her fearlessness is illustrated in an anecdote about a 1981 concert date in Minneapolis.

SIOUX: It was 11 in the morning, freezing cold and everyone else was asleep. I looked around the bus and thought, "You fucking tossers, I'm going for a walk." So I put on a Stetson and a poncho and went. I had this mission in my head to hit the bars and drink brandy. The town was desolate and windy but—God Bless America!—the bars were open. I remember walking through the business banking district in a foul mood looking for somewhere to drink, and I wandered miles, ending up in a much rougher neighbourhood. I was praying for some smartarse to make a comment about it not being Halloween yet so I could pick a fight. I went into this bar determined to get fuelled up and beat the shit out of someone. I sat in the corner scowling and giving off such a threatening vibe that everyone simply stayed away from me. You'd think that a girl on her own looking weird would be a prime target to gang up on or mug, but they weren't having any of it. I really wanted someone to pull a gun on me or something.


BUDGIE: When the rest of us woke up she was nowhere to be seen, so we split up and each headed across town in a different direction trying to find her. We thought she'd got lost somewhere because her sense of direction is hopeless at the best of times. We didn't imagine she'd gone off on a bender. No one could find her so we went to the venue to start soundchecking, by which time it had got dark. She'd been gone for hours. Eventually she turned up completely pissed. I remember her walking on stage and grabbing a microphone that wasn't there. That's when she realised she wasn't quite herself (pg. 116).

Yet despite her refusal of traditional norms of femininity—or, more accurately, because of it—Siouxsie & the Banshees must be seen as having a gendered significance in popular culture. In fact, they highlight the gendering that goes on in pop-music culture around male and female-identified performers alike. As feminist scholar Angela McRobbie argued in her critique of the Birmingham cultural studies ethnographic tradition carried out by male researchers like Paul Willis and Dick Hebdidge, young women are underrepresented in the studies of urban subcultures not because they're uninterested in the allures and functions of subcultural resistance, but because patriarchal norms confine their sociality and leisure to the spaces of home, school, and consumption. It's in this way that Siouxsie & the Banshees are a 'girl's band', since the perhaps quintessential moment of fan identification with Sioux happens in the interior spaces of leisure and domesticity that are the special prison of young women. The story that Shirley Manson relates in the foreward of the Banshees biography is an emblematic one, I suspect.

SHIRLEY MANSON: I was 14, at a girlfriend's house and she put on this single, 'Happy House'. I can remember thinking, 'What the fuck is this?' I'd not heard anything like it. And the B-side, 'Drop Dead-Celebration', encapsulated every single thing that I felt at that time as a totally inarticulate, podgy, pasty, unempowered child. I became addicted. I bought the record and played it obsessively.


At the time, I had no idea what she or the band looked like. The voice and the music were enough. But when I saw how she looked, I was hopelessly seduced. No woman I'd ever seen looked like that. She was one of the first to project a really powerful iimage of womanhood. There had been a lot of protest singers, but their music never resonated with me. I got into Patti Smith at around the same time, but Siouxsie Sioux was the one I connected with immediately. You never got the feeling that she was anybody's victim or anybody's whore. She was my girl, and has been ever since (pg. 8).

A comparison with Joy Division further illustrates the gendering that goes on in pop-culture reception. Their stereotypical fan cult has always been the gloomy lads in trenchcoats, maybe asexual yet definitely homosocial. As Mark Fisher (a.k.a. k-punk) wrote in 2005:

There was an odd universality available to Joy Division’s devotees (provided you were male of course). Look at those whom they left their mark upon, whom they still haunt: Savage, Morley (who has made an art out of not writing about them), Sinker, Eshun, Bohn, me. Gay, black, straight, white, postmodern, anti-postmodern: the point when you could count yourself one of Joy Division’s 'we'—'the sorrows we suffered and never were free'—is prelapsarian now, a time before the straitjackets Identity Politics had tailor-made for us had been cooked up.


Provided you were male of course… The Joy Division religion was, self-consciously, a boys' thing. The group wanted it that way and we, we colluded. Deborah Curtis: 'Whether it was intentional or not, the wives and girlfriends had gradually been banished from all but the most local of gigs and a curious male bonding had taken place. The boys seemed to derive their fun from each other.' ([Touching from a Distance, pg.] 77) No girls allowed…

Interestingly, while Fisher acknowledges his discomfort at being part of the JD boys club, elsewhere in the same essay he takes a different kind of gendered swipe at the Goth subculture that began with the Banshees.

Strange in many ways to see [Joy Division] canonized as Goth princes [in a special NME issue on Goth]. There was no question of course that theirs was a fiercely expressionist sound—a sound in fact that was much more genuinely Gothic than that of the Caligari-faced panto turns who have appropriated the name or who have delighted in having had it foisted upon them... Yet the austerity of Joy Division’s image—their staged refusal of Image—set them at odds with the post-Bowie mummery of the Banshees, the Cure, Bauhaus and their diminishing returns photocopy-of-photocopies offspring. They were Gothic, but not Goths, surely.

Why Fisher doesn't regard Joy Division's "staged refusal of Image" (emphasis added) as another variety of the contrived self-display he criticizes Goths for, who can say. But his caveat notwithstanding, Fisher's remarks draw on a traditional criticism of fashion-mindedness and public artifice that have anxiously reasserted a number of social hierarchies—race (particularly in the U.S.), class (no doubt relevant to the U.K., I'd guess) and sexuality among them—as they intersect with dominant masculine norms of authority and propriety. The nexus of social relations revealed by Fisher's remarks here should be understood to constitute a kind of urbanism—a system of proper behavior and privileged groups in public space. It's an urban code that, not coincidentally, Sioux, Severin et al. have long refused to abide, much to the delight of their fans, Goth and others.

The role of urban(ism) advocates

Finally, if we're going to look at the various contributors to the cultural reception surrounding the Banshees and Joy Division, then a word about music journalists who have written about these groups is in order. Both groups have set critics' pens afire with florid praise at different times, but Joy Division seems to have attracted a special breed of journalistic advocate, most notably Paul Morley and Jon Savage, whose writings on into recent years have sustained interest and offered perspectives on the band. By contrast, the Banshees never had such dedicated journalistic advocates. This could be the result of their oft-remarked "elitism" and disdain of industry hobnobbing, although I suspect the Banshees may have granted far more interviews than Joy Division did in those post-punk years. It's certainly the case that Joy Division's management generally advised the band to clam up around interviewers, which only encouraged writers to fill in the blanks about the group's aesthetics and importance—probably by management's design.

There's an unexpected reversal of gender roles here: Siouxsie and the Banshees defined and controlled their image more effectively than Joy Division did. More relevant to my argument here, Joy Division's journalistic advocates may very well have emphasized the question of Manchester urbanism more than Ian Curtis et al. ever did. Bernard Sumner, it should be remembered, only went on record about the traumatic influence of his neighborhood's destruction long after Joy Division ended. In the interim, readers of the British music press had many years to digest Morley and Savage's repeated references to Manchester environments (which may have been further primed by Tony Wilson's interest in Situationism, an interest that Savage shared). By contrast, which journalists or other contributors have held the critical flag for the Banshees as consistently? And did any of them look beyond the group's manifest aesthetics, or beyond the subcultural contexts and gender politics that would surround them, to emphasize their urban orientation?

So here then, some 30 years after their postpunk heyday, I modestly offer an urban sensibility that apparently no one has given the Siouxsie & the Banshees over all this time! My analysis, which follows out of some basis frameworks from urban studies, illustrates how one might "hear the city" in music—by identifying the geographic context of a band's career, assessing the presence of urban perspectives and themes in their music, and elaborating the urban relations posited by their art and its popular reception. That said, objective truth about or critical insight into 'the music' hasn't really been the main concern in this essay, which has exemplified the same phenomenon that it sought to investigate: the social contexts and external interventions (by fans, media, management, urban boosters, academics, etc.) that promote a certain kind of aesthetic orientation toward the music—in this case, an urban sensibility. The study of this sensibility is, I think, an important undertaking for pop-culture research. But is this urban sensibility essential to an understanding and appreciation of a 'non-urban' group like the Banshees—or, for that matter, the evidently 'urban' music that Joy Division made during its brief existence?

between champagne & eviction: more new wave rent party

My last post introduced an imaginary sub-genre that I call new wave rent party and covered the basics of its aesthetic principles and historic urban context. Here, I continue that discussion with some more material from 1977-81 era. Well, maybe a couple of years further on as well—the sub-genre went on a few more years past its historic sell-by date.

New York

New Wave Vaudeville

I’m thinking a whole article could be written about the underappreciated signficance of those self-consciously arty, goofy, and amateurish performance spaces that flourished under the umbrella of new wave. Did these new wave theaters/cabarets/vaudevilles evolve into new form after the genre declined? Do we see them in today’s open-mic nights, poetry slams, theater marathons, something else?

In the last essay I cited Klaus Nomi and Ann Magnuson as examples of artists who broke out of the new wave vaudeville circuit. Behind that statement, I had in mind “The Nomi Song,” the 2004 documentary directed by Andrew Horn. This clip, which focuses on Nomi's debut at the 1978 "New Wave Vaudeville" in NYC's Irving Plaza, conveys the peculiar combination of urban cynicism and hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show guilelessness of the form better than anything I could write.

Needless to say, Klaus Nomi could fit comfortably under the category of new wave dance party. Although (so far as I can tell) his act involves only men, the performative play with gender is obviously there. So, too, is the urban oasis of culture and “the finer things” that a cohort of 20-somethings sought to create for themselves after the emancipation of punk and the disturbances of the urban crisis. If Klaus Nomi seems far more aesthetically sophisticated compared to, say, Martha & the Muffins, I think this reflects, first, the remarkable way in which his art emerged fully formed from the get-go (the whole point of the clip above). Second, the rent parties Klaus Nomi attendered were, shall we say, a hell of a lot more fabulous than your rent parties! Drawing a gay and multinational population with its foot in high fashion and high art (he was even pursued by David Bowie!), he underscores the general straightness, whiteness, American and suburban origins that characterized new wave rent party as a general rule.

Ze Records

This last point also holds true for the stable of musicians, entrepreneurs and bon vivants associated with Ze Records, the NYC-based label whose initial burst of activity between 1978-84 overlaps largely with the heyday of new wave rent party. It’s no accident that the Waitresses (whom I discussed in the last post) signed to Ze Records. True, any label that has August Darnell as a house producer has nothing amateurish about it, and any label that draws on the art worlds of Europe, Detroit, No Wave, and the Paradise Garage for its “mutant disco” vibe has broader horizons than the narrow generic domains of so many new wave rent party groups. But then, if an artist like Cristina doesn’t embody the romantic dream of champagne and urban decadence that drew more than one girl to find her future across the bridge-and-tunnel, then no one does.

The Feelies

These Hoboken legends operated in the aesthetic wake of Talking Heads, the Modern Lovers, and a variety of other familiar new wave sources to come up with something subtle and ineffable yet clearly original. They're often lauded for the 1980 debut album, Crazy Rhythms, but I think this originality is best captured in their subsequent recordings and their various side projects (the Trypes, Yung Wu, the Willies): an eyes-closed surrender to percussive, strummed-guitar rock that's often quite danceable.

Just for kicks, here's their appearance (credited to the Willies) in the high school reunion scene from Jonathan Demme's 1986 film, "Something Wild".

The Shirts

From Park Slope, Brooklyn, the Shirts had the good fortune of becoming regulars CBGBs back in 1975, when the club first made its unexpected splash on NYC and rock music at large. They played an early string of dates opening for Television, and they were counted among the "Top 40 New York Unrecorded Rock TALENT" that advertised CBGBs' first Summer Rock Festival. God knows how they managed that company, based on the chirpy pop-rock they recorded that survives on Youtube.

In Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (Faber and Faber, 2011), Will Hermes describes the Shirts as "an amiable bunch of rockers with catchy songs and a strong-voiced, Little Rascals-style frontwoman, Annie Golden" (pg. 140). Annie also pursued a career on stage, and she landed major roles in "Hair," the 1977 Broadway revival and subsequent 1979 film adaptation by Milos Forman. Her charisma takes the band far — maybe far enough to distract you from the band's trite gestures of "rocking" and "entertaining."

San Francisco

There must have been something in the water in San Francisco to make it an especially fertile city for new wave. San Francisco’s punk and new wave bands and clubs did their best not to live under the shadow of New York and Los Angeles; certainly they succeeded in overshadowing whatever comparable was going on in Chicago at the time. If the San Francisco scene never gained quite the prominence it deserved, we can still marvel over the great local bands that played punk (Crime, the Avengers, the Offs), hardcore (Dead Kennedys, Flipper), and whatever category one feels like assigning to pre-punk heroes like the Residents and Chrome.

The Nuns

In terms of new wave up through 1983, Romeo Void (discussed in my last post) and Translator were probably San Francisco’s best known groups. And then there’s the Nuns, whom I really don’t know what to do with because they split the difference between punk and new wave so closely. Probably best known today as Alejandro Escovedo’s first band, they came out of the first wave of San Francisco punk and had the good fortune of opening (along with the Avengers) for the Sex Pistols’ final gig at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in January 1978. By their 1980 debut album, they’ve become like a tough but tight rock band behind Jennifer Miro’s vampy vocals. Presumably the Nuns’ future success was predicted on the basis of their generic resemblance to Blondie, but the music they made on this album sounds closer to Pat Benatar, and their “punk” background appears largely in their shock-value titles like “Decadent Jew” and “Child Molester.”

Pearl Harbor & the Explosions

Now we’re getting back into the center of San Francisco’s new wave dance party — its goofy, antiquated center. My 3rd edition of The New Trouser Press Record Guide calls Pearl Harbor & the Explosions “danceably forgettable.” The music doesn’t hold up that well, but these clips from San Francisco’s public access show “Girl George and the Supperstars of the Future” reveal a couple of interesting facts about the band. First, they opened for Iggy Pop at the Fillmore Theater in 1980 alongside the Police (yes, the Police opened for Iggy Pop!). Second, they had some remarkable things going on in the sartorial and choreographic departments — see for yourself.

Los Microwaves

Whatever happened to Los Microwaves, one of the city’s earlier synth-based combos? (They morphed into the equally forgotten Baby Buddha, that’s what.) The influences of the Residents and Devo are rather apparent. This whole strain of new wave used to be lumped under one word: quirky.

Los Angeles

The Motels

I’m torn about whether the Motels are new wave rent party. Originally from Berkeley, Martha Davis had been kicking around an incarnation of the Motels since the early 70s, and her pluck got the band placed in credible new wave settings in L.A. (the Rodney Bingenheimer show, new wave nightclub Madame Wong’s, a rehearsal space at the Masque that they shared with the Go-Go’s) before they made the big-time. Their 1979 self-titled debut album is inconsistent and schizophrenic in a pleasing way; “No Control” (their first commercial success, albeit overseas) already points the way to their MOR future, but there’s also some stranger tracks with that resonate with the new wave theater/vaudeville/cabaret vibe. Yet the Motels were always professional in their career determination and technical ability, and Martha Davis didn’t so much challenge the conventions of what a woman could do in front of a band, so much as use new wave’s retro umbrella as artistic license to revive an iconic torch-singer style.

I say, enjoy the Motels’ big hits “Only the Lonely” and “Suddenly Last Summer” (both of which deserve their heavy rotation as 80s oldies), and as you watch this video, try to think back to an earlier period when new wave and punk were a convenient step on the way to bigger things.

Slow Children

Originally from Los Angeles , Slow Children also had the quirky thing going on in Pal Shazar’s vocal styles. Some KROQ airplay, a single released in England—it seems like it never quite came together for Slow Children, who juggled a hodge-podge of 80s aesthetics and relocated to London without much to show for it.

...and then the South

The Graphic

A North Carolina group fronted by Treva Spontaine, the Graphic illustrated the “new south” that enthralled college radio for much of the 80s. The association with Don Dixon (who produced their album) and Mitch Easter (who played on a solo record by Treva) underscores the Graphic’s jangle-pop bona fides: we’re talking the same territory as the dB’s, R.E.M., and Let’s Active, just a little less distinguished. The sprinkling of 60s folk-rock and power-pop influences also brings to mind Katrina and the Waves.

How does this mild pop-rock qualify as new wave rent party? I think it’s not so much the music but the social precedent that Treva Spontaine set locally. She’s a far cry from the iconoclastic frontwomen exemplified by Kate and Cindy of the B-52s and Vanessa Briscoe of Pylon, but then the college towns of North Carolina don’t exactly have the same subcultural edge as Atlanta. For most of the south, Treva’s commitment to making rock music independently and outside the norms of Southern rock had to be pretty inspirational.

Ultimately, new wave rent party declined as an aesthetic moment alongside the broader new wave genre. The brief window for formal, sonic and (most relevant to this sub-genre) performative innovation became incorporated into "new rock of the 80s" and a more mannered, professional mode of performance suitable for MTV. And, as the cultural response of a largely middle class suburban cohort to the opportunities for personal freedom, nightlife pleasures, and self-expression found in North American cities of the late 70s/early 80s, new wave rent was submerged under the tides of the neoliberal urbanization. Wealth streamed back into the city in more pronounced and uneven ways, as epitomized by the new talk of "yuppies" and gentrification in the Reagan era.

The college graduate demographic that typified the new wave rent party generation was always implicated in this uneven urban development, but by the mid-80s, as these kids entered their 30s, it must have felt like time to shit or get off the pot for many of them. The music of new wave rent party, which was really about fun and dancing and the thrills of urban nightlife that young people (particularly women) might enjoy amidst the urban crisis, was no longer as innocent or credible as it once seemed. Hip hop exploded, the urban economy of art and creativity heated up, the downtown musical underground abandoned groove for noise—as the 80s progrssed, the lines between urban accomodation and urban revolt were drawn in increasingly bold strokes.

One hypothesis, maybe too tidy, about what happened to new wave rent party was that the music moved to the South. Or to college towns. Or, better yet, to college towns in the South, where the networks to the art/culture/entertainment economies of big cities weren't so well established as to incorporate the aimless, jaded pursuit of musical kicks. The mid- to late 1980s were the era in which Austin, Athens, and Chapel Hill were ascendant; the era gave us R.E.M., the new South, and the film "Slacker" (the latter in 1991, technically). In the South, where patriarchal values of honoring "daddy," family, and heritage still prevail, young middle-class kids, especially women, could experience the pleasures of personal autonomy and artistic self-expression as something new and genuine, much like it was for their counterparts in big North American cities 5-10 years before.

Postscript

In the five days between my last post and this one, news came that Laura Kennedy, bassist for the Bush Tetras (discussed in my last essay), passed away. The blog Dangerous Minds posted a touching obituary, including this quote from Kennedy, which nicely evokes the aspirations and worldview of new wave rent party:

Us New York City kids from the ‘80s, often transplanted from other cities, other countries, occasionally other planets (take a wild guess who I’m talking about) - we’ve kicked ass. We’ve taken names, too - and a good many of us have not only lived to tell, but are rockin’ the telling and rollin’ the living in a way that’s inspirational… We keep going, and going and going. I defy you to tell me that all of us weren’t defined by that moment in time that we shared. This has been apparent to me for a while, but more so now that we’re a decade into the oughts. We were blessed to come together in this life at a time that defined the End of a Century.

living the urban crisis at the new wave rent party

I recently downloaded the reissued Human Switchboard album, Who's Landing in my Hangar? Anthology 1977-1984, which set me off again obsessing about a subgenre of new wave that I've never really seen recognized.  I don't even know how best to name this subgenre, although I'm convinced it has a musical coherence.  I'll call it new wave rent party to evoke an emblematic scene for this music: 

1979, Manhattan, a 5th-floor walk-up on 2nd Avenue between 28th and 29th. Carla, 26, and Michelle, 25, college friends from Rutgers University, moved to The City three years ago to the horror of their parents, who are waiting for the phone call from the NYPD informing them that their daughters were raped and stabbed on their way from home.  Neither of the girls can exactly allay their parents' fears, but they felt they had to leave New Jersey because New York could give them three things: 

1. real jobs that will give them a chance to use their degrees 
2. a chance to fool around with guys who don't want to stay in New Jersey, inherit their fathers' accounting firms, and expect their wives to have kids
3. bars, clubs, movies, 24-hour restaurants, theater... the NIGHTLIFE! 

The girls' roommate, a SVA student from Japan named Sukiko, moved back to Japan on last-minute notice, leaving Carla and Michelle behind in rent.  It looks like this guy Marshall, a gay friend of Carla's (can't WAIT to tell the parents about that situation), can move in next month, but their shady Greek landlord (who's NEVER around to fix the hall light or replace the moldy shower unit) is threatening to evict them unless they can come up with the $250 rent.  It's not like there aren't other places to live, but Manhattan can be really HAIRY in a lot of places, and the girls have spent too much time learning the lay of the land in this neighborhood to leave.  

So they've decided to throw a rent party to make up this month's rent.  Carla knows this other girl from the gallery she works at who's in some kind of new wave band.  It's not exactly their kind of music—they've had fun dancing at Hurrah's before, but that New Wave Vaudeville at Irving Plaza was so dull!—but this girl Nina is really cool (does Carla have a CRUSH on her?), and she promises the band will draw at least 50 of their own friends and get people dancing.

Friday night comes, and the band arrives at the girls' loft apartment at 10:30.  Nina, another girl with a really short bob, and three guys (wearing button-down shirts that already show the sweat under their arms) bring in their gear: guitars, amps, keyboards, drums, sax, microphones, and a ton of cords.  What, they need grounded plugs?  Uh oh, hope these adapters don't blow up the place.  Then the band leaves (Carla looks a little crestfallen) while guests start showing up.  

Ugh, Michelle's brother Ricky from New Jersey is here!  But he and his friends roll in a couple of kegs; they can stay just as long as they don't go making fag jokes.  Then Aaron from the law firm where Michelle paralegals is making a mess at the kitchen, whipping up margaritas: "here, Michelle, try these!"  "Ugh, needs more mix!"  And suddenly the apartment's really crowded and REALLY LOUD, and Michelle needs to use the bathroom (better just sit still for a minute before the line outside gets too long), and then they're having a BLAST, exactly the reason why they left New Jersey for The City, let's just not think about the clean-up tomorrow, and is that Nina and her band now?  It is!  They're gonna play! 

Musically, new wave rent party is the style of new wave in its early, pre-synthpop years that reveals a line from 60s garage bands to the Velvets through the Modern Lovers on to many, mostly unsung groups circa 1977-81 who played danceable garage rock.  The foundation of musical influences in this subgenre isn't all that important; what's more distinctive is how new wave rent party reflects an interesting moment of change in the practice and aesthetics of the rock ensemble.  Quintessentially, new wave rent party is a mixed gender affair.  The greater visibility in new wave of female musicians, singers and composers signaled a gain of liberation and freedom in rock music overall, but for this subgenre it's in the internal dynamics within each band that the most significant ideas, values, and pleasures of performance emerge.

To illustrate, look at the B-52s, probably the greatest of the new wave rent party bands: two girls, three guys, a then-uncommon mix of thrift-store signifiers and camp aesthetics, and a genius for danceable rock music.  More than 30 years into their career, the joy these musicians have in playing together and dancing onstage is still contagious, but it's perhaps best captured in the final half of "Rock Lobster," which to my thinking is one of the great moments of pop music.  

[A few weeks ago, I was in line at Michael's arts and crafts store in Manhattan, waiting in line with my daughter to return some cupcake decorations, when I heard a BLOOD CURDLING scream over the store speakers.  "What," I thought to myself, "did no one else hear that?!  Oh... it's just the end of 'Rock Lobster'."]

In this song chock full of fantastic moments, the call-and-response vocals particularl rips open the staid conventions of rock music, as the singers commit themselves to an new extremes of offbeat vocals.  (Fred: "There goes the norwhal! Kate: Eeee-oooo-eeee-oooh! Fred: HERE COMES A BIKINI WHALE!! Cindy: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKK!)  In Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (University of Michegan Press, 2011), Theo Cateforis writes:

As Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis aptly described, [Fred] Schneider approached the band's lyrics quizzically, "as if he hoped that by singing them, he might be able to figure out their meaning."  DeCurtis reacts here to the doubleness in Schneider's singing; on the one hand we hear the dynamism of his surface affectations, but on the other hand it is difficult to read in his voice any direct emotional underpinning.  Like the camp of the drag queen, Schneider's singing comes across as deliberate role-playing.  But the quesiton remains, what exactly was he camping? (pg. 118)

Cateforis goes on to analyze Schneider's "camp play on male whiteness" persuasively, although by doing so he ignores the B-52s' secret weapons, vocalists Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson.  Nevertheless, irrespective of the group's semiotics, what comes across in the best B-52s' music is their discovery of a new performative syntax.  This discovery still sounds as much of a shock to the band members as it was to listeners the first time they heard the B-52s, which is why for me their music always brings to mind the interpersonal dynamics and back-and-forth within the group. 

I'm being generous in claiming that a small handful of groups from the new wave rent party sub-genre were nearly as great or important as the B-52s.  Most of them almost certainly weren't, and listening to their music today, you can see the reasons why many of them have been forgotten.   Still, reviewing the other groups sheds light on other dimensions of this sub-genre and provide further historical context to this transitional moment.  So, in declining order of their greatness (in my humble opinion)... 

Martha & the Muffins 
Rush may be the greatest Canadian rock group, but Martha & the Muffins are definitely my favorite.  Based in Toronto, this new wave unit led by singer Martha Johnson and guitarist Mark Gane evolved over its first five or six albums in remarkable tandem with Talking Heads' aesthetic arc, but their prime years in the new wave rent party corresponds early years leading up to their first two LPs, particularly their ageless debut album Metro Music (1979).  This record features a classic new wave rent party format: two women, keyboards, guitar, saxophone, bass and drums.  Saxophone is a particularly vintage new wave instrument; after the so-called second British invasion made synthesizers the sound of new wave, the sax almost immediately became an archaic instrument linked inextricably to the "retro" 50s/60s rock and R&B styles that originally inspired new wave just a few years before.  The same holds for cheap keyboards: Farfisa, Vox or, in the case of Martha & the Muffins, the Ace Tone that dominates their biggest hit "Echo Beach."

Furthermore, at this point in rock music (and perhaps on into the present day) saxophones and cheap keyboards weren't regarded as the basis for "new sounds" and studio exploration, two hallmarks of most new wave bands whose influence survived past the early 80s.  This might be a shortcoming of early new wave, but I think it once again calls to our attention the real-time performance setting of this music: bands playing before a audience, but also members' musical interactions as captured (or asynchronously refashioned) on recording.  All of this is to say, I don't listen to new wave rent party to take a headphone-assisted flight into fantastic landscapes of my mind.  I crank it up as loud as needed to recreate the presence of a band playing live.  And while Martha & the Muffins hit their stride as a studio band with their third and fourth albums (1981's This is the Ice Age and 1983's Danceparc, both highly recommended), it's on those first two albums where you can hear the band's internal rapport.  On tracks like "Revenge (Against The World)," I imagine the original six-piece band playing to each other in a circle (not lined up facing the fourth wall, as in concert or video) as the twin vocals of Martha Johnson and Martha Ladly (two Marthas! how cool is that?) carry out a private conversation within the band.  

Martha and the Muffins' Canadian origins also highlight how new wave rent party is almost entirely a North American sub-genre.  Certainly there were contemporaneous groups in Britain, Ireland and Europe playing new wave styles and sounds not all that different from the groups reviewed here, but they did so in a different context due to the undeniable impact of punk rock.  When the Sex Pistols have reached the top of the charts in your country a year or two earlier and changed the game of pop music entirely, the choice to play a kind of music that's just fun, danceable and poppy wouldn't be as innocent as it would in North America; more likely it would represent an artistic timidity ("nothing too extreme to keep us off the charts!") or an acknowledgement of conventional popstar ambitions.  In North America, by contrast, the dominance of corporate rock by Led Zeppelin, the Eagles et al. would give music that's "fun, danceable and poppy" a more transgressive charge.  And in an era before MTV, the vast geography between still fairly distinct musical regions meant bands undertook new wave music without the media echo chamber fostered by Britain's music-weekly saturated pop culture.   

The Waitresses 

The stretch of Ohio between Cleveland and Akron was an especially fertile crescent for vintage new wave, and out of it came the Waitresses.  Under the musical directorship of guitarist Chris Butler, the group started out in Akron more as a studio project with an evident taste for Beefheart and Pere Ubu (which was even more pronounced in another band that Butler played in, Tin Huey).  Butler relocated to New York City, reformed the Waitresses with NYC musicians (such ex-Television drummer Billy Ficca), and let original singer Patty Donahue assume all the vocal duties.  And of course it's Patty's voice that has become the Waitresses' signature; singing lyrics written by Butler, she developed a talking style of vocals that managed to convey both feminine sass and urban stress.  I can't say it better than Jim Green did in The New Trouser Press Record Guide (3rd edition, 1989):

Furthermore, Donahue's persona — she doesn't sing so much as carry a simultaneous conversation and tune — has been developed into the archetypal young, white, middle-class woman trying to sort out her identity while beset with standard societal conditioning on one hand and specious, voguish "alternatives" (the Sexual Revolution, the Me Generation) on the other.  The Waitresses' combination of musical aplomb and lyrical acuity makes the first LP [Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?] at once funny, sad and universally true (pg. 621).

As this passage suggests, new wave rent party is a very self-consciously middle-class music.  If this seems uncool or uncomfortable for those inclined to look for rebellion or (in the language of cultural studies) "resistance" in their pop music, I think the historical context reveals its signficance.  New wave rent party is the sound of young, college educated women and men moving to the city at a time when the urban crisis was raging with no apparent end in sight.  Maybe some of these kids moved "downtown," i.e., to the emblematic zones of punk rock (and, in New York City's case, no wave).  However, the statistics suggest many others settled into less destabilized urban neighborhoods where, frankly, you could still get mugged or worse if you were careless or unlucky.  Perhaps these kids hedged their bets geographically and musically, although if they really wanted to play it safe, it would be easier to stay, like most of their contemporaries did, in the suburbs where their parents (quite likely themselves of the generation born and raised in cities) lived.  

Thinking About Sex Again

For young women at this time, the urban context was perhaps most alarmingly represented in the 1977 film Looking for Mr. Goodbar.  To acknowledge the pleasure in "thinking about sex again" (to cite another title from the Waitresses' first album) might be a privilege of the "archetypal young, white, middle-class woman," but it was also an achievement with its own risks. 

Romeo Void 
Hence the gender revolt signified by Romeo Void, one of San Francisco's most successful new wave groups.  In the early 1980s, generations of virginal teenagers had their libidos tantalized on the dancefloor as they heard singer Debora Iyall's croon the chorus of "Never Say Never": I might like you better if we slept together.  Those who saw the band on MTV would likely have had their minds blown to boot, as they watched a charismatic, overweight woman of Native American descent command the stage like Pat Benatar never could.

Musically, Romeo Void were a mixed bag.  On the one hand, their taut rhythms, jagged guitar (for me, "Never Say Never" was a musical gateway drug to Gang of Four), and muscular saxophone were appealing enough.  On the other, the songs weren't really there as a rule, and the band's cheesy gestures of "rocking" and mugging for the camera were probably as hard to stomach then as they are thirty years later.

Romeo Void exemplifies how across the generic border of new wave rent party lies the traditional rock stardom that most musicians in this sub-genre uncritically aspired to. "Do it yourself" prodded Romeo Void and others of their ilk to get up on stage, no matter how unlikely a rockstar they might seem, but in general these groups didn't have the independent ethos that might commit them or their audiences to sustaining the urban nightclubs and regional independent labels from which these groups typically launched.  Of course, almost no one had this ethos in these days; their inconsistency was true for new wave in general, as well as much of early punk in New York City and Britain.  Maybe what new wave rent party added was a visibly gendered component, as illustrated by Romeo Void, in which a subversive female performance shared the stage with the macho posturing of "real" (i.e., male) rock musicians. 

Pylon 

Across the other generic border lies post-punk, which brings its own set of contradictions that new wave rent party negotiates.  While it takes obvious inspiration from postpunk's "rip it up and start again" aesthetic (to cite Simon Reynolds' canonical book on the subject, which in turn invokes the Orange Juice lyric), it stops short of the radical modernism that motivated Wire, PiL, the Raincoats, and other postpunk groups to create new musical forms.  On the whole, new wave rent party is formally conservative, operating out of fairly established generic traditions (i.e., that line from 60s garage bands to the Velvets through the Modern Lovers); its aesthetic innovations appear primarily in the domain of performance.

For this reason, the Athens GA group Pylon squeaks through into the subgenre.  Formally, they fall squarely within the postpunk genre, but it's Vanessa Briscoe's musical and performative reinvention of the "girl singer" for which they're probably most remembered, and which qualifies them for new wave rent party.  One might even go so far as to say Vanessa upholds an emerging Southern tradition of iconoclastic female frontwomen that Kate and Cindy of the B-52s established, and which Hope Nicholls of mid-80s college-radio band Fetchin Bones (from North Carolina) next embodied.  In any case, I do think it's significant that Pylon weren't from New York or Los Angeles.  The absence of major punk scenes in their environs seems to have inspired the group to forge an idiosyncratic performative grammar, something characteristic of new wave rent party's most important contributions to pop culture. 

The Bush Tetras 

For similar reasons, I think New York City's Bush Tetras also squeak into new wave rent party.  The group had an impeccable no wave pedigree, particularly via the Contortions.  So why doesn't new wave rent party overlap with no wave, considering how the latter yielded so many iconic mixed-gender groups?  For one reason, you generally couldn't dance to no wave; artists like James Chance might have toyed with (or, to be more accurate, took delight in torturing) dance music, but others like Lydia Lunch would just as likely want to eradicate dance music altogether.  Furthermore, no wave's continuity with New York's confrontational high art traditions made playing music too much of a serious undertaking.  In obvious yet significant ways, new wave rent party isn't all that serious; it's less about art and more about fun and pleasure.  Listening now 30 years after the fact, these distinctions might not be all that evident.  I suspect they would be much starker on the ground, since historically the two genres drew support from different neighborhoods, different nightclubs, different drugs, and different lifestyles.

The Bush Tetras, by contrast, were a dance band in the percussive, hypnotic postpunk styles of Gang of Four and Talking Heads.  Which in turn raises another question: why haven't I mentioned pioneering new wave groups like Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Patti Smith Group?  The reason is historical; new wave rent party represents the next generation of bands, the ones who took their cue from these CBGBs icons.  With the exception of the B-52s, none of them attained the commercial success of their NYC role models.  That's largely why this subgenre was soon eclipsed by synthpop and the second British invasion, but for a few years this commercial obscurity gave these groups a relatively autonomous space (not that many of them wanted it!) to do their own thing and explore the dynamics of the mixed-gender rock ensemble away from the media spotlight. 

The Fibonaccis 

A Los Angeles band who recorded between 1981-87, the Fibonaccis outlived the heyday of new wave rent party, evidently with diminishing returns until they broke up in obscurity.  By that time, Los Angeles seemed to have moved light years past the creative peak of vintage new wave, which unfortunately would almost always be associated in L.A. with the Knack.  Hardcore, roots rock, the paisley underground, death rock, and hair metal would have come and most likely gone by 1987, and the metal-funk hybrids of Janes Addiction, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone and Thelonious Monster would be in ascent.  Just as importantly, the promotional music video would have become an inescapable fact of the music industry by this time, a format that too many new wave rent party groups found themselves unprepared or unsuited for.  Artistically the Fibonaccis did okay on that front, making a great, crazy video in 1984 for their great, crazy cover of "Purple Haze," but one look at the results should make clear why MTV wouldn't want to touch it.

The Fibonacci's connection to new wave rent party comes from their obvious "artiness" as well as the influence they took from sources left in the alternative-music wilderness: Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, the chamber-music textures of Henry Cow.  There used to be a place in some cities where these traditions found a home: the new wave vaudeville, new wave cabaret, new wave theater, etc found in willing nightclubs and on late-night public access TV.  Klaus Nomi and Anne Magnuson got their start at the New Wave Vaudeville in Manhattan's Irving Plaza.  This video captures the Fibonacci's big moment on L.A.'s New Wave Theater. 

As I've argued before, higher education remains a key social element to the independent or underground rock music scenes thriving in many cities today.  Arguably, new wave rent party represents a beginning of that tradition, as college kids, art students, and autodidactic oddballs appropriated new wave music for their own ends.  It's a fascinating question how the value and uses of their education have changed over 30 years of musical development. Certainly, it's rare to find today such an overt display of art and culture learning of the kind found in the new wave theaters/vaudevilles/cabarets, which from the likes of these video documents look like they were excuses for drunken parties by art history grad students.

So whatever happened to this generation of new wave rent party musicians, once the bands eventually broke up?  Some became art professors.  One or two may have even become big-time record executives.  Today reunion concerts and album reissues have rekindled many of their careers; some of them may have kept musically active in the three decade interim.  And no doubt some went on to obscure lives of substance abuse and ignoble ends of the kinds that we might expect for rock musicians, but I suspect that's not the norm. 

New wave rent party represents the first cohort of the young urban professional, a.k.a. the yuppie, as that term first appeared in the early 1980s.  However, with few exceptions these girls and guys weren't the monied Wall Street or successful professionals originally designated by that term.  I suspect that currently many of them, maybe most, enjoy the familial and career situations that they find themselves in.  They're middle class, after all, and they're armed with a backstory and a cultural capital that would be the envy of many a 20-something today.  But the path to where they find themselves today hasn't been clear because, with few exceptions, they failed at their first significant vocation. 

To the extent that they still live in the city, we can recognize them as the so-called urban pioneers of urban gentrification.  It's easy to cluck about that in hindsight, but at least we shouldn't forget the uncertainty and risk of their urban existences back in the late 70s and early 80s.  This was hardly an era in which people moved to cities because homeownership was a safe bet; they were drawn by other opportunities for lifestyle, self-expression, and self-actualization.  To the extent that cities today have become safe playgrounds for hipsters, we could look further at the new wave rent party to how that unanticipated development came to be.

[For more on new wave rent party, see my next post.]