No Wave was a bunch of avant-garders in late 70’s-early 80’s NYC who decided that Punk Rock wasn’t obnoxious enough for them, so they made abrasive atonal music that no one cares about. Nobody even knows what it is. In 2023 most folk barely remember The White Stripes. You have to be a art-house historian, hipster music snob, or Lester Bangs to care that this Futility of Horrible Noise occurred at all.

Nevertheless, it remains an aesthetic extreme of some form, perhaps even a progenitor of this thing called “noise rock”, if you care about that sort of thing, which apparently some people do. Enough, at least, that way back in 2008, Pitchfork gave space to an excerpt from a book called No Wave by staffer Marc Masters.

But before we go any further, you should understand that this is the sort of thing I’m talking about…

Shocking as it might be to discover, this kind of music didn’t sell well, and a lot of it is hard to find physical copies of even today. Getting your hands on a vinyl print of the genre-defining No New York album will set you back some. The question is, what for? Who wants or needs this horrible noise? This anti-music?

The aforementioned Bangs was the one who coined the phrase “Horrible Noise”, and in 1981, just as the No Wave thing was already dying, he published a “Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise“, in which he describes reviews the above EP by DNA as follows:

DNA – A Taste of DNA: The lead instrument in the new, improved DNA is neither Arto Lindsay’s slamming and scrapings of the electric twelve-string guitar he never plays chords on nor his laconically imploding epiglottis. It is Tim Wright’s bass, which ain’t even bereft of melody. and Ikue Mori cuts Sonny Murray in my book. Sure wish Ayler was alive to play with these folks (don’t laugh; Ornette almost played on “Radio Ethiopia”) – he played “skronk” (the word sounds like something straight from his bell) if anybody ever did.

Lester Bangs, “A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise”,

In other words, the active sonic extremism creates a form of excitement in the listener, a kind of aesthetic hazing. This is of a piece with what passes under the name of Art in the modern/post-modern age, as I have written before: anti-art trying to burn away all traces of industrial purpose, so as to maximize true individuality. Never mind that this is a pose and requires capital investment from the bourgeoisie, who are perversely flattered by the fact that they Get It and are thus So Hip. The unwashed masses listening to Michael Jackson will never notice that anyway. This is what the No-Wavers fancied themselves as, the most Art-House of the Art-House, painting in the morning and beating their instruments in the afternoon. Just Make Something, Just Do It, who cares if no one likes it? That’s the point.

Artists looking to break rules would logically want to avoid creating their own. No Wave thus produced a wide variety of sounds and styles, with few bands sounding alike. Yet commonalities inevitably emerged. “I think the aims and methods of each band were quite unique,” says Jim Sclavunos, a member of four different No Wave groups. “However, one common aspect to all the bands was their auditory roughness: harsh, strident instrumentation, dissonance and atonality to some degree. All of the bands had somewhat alienating stage presentations. Audiences were subjected to random outbursts of violence or cool obliviousness or disdainful hostility, sometimes all of the above.”

“No! The Origins of No Wave” Pitchfork.com

We return to the questions dogging our discussion of James Chance, who, no one should be surprised, to learn, was very much a No Waver whose work appears on No New York. Yes, you can break all the rules, but for each expectation you violate or complicate, you lose your audience. And you really do need an audience. Without one, your words fall like seeds upon the rocky soil.

Inasmuch as No Wave was considered to be still worth writing about in 2008 (the peak era of “What New York Used To Be”, Fear City Trash n’ Sleaze Nostalgia), it could be argued that they found some kind of audience. And certainly more successful acts, such as Sonic Youth, cited them as an influence. This stuff’s not on YouTube because no one wants to hear it. But do they get anything from it other than the self-congratulations of the successfully hazed? If you make it all the way through a Teenage Jesus and the Jerks record, do you get to be an avant-garde snob for the rest of your life?

But let’s be fair here. There’s plenty of music that appeals only to limited numbers of people, that possesses a lack of nods to popular trends that means a majority of radio drones will never even hear them. This is a consequence of specific choices the artist has made, because said artist wants to express something specific. Is something like a Fripp & Eno record, for example, really all that different from Teenage Jesus, other than sounding more pleasant to the ears?

The answer, of course, is yes, because making distinctions between efforts is precisely what we’re trying to confront. Fripp & Eno are trying to use music to express idea. So is Lydia Lunch, but mostly what she’s expressing is disdain for the medium itself. Lydia can tell the world she don’t want to be no rock n’ roll star, and do everything possible to sabotage any nascent seeds of commercialism, but at the end of the day she still picked up a Fender Jazzmaster, played club dates, and made records, before graduating to that kind of scenester emeritus forever issuing fatwas on the inauthentic (E.G. appearing in mid-oughts rock docs, grumbling that The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are interlopers in Brooklyn. Bitch, you’re from Rochester). The act of deconstruction depends upon the thing deconstructed. Anti-Art is not.