No Wave: How culture ate its own tail (by Rodrigo)

No Wave is a perfect example of standardization, selective culture and the hypocrisy of the avant-garde and its postmodernist rejection of mass media. To provide a reason for why it might be important to analyze No Wave I believe it must be clarified that No Wave is not important; it's relevant.

The struggle between modernism versus postmodernism, avant-garde versus mainstream and the slow process of culture industry are as clear as can be when analyzed through the lens of this late 1970's artistic movement and how its mark rings out still, in ways that contradict its very nature. At face value, No Wave was just another counter-culture movement like many others that came and went along the 20th century, leaving behind countless forgotten artists and devotees under the false promise of a true separation between the mainstream and the viscerally artistic and inimitable new thing. But it's legacy reveals its relevance.

To provide context, we must look back to the late 70's NYC,  when punk was starting to show its worn and tired side. Commercially successful bands like the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and others were a shameful mockery of the punk ethos and its rejection of consumerism, capitalism and countless other slogans that had faded away under the massive hand of EMI, Warner, Sire, Elektra and many other multi-million companies; the working hands of the culture industry. Adorno and Horkeimer state that every new style is a promise of truth. A promise to reshape culture and conventional social norms, thus, providing every new style with a very straightforward ideological baggage. And just like Adorno and Horkeimer state, when the identity of a style is a mere imitation, its true face is revealed: obedience to social hierarchy (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944).

 (pictured above:  Joan Jett (Runaways), Debbie Harry (Blondie), David Johansen (New York Dolls), and Joey Ramone (Ramones))

 Punk had made a promise, and failed to deliver. The 60's saw an infant postmodernism struggle to break away from the standards of modernism and the 70's saw its decline. Punk had failed to be more that another cog in the reinvention of pop music, where the cliché standards of rock n' roll and blues were just sped up and sprinkled with a revolutionary aesthetic that crumbled at the sight of a record deal. 

That is when No Wave is born. A true counterculture to reject both mass media and the traitors of postmodernism. Bands like Mars, Suicide, Swans and Sonic Youth mixed punk with jazz, funk, rock, noise and dissonance, creating a violently nihilistic art movement that flourished among the New York City underground art scene. A new promise was made, and this time it swore to imitate no one and disgust everyone. 

                     (pictured above: Sonic Youth in 1984 during the "Bad Moon Rising" album era)
 

But a couple years pass by and most of these bands only amount to short lived experiments with inconsequential results. Others, like Swans and Sonic Youth shed their No Wave skin and continued to produce more commercial music, eventually moving on from their humble beginnings on Neutral records (the most prominent No Wave independent label) to deals with UMG and Sony Music for Billboard charting albums that are now considered classics to music enthusiasts all over the world. No Wave became a new standard and its style became commercially viable and marketable. Years later we have a myriad of new artists from Death Grips and Daughters to Kero Kero Bonito and Idles headlining massive festivals like Primavera Sound, Glastonbury and Coachella while citing No Wave bands as a key influence in their art.

                                             (Pictured above: IDLES at Glastonbury in 2019)

So did No Wave follow through with its promise?

Maybe No Wave meant a drop of realization of the "deluted dream of avant-garde mass media" as put in Huyssen's "After the Great Divide" essay (Huyssen, 1986).

 Or Maybe No Wave was another hypcrite according to Adorno and Horkeimer, establishing the culture industry's endless cycle of deciet. "The culture industry does not sublimate: it represses" they state (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944). Are Swans and Sonic Youth a clear example of this subjugation to the more comercially viable in order to survive? Did the front-runners of No Wave become the very thing they were born to rage against?

Maybe. 

I still like them very much. 

...

For anyone interested:

To better understand No Wave and how it evolved I recommend comparing:

1. Sonic Youth's "Halloween" (1985) vs "Incinerate"(2006)

2. Swan's "Stay Here" (1983) vs "Blind" (1991)

Works Cited:

Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1944). Culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. Routledge.

Huyssen, A. (1986). After the Great Divide. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.