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LAST SUNDAY, I woke up at noon, stale and ill from whatever the hell happened the previous evening. I realized I had to go to work. Work requires an uber-hipster "uniform" that consists of one corporate t-shirt, one studded belt, one pair of old corduroys, and one pair of pre-1995 Converse sneakers. In groping around for these items-dehydrated, gargly, and without glasses-my only perception of the world is the requisite cacophonous miasma of music emanating from the hallway of my dormitory "subject to the logic of niche marketing." Housemate A is deconstructing Appalachian folk on instruments that remain incomprehensible in my state of rock-n-roll consciousness; Housemate B simultaneously covers Modest Mouse on her acoustic guitar with a formidable tenacity that would most certainly put those squeaky weasels to shame. Suddenly, I feel a whole lot sicker. I remember the dashing young man I met at the party: Jack Daniels. I reach for my receiver knob in desperation and manage to crank the volume just before the onset of blackness, and thankfully the heroin hits the blood stream just in time: wanzhenvergg! wanzhemvergg! wanzhenvergg, wanz! Ahhhhiiii crhs cusioq sifioq dfkljls aggg!!!! Sometimes it helps give meaning to life when I think of the world as nothing more than an amalgamation of Venn Diagrams. I like to draw them on my mirror with a dry-erase marker. This is especially helpful when it comes to dealing with music criticism/appreciation. Seminal artists like El-P and Boards of Canada capitalize on bulls-eyeing the overlapping regions. These are the bohemian hotspots, places where cognoscenti indie rockers, hip-hoppers, and electronic-ers shuffle in ostensibly antagonistic patterns to each other, but in the secret of the dark, participate in a clandestine orgy. When the lights eventually turn on, everybody runs away screaming because they realize the whole thing is way too White, way too Bourgeois. But on that fateful Sunday, my entire perception of music and the universe at large was annihilated. I remembered in that moment of redemption that God (Karl Marx) had created Noise Rock, and It was good. Noise Rockers are not Venn Diagram people. In fact, they eat Venn Diagrams for dinner, and vomit them up as meaningless scribble. By nature, the musical form is antithetical to the bohemian hotspot. Noise is the statistical outlier your math teachers told you to ignore and destroy. I am a Noise Rocker. Hydromastgroningem The outliers are always the ones who are misunderstood yet grossly influential in subversive ways. Where would we be without people like King Crimson (Father of Math Rock), Captain Beefheart (Father of Everybody), and Bruce Springsteen (Father of this Sovereign Nation, and the evil bastard twin, Alt-Country). Now when I talk about Noise Rock, I mean the original stuff from the brilliant, post-Imperialist, hyper-creative nation of Japan. It all got started in the mid-eighties, which produced greats like Ruins and The Boredoms. While punk and prog rock undoubtedly influenced the creation of the Maximist (Marxist) sound of Japanese Noise, the tap roots are in the avant-garde Minimalist tradition. Now when I talk about Minimalism, I mean the original stuff from the oft-forgotten Euro-power of Luxembourg and the short-lived 1940s No Wave-harbinger-genre of Lux Rock. Philip Glass didn't invent that shit, you know. Moving on, starting in 1985, both Ruins and The Boredoms proceeded to spread their seed all over the inbred Japanese noise rock scene. The Boredoms managed to keep the levels down just enough to show up on the US radar, and in the nineties met their stateside Renaissance while playing at Lollapalooza and being touted as Sonic Youth's shiny-new, most-favoritist band. As will be discussed later, this would possibly be a crux move for the Rhodeislandization of Noise Rock. Meanwhile, Ruins continued to ride the razor edge between brilliance and unlistenability: the dynamic duo of Yoshida Tatsuya and Sasaski Hisashi armed themselves with a six-string bass and nonsensical, improvisational power scat. Unlike their brother-in-arms The Boredoms, and The Boredoms' successor/accomplice Melt Banana, Ruins never quite garnered quite as much mass appeal in the US, though in truth, Jim O'Rourke loved them all equally. But in Japan, they were (and perhaps still are) the vanguard of Noise, where they've released a prolific set of full-length and singles under an equally prolific number of labels. (I should say, though, that the true Lenin-in-hiding is probably Merzbow, somebody that Jim O'Rourke doesn't like, but Kid606 does. Merzbow is the carnal manifestation of Noise. The rest, you'll have to find out for yourself.) Most notable are their infamous side projects, which includes drummer Yoshida Tatsuya's work with Juntaro Yamanouchi of Gerogerigegege (a name self-described as onomatopoeia for vomiting and shitting diarrhea simultaneously). The two produced the canonical Tokyo Anal Dynamite, a live set consisting of a one-minute piece of noise that is comprehensible only in the sense that it vaguely mimics ancient Babylonian dogs being electrocuted. The piece is then repeated 75 times in succession, with a new title screamed at the start of every track. Go home, punk rock. You've been played, Dawg. This is real hip hop. Noise Rock. Pop Tatari vs. Broadway Hell, Ruins even played with Lightning Bolt once. Or vice versa. Shhh. You see, somewhere down the line, Japanese Noise managed to percolate through the Stars and Stripes and somehow ended up in Olneyville. How did this happen? One possible explanation, as a flow chart: The Boredoms to Sonic Youth to Godspeed You Black Emperor! to Black Dice. This is the promised significance of The Boredoms being at Lollapalooza (and yes, they played on the main stage). However, there is evidence that the formidable Providence Noise scene has somewhat transcended the aforementioned flow. Ruins and Lightning Bolt have appeared on compilations together, and the music of Fort Thunder-associated musicians was the highlight of the fabled vol. 7 of Japanese label Contact Records' US Pop Life series-a series designed to introduce underground US music to the Japanese scene. My point is, the big LB seem to have a direct connection with the Mother Country. My other point is, your worst fears have been confirmed: Lightning Bolt is famous. What's more, Load Records has got an arsenal of other promising artists, all of whom incorporate lessons from the Japanese Noise Canon and further threaten the institution of the Providence Underground Aesthetic. These include Olneyville Sound System, Forcefield, and the Man/Myth electro-glitch genius, Pleasurehorse. Not to mention the many brilliant unsigned groups (my favorite Hawaiian fish is.) that haunt Providence warehouse-venues and make this one hell of a fine city in which to live. Karl Marx underestimated the lumpenproletariat. So did Buddy Cianci. The spectre of the lumpen is haunting Providence. Noise Rock is that spectre. Danger, pulse demon! But what happens when Big Man Industry comes riding into town, and wets his patent-leather saddle when he finds out post-industrial Providence is the purrr-fect next Seattle? And what happens when college kids, like myself, cannibalize Providence Noise, idolize Brian Chippendale, and have no fucking idea that Noise came from Japan, let alone from Luxembourg? What happens when the Daily Nebraskan runs a features article about BSR? Panic. Panic. CMJ-the magazinial brute of college music distribution-describes Lightning Bolt with phrases like "brutal wall of rock noise" (Brutal!) and "this is the rocking sound of drum and bass" (Drum 'n' Bass!). Panic, Panic, panic. To all you Industry goons: Don't reify Providence, you Capitalist Cadets you! Keep Boston out of Providence! ighiodho!!! gjifogjfosdig!!!! jgi gji gjiog gosajbb!!! Fortunately, Noise Rock is a puzzle piece that will hopefully take the Industry awhile to orient and snap into their Grand Design: unlike its low-speed Icelandic counterparts (Sigur Rós, Mùm) this is not depressed-on-the-futon, cozy-icicle listening that is relatively easy to market. But perhaps the same was said about punk rock at one point in time, and eventually even greats like Green Day fell into the pit of commercialized doom. All I know is, when it comes to Noise Rock, I don't want to live to see the day when people talk about Ruins like they talk about the Beatles and Lightning Bolt becomes the neo-Joy Division. I want to die young in the glory of the Providence Revolution, fighting for a Living Wage and Free Radio, with that sleazy bastard Jack Daniels between my thighs and Venn Diagrams for halos. Martyrdom, my friends, is the only way to go. And to my fellow fans of the carnivorous mind-fuckery that is Noise, this will be my epitaph to you: listen on, soldier, and next time you see a funny-looking West Side poster, look a little closer. Jess Tierney B'04.5678 is much, much more than a +1. |
copyright © 2002, The College
Hill Independent
last updated 11 22 02
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