Customer Reviews

No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980.

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1970's New York, a time of polemic filth and fury with displaced art kids crashing head first into the detritus to form bands without which we would have no Rapture, Yeah Yeah Yeahs or (insert a hundred names here). Framed around this incredible gathering of black & whites are interviews (conducted by the Thurston Moore and writer/editor/et cetera Byron Coley) with artists deep in the thick of said scene (i.e. James Chance, Glen Branca, Ikue Mori, Robert Quine and the ever-verbose Lydia Lunch), club owners, iconic groupies and passers-by, including Brian Eno who gives his perspective on the immortal Eno "produced" No New York compilation. Having been active participants during this era, the authors do a spectacular job of detailing the tenuous camaraderie, insular tension and the seeds of No Wave's demise. Not simply for those who know the difference between "No Wave" and "New Wave", the eye candy and history lessons make for an illuminating, universally appealing document.

Legal o livro... um pouco chato o lance de ter um monte de entrevistas no meio da narrativa. Vc está lendo no fluxo, de repente um sujeito começa a dar um depoimento e passam 2 ou 3 páginas de fotos (incríveis, por sinal)... aí vc já não sabe exatamente onde, quando, etc... E podia ter mais free jazz (esse rótulo é um lixo, mas da pra entender do que estou falando). Não é o foco, mas as duas cenas estavam mais do que conectadas e isso é apenas mencionado.

Vale pelas fotos e o texto é lesgal... Se vc usar ele como "coffee table book" na sua sala de estar e uma menina chegar lá e não te achar um cara sensacional por vc ter ele ao invés de um do Matisse ou um de decoração de interiores é porque ela não vale a pena!!!

Basically if you were listening to music at the end of the 70's, beginning of the 80's, you had heard of all these people. Their records were available in most record stores world-wide, but nothing really became directly of it. This record documents this scene very well: we see a NY underground scene that intermingled with then and future celebrities (Iggy, Blondie, etc) but somehow did not connect. The whole scene centered finally on the Eno-produced No New York LP containing music by the more prominent acts in this book. While Eno seemingly had an eye on the future appraisal of the scene and merely wanted to document it (which shows as I wrote that EVERYBODY had heard of this scene, even my mom...). This book is surprising because while most of the rock books especially the ones covering this era tend to use mostly the same material and sources, this is fairly original stuff. It is based mostly (a little like PLease Kill Me) on personal recollections but without necessarily having a storyline. This does not matter since Moore and his collaborator get the vive of this underground scene beautifully. It is more a photo book with some essential anectdotes. Retrospectively a lot of intellectual bs has been put on the music that was really partly unlistenable and really hilarious stuff to annoy your parents or friends in the 70's who might like their rock music to be listenable. Mars and DNA is particularly atrocious as is some of the Lydia Lunch stuff (she was at the time the arhetypical indie queen and seems to have been a bad influence on everyone). Arto Lindsay ended up doing almost commercial stuff nowadays and Lizzy Mercier Descloux (God Bless her) had a huge afro-beat hit in France with "ou sont passees les gazelles". James Chance was more interesting and apparently still tours France. Anyway this is a splendid book, lovingly done by two people involved in a scene that existed while I was a teenager. I still have all these records and they are to be cherished because they really pushed some (not always artistic} boundaries by being simply too extreme. It was a scene that took itself way too seriously but which had some really very colourful characters. The book does indirectly explain on the one hand why they were extremely influential on the people who heard them, bought their records but failed to go beyond that for recognition. Anyway, it is also quite cheap for the work they have put into it and this kind of work must be supported.

Best described as a mish mash of art and punk rock, the No Wave movement of the late 1970s was something bizarre to behold. "No Wave: Post Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980." is a look at the brief movement and those who were behind it, including James Chance and Lydia Lunch among others. Collected from oral history and interviews conducted by the authors, and enhanced with dozens of black and white photographs, "No Wave: Post Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980." is highly recommended for community library music collections.

Diane C. Donovan

California Bookwatch

It certainly was a special time and place, but no one knew it then. As previous reviewers indicated, this book represents the best documentation available for this unparalleled time and place: the late 70s in New York City. Having lived in the East Village during that time frame, I can attest to the absolute authenticity of this title. With a plethora of photographs as well as authoritative text, this is as close as you can get to being there. Additionally, the complex and incestuous ties between the people that operated within the No Wave movement are well discussed here, to include a two-page chart, clearly depicting the relationships between these bands.

Of important note is the fact this Japanese publication was also released in Japan, but with the addition of perhaps the rarest "bonus" CD of all time. It features pre-No New York (the first official album title and produced by Brian Eno) concert performances by The Contortions (February 1978) as well as early DNA (November 1978). Both shows were recorded at CBGBs. While the sound is just okay, to hear these early documents of such an important musical movement is priceless. Strangely, this CD is not included in the U.S. version, however, is available from Amazon in Japan. The book is exactly the same as the publication available in the U.S. and includes a presumably Japanese translation of the same as a second book included in the package along with the CD. It is quite expensive, however, is truly worth the extra expense. Click on the Japan link at the bottom of any Amazon page, when there, click English and search for it. If the book without the CD is 5-stars (and it is), the Japanese version is certainly 6-stars.

No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980.Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) and music critic Byron Cooley have created the definitive chronicle of the late '70s New York art-rock scene. Together they skillfully depict the culture, politics, and environment that formed the still-obscure and quietly influential bands of that era. The details are vast and at times daunting; all the who-dated-whoms, whens, wheres, and whys are included with factual reference points, oral histories, and extensive quotes and photography. The scene, created largely by emerging artists, was rich in photographers and creative writers, and a lot of the never-before-seen source material in No Wave is worthy of a book alone. No Wave fans, especially the art-school-leaning types, will appreciate the reproductions of Lydia Lunch fashion calendars, black-and-white behind-the-scenes photography, record covers, and concert flyers.

-from AlarmPress.com

http://www.alarmpress.com/4089/book-reviews/no-wave-post-punk-underground-new-york-1976-1980/

Thurston Moore and Brian Coley, No Wave. Post Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980. (Abrams Image, 2008)

While I was writing up the (insanely good) doco We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen for an article earlier this year, I opined that in most cases, pieces of art that attempt to document a moment in music history tend to be of the "you had to be there" variety (because We Jam Econo is such a glorious exception to that rule). It doesn't matter what the genre is you're looking at, such books and films tend to be overviews made by someone so entrenched in the scene that they forget the rest of the world doesn't speak the language. This is true in all cases of geek-produced material, of course, but it always seems much more prominent to me in the music world for some reason.

No Wave is right in line with such other tomes as Steven Blush's American Hardcore and Moynihan's Lords of Chaos in this regard; you kinda had to be there. With Blush's and Moynihan's books, though, I actually was, whereas I was still a bit on the young side for No Wave (though more commercial bands running in the same vein, such as Talking Heads, penetrated by aggressively-AM radar in the late seventies; I didn't discover there was music outside the mainstream until someone said "you gotta hear this band called Black Flag!" to me in 1982...). I've read a lot about the period over the intervening years, and I'm as big a fan as any of a lot of bands who were spiralling around New York back in the day (and an even bigger fan than most of Poe and Kral's document, The Blank Generation). But still, I wasn't there, unlike Moore and Conley. I can grasp the atmosphere, but I never breathed it.

In another write-up for that same article (I can't remember which new Eurocrime film I was talking about, possibly 13 Tzameti), I talked about the new breed of European crime films and how much I loved them, then compared and contrasted to critics who were so blown away by Godard, Chabrol, Melville, etc., who were making the same sort of low-budget crime films in the fifties and sixties. I've never seen the appeal of Godard, honestly, but watching movies by Babulani and Tarr and all the rest of the bunch I can understand why it is that people like Ebert and Rosenbaum and Phillips are so bowled over. I feel the same way about No Wave, except that I like these bands a lot more than I do Godard and Melville's flicks. But I still feel like I'm missing something, and this book, while being another good overview, didn't quite fill that hole. I suspect, quite strongly, that someone who's a few years older than me, who was actually listening to this stuff at the time, maybe even going to the gigs, will be a lot more affected by this than I was. Which is not to say in any way that it's not worth getting; if you weren't, there, you'll probably hear of at least three or four bands you'd never heard of before. *** ½

It's a pretty good book with good pictures, etc. Musically, i'll stick with the Pistols, Clash, Dead Boys, etc.

Its by Sonic Youth, enough said. The photographs are awesome and the documentation of a whole other part of New York music is fresh. These kinds of books are great because we're getting the story straight from the people that lived it.