Although punk has come to be seen as something intrinsically British following the success of bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash, its sound was born in New York in the mid 1970s in the now defunct CBGB club. CBs, as the club was often known, was the home of bands and artists like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television and Blondie, all of whom were instrumental in helping to define what punk was and how it should sound and present itself. However, by 1977 (the year where punk boiled over into the mainstream) these artists were more than just the heroes of a local scene. They were stalwarts of a genre that was finding international success, and as such were increasingly drawn away from their home city by touring schedules. This left a vacuum to be filled by a second generation of New York artists, who were to be collectivised under the “No Wave” moniker, a term coined as a wry dig at the new wave movement that these older groups were becoming associated with. No Wave reviled against everything: its crumbling hometown (New York was on the brink of bankruptcy at the time); its own musical heritage grounded in rock and even the movement itself, with almost all of its constituent members refusing to acknowledge they were part of anything at all. No Wave was nihilism incarnate.
Immediacy was the only clear link between the first generation of New York punk artists and the second, and while bands like Talking Heads embraced the new sounds that could be achieved in the recording studio, the artists of No Wave favoured a “back to basics” approach that involved equipping themselves with the instruments of the traditional rock group and little more. The first major no wave group to emerge were Mars, who claimed to have had no knowledge of how to play their instruments before they formed, and played a jagged, angular style of punk where melody was buried under abrasion. It’s hard to find a link to anything that came before in the music of Mars, save for the most atonal moments of the Velvet Underground.
The music that Mars played was essentially the vandalisation of rock. DNA, on the other hand, utterly deconstructed it. Their music actually has much in common with early techno: DNA’s sound was atonal and relentless, featuring pounding rhythms and a predominance of texture over all else.
Miles away from the drone of DNA were James Chance and the Contortions. James Chance idolized James Brown, and the music they played was punk-influenced funk on a heady cocktail of speed, heroin and chaos. James Chance would quite literally attack his audience, often leaping from the stage arms flailing, punching, kicking and biting anyone who would get in his way while in such a fit only to return to the stage soaked in blood to continue aggressing the audience sonically.
In the heyday of no wave James Chance was often romantically linked to the leader of another no wave band: Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Lydia Lunch was the corruption of 1970s New York made carnate: a wailing, screaming nightmare who could lay better claim to being a banshee than Siouxsie Sioux ever could. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were no wave at its darkest, making no concessions to rock music and refusing to acknowledge or adopt accepted, recognisable features of music such as verses or choruses and seemingly seeking to simply make noise rather than anything that should be listenable. No Wave was painful music, but to claim it unlistenable because it is such would be to miss the point. The scene fizzled out fairly soon after its initial outburst, but did succeed in launching a diluted version of its sound to the mainstream in the form of Sonic Youth, who formed immediately after the golden years of the scene in 1981 only to achieve success in the latter years of that decade and in the early 1990s. Arguably, No Wave is the missing link between the art rock noise of the Velvet Underground as heard on albums such as White Light/White Heat and the grunge sound achieved by Nirvana.
