NO WAVE

authors:
THURSTON MOORE
AND BYRON COLEY

Non-fiction
146 pages
Abrams Image

No Wave is a compilation of interviews, writing and photographs put together by Sonic Youth founder Thurston Moore and Byron Coley. The book follows in the vein of Please Kill Me, I’m Punk by Legs McNeill but is more photography oriented and documents a much smaller scene with fewer interesting personalities.

From 1976 – 1980, New York City was populated by a variety of artists who cared (or at least seemed to care, as it later turned out) very little about making money. Their music scene, which thrived in CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, came to be known as punk rock, but its little brother, No Wave, existed alongside it, and that’s what Moore and Coley are focusing on in their book.

I think the point here was to try and document a scene that, while it existed, really only had an impact on about a hundred or so people, but would go on to steadily influence artists for the next thirty years. In a lot of ways, the book is a visual representation of the Brian Eno-produced, No New York, which focused on the trend’s leading groups, the Contortionists, DNA, Mars, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and is nearly impossibly to listen to unless you’re suitably dedicated.

I wasn’t born until a year after this scene fizzled out, but I have pieced together through various interviews I’ve conducted, books I’ve read, and films I’ve seen, that New York City was a wild place from 1976-1980, and it is deserving of most of the mythology assigned to it. No Wave is the sound of tenements, raw loft spaces, and alcohol- and drug-fueled nights, but with an academic edge (a lot of its participants went to NYU). And this book is another piece of NYC art scene puzzle.

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