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THURSTON MOORE’S No Wave Thurston Moore and Byron Coley recently released a book called No Wave, which is a photograph and text-driven document of the no wave scene that sprang out of the art-rock movement in New York City during the late seventies. The sound of the bands is characterized by a purposeful lack of melody alongside cacophonous texturing. Though none of the bands went on to great success, Sonic Youth being a post-no wave band, the short-lived movement left an indelible mark on popular music and continues to inspire bands such as No Age, MGMT, and The Boredoms today. Thurston Moore explains. When did you start thinking about putting together No Wave? What was the impetus? I started thinking about doing a book on the history of No Wave in the eighties. It was something that my co-author, Byron Coley, and I had always considered doing, in some respect. Through the years, we would knock our heads together on how we were going to do it. It was a scene we had been witnesses to, and, to some extent, we were actually participants of. We wanted to basically do a book on New York no wave history. And as the years went by we decided to make it stricter and stricter, and make the parameters really tight. We started seeing a lot of references to New York no wave that made it more than it was. No wave was such a short-lived affair. We wanted to hone in and detail the exact history of the scene—its entry point and its exit. How big was the scene? In the four-year period the book refers to, how many shows even occurred? At the time, the scene in New York City was really exciting; but it wasn’t like it is now. There was no media eye on it. Not the exchange of information we have now. It was a real neighborhood-y thing. And the city was less welcoming to people who would come here and think they would have some type of glamorous existence because it was completely ratty and bombed out. It was an infested downtown. The people who were coming [in NYC] were hard-edged artist types. And you could live on the cheap. It dictated what kind of personalities were showing up. It was a super diverse and exciting brew of people, but it wasn’t overcrowded. You kind of recognized everybody. When the bands started happening and Lydia [Lunch] referred to her and her friends as “no wave,” the [press] started referring to them as No Wave. It was because they had no real interest furthering any kind of traditional rock & roll music I noticed the book followed in the vein of Please Kill Me I’m Punk or Dance of Days—a lot of photos and a lot of quotes from people who made the whole thing happen. Was the book inspired at all by nostalgia? We didn’t use those books as models even though I like those books quite a bit. We didn’t have a model. The book, if anything, is kind of a tribute to the photographers as much as it was to the musicians and artists we talk about in the text. The photographers were part of that scene as personalities. It wasn’t journalistic documentation—they were part of the No Wave scene. It’s not necessarily a photo book—there is quite a bit of writing. How did the narrative come together? Byron Coley did the bulk of the interviews because I was touring with Sonic Youth. But he delivered me all the transcriptions. I goosed up his essay a little bit, then took all his transcriptions and interspersed them within the essay. That kind of created the flow of the book. The photos we have—we used probably two per cent of the material we had in front of us because we had decided we primarily wanted to use photos that had never been published before. Almost ninety-nine per cent of the book has never been published before, photographically. As you point out in the text, New York City in the seventies has an art-rock movement that punk rock and no wave were both part of. How come no wave fizzled out and the other went on to global mainstream acceptance? No wave didn’t allow itself to expand. It came out the gate fully formed as weirdo music. As soon as any of these people started playing any semblance of rock & roll music, it was over. I feel a book like No Wave has two purposes: a) to explain what the core of the scene, b) to say, “It’s over: This is the capsule.” Were you cognizant of that putting the book together? Is no wave over? What of the bands today that are inspired by it? I think people have access to the documents that came out of the scene. I think a lot the bands now just reference it. I don’t think they refine it so much, I think they use it as referential information for their own musical vocabulary. But they didn’t start it. And we wanted to pinpoint who those people were, and what their history was. No Wave is available through Abrams Image wherever fine books are sold. |
