August 9, 2010   1 note

Negazione- Tutti Pazzi 7” (1985)

“CRAZINESS” IN HARDCORE

Have you ever tried to imitate speaking a language that you know nothing about? If I try to “speak” Chinese or Finnish or Italian, I can only replicate a few typical sounds, an accent, and maybe some stereotypical gestures. Maybe I have heard the pitch system in Chinese, or what seems to me a preponderance of diphthongs—but my observations really don’t take me very far. I run out of these tics very quickly, and am left repeating just a few of them until the impression falls flat. 

Lesson: the production of an effect (“a good impersonation of an Italian speaker”) is completely divorced from the epiphenomena (tics and characteristics) of the real cause (the Italian language). 

The same thing is true in the hardcore topic of “crazy” bands or records. It is very easy, but very uninteresting, to latch onto and reproduce the *effects* of a band that is “insane”: delirious vocals, dissonant or untrained musical ideas, choppy or noodly “naive” instrumentation, lyrics that advertise a mind on the brink… But in the same way that an Italian accent, an awareness that “Italians talk with their hands,” and that Italian words end with “-issima” and “-azione” make only for a very shallow impersonation—the hardcore band that sets out to sound crazy by making a crazy sound will not endear themselves to posterity.

SOME CONSIDERATIONS

The worst offender in this category has to be Nine Shocks Terror. Just as Iron Maiden are tiresomely convinced that *any* pleasant dual guitar line will be riveting and dramatic, with the result of being almost New Age rather than metal— just so, Nine Shocks Terror drag out their inoffensive and banal hardcore under the aegis of their own “insanity.” Far from being insane, it is truly background noise.

I have lamented often enough the supposed interest of bands like Cult Ritual, Condominium, Swankys, Death Dust Extractor, Sex Vid, Dry Rot, etc. etc.—bands the mental state of which has somehow come in for evidence of their musical interest (which ought rather have been left to my feet and neck-vertebrae). But, OK, aren’t there good bands who are crazy? and is this indeed part of their appeal?

[Also worth pursuing: bands who are less “out there” than Deep Wound or Declino, but whose “inner logic” is more convoluted and bizarre. The Dutch Agent Orange seems exemplary to me in this respect.]

One more thing: I’m sure everyone has experienced this. You think a band is really “far out,” but it turns out that it was just the recording, the language, or the national hardcore style: live, they are just art-punks, not a hardcore band; or the riffs are boring but the vocals were crazy; or it’s much more metal than it came across; the dreaded “circus music” style of hardcore, etc. But what kind of feeling is this?: This seemed crazy to me, but really it is better categorized as… 

Two points that I want every reader to be very clear about in what follows:

HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Best “crazy” bands: G.I.S.M., Gang Green (early), Rudimentary Peni, Void, Kansaan Uutiset, Die Kreuzen, Wretched, Negazione, Civil Disobedience, Deep Wound, Terveet Kadet, and Confuse. 

A note about Septic Death: this is a band about whom I have had many changes of opinion. My current thought: Septic Death are not a “weird hardcore band.” They aren’t a hardcore band at all. Not in any meaningful sense. I see Septic Death as a really loud art band, more in the lines of a metal-influenced The Birthday Party. And they are much better to listen to if you keep this in mind. As a hardcore band, it doesn’t work, but as a relation of The Pop Group, Big Black, etc., Septic Death is quite good. 

Any question such as this, about hardcore, has to be posed in a historical relation to punk. It is sometimes useful to be anachronistic (to explain Discharge in terms of Skitsystem)… and of course we can’t ever hear with truly fresh ears—but an attempt has to be made.

For example, what is going on in Void? On the Condensed Flesh demo, the vocals are less the leering growl of the split LP, and are much more the monotonous rant of the Middle Class 7”—but the more historical reference is the Teen Idles 7”. (This can be especially heard if you compare the two versions of “Organized Sports.”) But at all times, there is something counterintuitive about Void’s bizarre, squirmy sound: John Weiffenbach’s vocals almost always *follow the guitar exactly*. But he does this in a most un-Ozzy Osbourne way.

Thus, one can say that Void, over their career, develop an idiosyncrasy and a characteristic sound (a way of the vocals following the guitar riff) from what is present from the beginning (in the Middle Class/Teen Idles influence or basic starting point of hardcore vis-a-vis its riffs). What is originally “usual” about the band becomes the very thing that is “weird” about them. Listen to “Authority” or “Ignorant People,” and you will that the vocals following the verse riff note-for-note is actually really psychotic and almost an autistic approach to ideas like counterpoint, harmony, collaboration, polyphonics, etc. It is really aggressive, and not in the sense of “aggressive music.” 

I dwell on this aspect, firstly because it is a strange characteristic of Void, but secondly, because anyone trying to “go crazy” would do the exact opposite: spazz out and get as far away from the riff as possible. “I can’t be confined to the riff! I’m insane!” Much more interesting is that Void’s claustrophobic energy comes in part from this counter-intuition. But I think you only notice this if you put it in the context of early hardcore, the Void demo as compared to their split LP, etc. Of course a lot of Void’s mystique is elsewhere: the weird stereo mix on the split, the lyrics, the lead guitar, the inability to bridge their two tempos, the great art, etc.

NEGAZIONE “TUTTI PAZZI” EP

Negazione are, to my thinking, extremely underrated. They have in common with Void an overwhelming guitar presence, which in its squealing digressions never ceases to be completely determining. Also like Void (“My Rules,” “Think”), Negazione can conjure up a commanding, extremely simple mid-tempo, palm-muted riff in the midst of all the other chaos—while with Void it is somewhat disarming, for Negazione it is much more fluid and less rhythmically stilted. Dare I say “technical”? Check out the funky “Tutti Pazzi”—or (on their split tape with Declino) the song “Plastic Humanity,” with its protean riffs: now soaring, now chunky, now noodly. The total rhythmic domination of the guitar is much more along the principle of German thrash metal—which it does not sound like in the least—than the locked-in singlemindedness of American Hardcore (say, the DC Youth Brigade or Seven Seconds).

On top of this, Negazione have one of the all-time demented, ranting, syllable-chewing lead singers in hardcore. I think ultimately he counts against them. He doesn’t really know what to do *besides* spit out words at maximum velocity, in a terrifying screech. I’m not sure what I would have in his place, but neither this early ferocity nor the later, tamer Negazione vocals really help the band—they are somewhat neutral, despite their intensity. 

So, here’s my conclusion about Negazione: you come for the insane, frothing-at-the-mouth, squealing Italian hardcore, but you *stay* for the extremely fluid guitar playing, which over the course of the (roughly an hour long) Negazione discography develops a persuasive, personal, and subtle language of riffs, while still being very aggressive and restless. 

CONCLUSION

Of course Negazione are only an example. Perhaps it would have been better to dwell on Void—they are far and away the better band. But Negazione shows that what is “crazy” in the sense of aggression is often not the lasting appeal of the band, and that what is charming comes from what may be “odd,” but is not particularly “wild.” And one of the best things about this band is that, if you are really familiar with their work, the songs never fall into the trap of being just crazy—the problem with Slayer’s guitar solos. The latter do not improve upon further acquaintance; they are there to be all-out shredding, with no rhyme or reason, and that they are. Negazione (and Void, except on the song “Explode”) avoid this: their songs never lazily fall back on chaos. 

This makes it sound as though “craziness” can be thought away, or interpreted away, or disappears the closer one looks. I don’t want to say this… not exactly. What makes Negazione “all over the place” cannot be entirely analyzed away, nor is it entirely separate from their appeal. My writing tends to emphasize the “take away” of records: hooks, neat parts, hummable bits. I don’t think this is wrong, but it jumps too quickly to the pay-off of a LOT of listening. The first approach, as I stressed with Negazione, is always the intensity, the rawness, the deranged confusion. 

I don’t think it would be out of line to say that there is a dialectical relationship between these two “levels.” Negazione are worthwhile because they eventually have the intellectual interest I described. But I think this lies at the heart of their apparent racket. Racket—this is what I was getting at in my description of trying to impersonate a language—has to rely on something else than the mere effect of *being* a racket. I think a careful listener of, say, Deep Wound, will rediscover their genius at every level—otherwise there wouldn’t be a take-away at all. This is truer of Void than any band: Void are redolent with hooks. But their songs do not EVER “decompose” into “perfect pop songs.” What is interesting about them is crazy, yes, on some levels—structurally, aurally, lyrically—but is consummate art when considered in another light. That is, why not call it just as well the creativity, the abundant, juvenile, socially ill-channeled, short-lived creativity that (absolutely correctly) ran away to its limits in early hardcore? (After all, Beethoven was undoubtedly “crazy” in a much more accurate sense than Void or Deep Wound, but we willingly see this as continuous with his creative powers, while never expecting that the music itself should be “unhinged.” Van Gogh would be an interesting digression here, too.)

I’ve talked a lot about creativity in my recent blog posts here and elsewhere, and I obviously don’t mean the 2nd-grade version of it that culminates in a diorama or presentation, or the fiction of the “creative type” in our society. Rather, what I mean by creative is the ability to envision an effect and render it—to work backwards, as it were. The grander the effect, the better. And the more *material* that can be grasped in the presentation/translation, the better. It is no coincidence, I think, that the “craziest” bands were also the most grabbing/appropriating/expansive. (Of course in a completely opposite way from the Clash’s appropriations). I’m not sure that the bands who best managed their execution and said production of effects may not in fact be those considered as the most bizarre and haphazard. 

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