DAF and Robert Gorl (Sans Umlaut): The Origins of Gothic Synthpop Dance Music

"Beruhrt Verfurht," ("touched seduced") Robert Gorl (1984) sounds like Alan Vega's (Suicide) German cousin. Mumbly, breathy, inscrutably emphatic, especially in Gorl's case because it's all in German, so no idea what he's on about until I looked it up. Although touching and seduction as subjects wouldn't have been too hard a guess. The girl singer sounds like a dry sassy Dietrich update. It's a nice '80s techno pop period tune. 

But Gorl, more like Suicide's Martin Rev, I'm learning is really a pioneering maestro of creative synthpop tempos, goosestepping stomps, hopped up polka Oompahs, robotic Teutonic jamming with a minimalist's blunt appeal, and a widely revered pioneer of Techno music. 

Here's Gorl showing off his instrumental chops and drollery on this 1984 failed solo stab at the charts: 

But where it all started was Gorl as one-half D.A.F. ("German American Friendship") with Gabi Delgado, German post-punk innovators, pioneers of synth-pop and industrial dance music styles between 1978 and 1984. Gabi adds the punky mock Nazi authority vocals and lyrics, crucial to their radical origins fashioning an electronics and synth based analogue to 1977 London punk rock. 

Add Gorl's brilliantly propulsive and minimalist drums and electronics, some production help from Krautrock legend Conny Plank (Kraftwerk, Neu, Cluster), and the first four DAF albums are extremely listenable, a journey from art-punk to what they called "Electronic Body Music" or EBM, and was rarely exceeded in catchy proto-synthpop sounds from that period. 

And they are another secret treasure in the annals of postpunk music unearthed for me by Simon Reynolds postpunk book. Back in the day I'd admired DAF no further than "Der Mussolini" as a kind of punk era one-hit-wonder. But never searched any further until running into them again in Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again. 

"Der Mussolini" (1981), an international hit and monster in the dance clubs, was my first DAF song. The electro punk edge was instantly grabbing, but I barely noticed the dancing to Mussolini, Hitler, Jesus Christ, Communism, and right/left rhetoric beyond punk provocation and sloganeering. The provocations struck me as mocking as the Sex Pistols. 

  

Anyway, a deeper appreciation of their postpunk electronic synthesis now comes as exciting news. Their punk rock incubation phase is viscerally charged, to say the least. Check out this performance of "Ich und die Wirklichkeit" ("Me and Reality") (1981). Delgado on the mic, Gorl at the drums, but not sure about the New Romantic help on the electronics? But key! An electro charged punk rock fit. 

Best translation I could find googling: 

Me and I

In real life

Me and I

In reality

I feel so weird

I feel so weird

I feel so weird

I feel so weird

Me and I

In real, ha, life

The reality comes

Reality comes

Reality comes

Reality comes

I feel so weird.

Delgado is a hypnotically effective ranter, his tortured sarcasm comes through without much translation. This one standard issue existential punk rock angst but crucially with drums and electronics, no guitar. 

"Sato-Sato" (translates from Japanese as "always active"?), DAF (WestBam Remix from 2017): Priceless original early '80s footage of punkers dancing to DAF's electronic punk montaged by contemporary mixmaster WestBam. Public service:  

So of course the more fully up to date music people as opposed to a Mr. Magoo dilettante like me have been onto my DAF discovery for at least twenty years. Here's DAF dominating the Wire Festival in 2003 with another one of their Techno punk classics, "Alle Gegen Alle" ("All Against All") (1981). Flirting with violent fascist imagery via Hobbes, but again emphasizing the power over the hate-mongering. 

There's more trigger warning talk online about DAF, about how they were out gays and their lyrics tended toward explicit sex and rough trade stuff. I can definitely see some of the gay leather thing in their album covers but until this late edition song I haven't encountered much explicit language. Again, not that I'd notice with the German, other than to observe a lot of German sounds like cursing to me, if not particularly sexual. But looking up a few translations of the DAF I'm sharing here this is the first song I've come upon with explicit language. So adult content warning but also an evolved example of their special combo of tricky beats and aggressive electronics and sarcastic humor. 

"Ich glaub ich fick dich später" ("I Think I'll Fuck You Later") DAF/DOS (1996): 

A lot more where this came from that I don't know but a previously unexplored synthpop fountainhead source of electronic music fans of the genre will want to know, I will insist. DAF are one of the key founders of postpunk electronic-based gothic dance music and if you like any one of those musical categories they are not to be missed. Invigorating.  

Oh! Brother. Won't you give me one more chance?

"Oh! little brother

We are in a mess

Don't look at me that way

Don't put me to the test

When I first saw you

People said:

"He scrutinised a little monster"

And disappeared through red door

Now everyone is disinformation

Disinformation

Disinformation

He says:

"Won't you give me one more chance?"

"I'm not a communist"

Disinformation

Disinformation

Disinformation"

"Oh! Brother," The Fall (1984): Mark E. Smith (MES) at his most affable. Off Wonderful and Frightening World, Brix's first full album and also the last Fall album with two drummers. 

"League of Bald Headed Men," The Fall (1993): More of MES's semi-affable tip. Off Infotainment Scan, their highest charting album, graphically the worst Fall album, with a couple of standout covers, maybe a slight step back musically from the articulated tribalism, avant-primitivism, of their best work but MES's typically caustic lyrics are playfully sharp.  

"Violence Grows," Fatal Microbes (1979)

 

"They've seen too much and don't want to know/Violence grows/Violence grows/Violence grows." Brit punk rockers writing their own rules. Honey Bane on the mic. Boosted by John Peel. Edgy and timeless. 

The Pop Group and Mark Stewart's Agitprop Post-Punk Funk

"The Pop Group has this obsession with being endlessly in the vanguard of finding a new way of doing everything,"  once said Vivien Goldman, journalist, member of The Flying Lizards, and Chrissie Hynde's NME London flatmate in the late '70s.

The Pop Group were the first post-punk band or in that conversation, anyway. On paper they were irresistible, for their hilariously blunt agitprop titles alone: Learning to Cope with Cowardice; As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade; For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? They were also very into Black music; members eventually formed relationships with On-U-Sound records that has lasted into the 21st century; a label devoted to reggae and dub and related beat music. In the burgeoning punk era British pop press of the late 1970s The Pop Group were a prototype post-punk band. So hot they were on the cover of NME before they even had a record.

And Mark Stewart's voice is the unmistakeable calling card of The Pop Group and Stewart's subsequent outfit, Mark Stewart & the Maffia, and in its loutish way a punk rock monument in its own right. Like a drunken pirate, inflamed with bitter lamentation. Like a 17th century ranter or 19th century romantic poet, caterwauling against the void. Stewart's maybe too smart and didactic and political for a goth icon but he carries on in gothic histrionics anyway. He grabs your attention, whether you like it or not. He'd probably make a great street corner preacher if he wasn't such an angry humanist. He often wails through a bullhorn like a street preacher, even if you'd have to really play close attention to make out much of what he is howling or muttering about. 

Which is part of his achievement, turning his tuneless warble into this big scenery-chewing personality, apoplectic about the human surrender to entropy and passivity, or the placid indifference to the poly-crises raging all around us. Stewart is not having any of it and has some things to say. 

In your face vocals are a common if not universal feature of punk rock singing, of course. And by such criteria alone Stewart is on a very short list of great punk rock singers. But, it should be noted for the same reasons, this makes anything with Stewart's voice impossible to listen to as background music, how I must admit I do most my music listening anymore. The dude will not blend into the music; or tends to "dominate the frame," is how producer Dennis Bovell once put it. 

But in small doses, songs, Stewart's hectoring, shamanistic and dramatically delirious spells are cast; "We Are Time," "Where There's a Will There's a Way," "She's Beyond Good and Evil," etc. And maybe contrary to what you might expect from such a big personality Stewart is actually into the collaboration and band thing. I've never had a full blown crush on any Stewart album but there are times when nothing quite hits the spot like one of Stewart's dub-heavy funky free-jazz political jeremiads. 

And this be, I'm afraid, one of those times. 

A live record of The Pop Group from the '00s is titled "Idealists in Distress from Bristol." Mark Stewart is an idealist in distress and a post-punk original. 

"Rob a Bank" (1980): Robin Hood as Punk Rocker. 

"Where There's a Will There's a Way" (1980): Punk-funk, post-punk, perverted disco, etc.  

"I shall not cease from mental fight nor shall my sword sleep at my side/'Til we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land," William Blake.

Mark Stewart and the Maffia's version:

 

"I Have Been to Heaven and Back," The Mekons (1989)

Late song off Rock'n'Roll (1989), and as pure an example of The Mekons rock & roll as you're going to find. One way you can tell the pure stuff is if they, Sally and/or Tom and/or Jon, kick up their heels like drunken Rockettes when the band joins all together on the crashing downbeats. Like bullfighting Ole's, shambolic urban thriftshop world music. Or Mekons Rock'n'Roll! 

Or rock & roll or rock-n-roll all superior to rock and roll because they bind the two, the  'rock' and the 'roll,' together more tightly than the common rock 'and' roll. I prefer the upper case musical duets, like Sam & Dave, and the imperial E Pluribus Unum of the ampersand but I'm okay with the informality of the apostrophe too. Mekons Rock'n'Roll.  

 

Chrome as Space Rock Avatars and Cyberpunk Pioneers

My short playlist case for Chrome as underground proto-cyberpunk musical missing link to Erik Davis's High Weirdness in California in the 1970s. 

Damon Edge, creator of Chrome, after recording Visitation, 1976, their debut, sent the record to Warner Brothers but they rejected it. They told Edge it sounded like a "messed up Doors album." He took this as a compliment, of course. I might want to add a 'messed up stag Jefferson Airplane' but, yes, very apt. This is the only Chrome album that has such a bad '60s hangover vibe and isn't yet characteristically post-punk. 

What if NYC's band Suicide lived in the Bay Area and had a thing for sci-fi Alien Soundtracks, consider Chrome's second album that came out in 1978? "Chromosome Damage" might be a worst case scenario. Bad trip psychedelia meets DIY tech. Helios Creed joins the band on the second album to solidify the nucleus of Edge and Creed through Chrome's classic period, Alien Soundtracks to 3rd from the Sun (1982). 

"Zombie Warfare (Can't Let You Down)," off Chrome's '79 album Half Machine Lip Moves. Maybe their best album but there are several other legit contenders. As live music fantasies go Half Machine Chrome double-billed with the Wipers, not inconceivable, generates sci-fi psychedelic punk rock mind-melding live music energies. Cum feel the noize. 

Here's Chrome, if I'm not mistaken, and I could very well be, but from what I could gather, 1980, "unreleased studio outtake," so tossed out but, more significantly, tossing off seemingly effortlessly a prototype of a particular feedback heavy guitar band emo-screamo vocal style that anticipates bands like Husker Du and Nirvana and Guided by Voices. Although, I can't say for sure how much actual guitar Chrome uses in this take because all the instrumentation sounds, as usual, heavily treated and filtered. Still, more rootsy and soulful than typical Chrome. 

Chrome's New Wave bid, "Animal," off Red Exposure, 1980. I admire the boldly abstracted pop move but understand longtime fans find it a slight sell-out. 

From the 1981 Chrome album, Blood On The Moon, another album contender. "The Need." Chrome's mature sound is a visionary amalgam of jittery punk, bad trip psychedelia, space rock, and a kind of space rock musique concrete that would morph into industrial music in the 1980s. Creed's noir guitar sound also a big influence on Sonic Youth.  

I've tried less successfully with Chrome before. There is a muted quality to the production that makes everything sound distorted and staticky and so alienated and impenetrable but once you stop trying to get to some clear narrative center the sculpted, conceptual, abstracted shards of muted noise rock are catchy. Some wag on youtube mused, "Chrome are for Hawkwind fans into industrial music." That sounds about right to me. 

Chrome are a combo of psychedelia, punk rock, and obsessive uses of DIY technology. High-low weirdness from San Francisco, California, in the 1970s. Hardcore fans seem to favor '82's 3rd from the Sun as a kind of aesthetic culmination but my sense of the album is it's when they settle into a more conventional dark metal sound and lose some of the weird charm of their earlier records. Edge leaves the band and moves to Paris in '83, ending what I'll call their classic period.   

The Class of '77 Punk Rock and New Wave

 Very rough video from 1977. Devo still working out their costumes; going for a Robin Williams look circa Mork & Mindy. But rocking out like twisted punk rockers. They're feeling each other out, locking in, winding up the tension and rocking out like they invented a new robotronic punk superdrug. Very confident. Tweakers tight. Hailing from Akron, Ohio, once upon a time Rubber Capital of the World, Devo go from Kent State to "Rust Belt" ur-text New Wave '80s chart champions. Here they are on the verge of breaking out. Also fine example of the robotic, herky-jerky, neurotic nerd spazzing dance style characteristic of New Wave, especially the stuff with any kind of electronic sci-fi art school performative theatrical keyboards slant. 

Or this one, again, very early and crude but at Max's Kansas City in NYC the summer of 1977. Landmark event on the rock era timeline: Devo performing for Eno and Bowie and industry flak before recording their stone cold classic debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo?, at some local NYC studio. Devo had been together since '73 and were seasoned enough but still what stands out here is their moxie and tightness. Charging into NYC and Max's with such nerdy swagger.   

I saw them on their 1980 Freedom of Choice tour, at the old Paramount in Portland. It was rock 'em sock 'em electro dance music with jarring, colorful, pop culture montages on the big screen behind the band. Fun show. But maybe the end of their peak, as their albums seemed to drop off in quality thereafter. They began as a midwest nerd response to punk rock and end up as essential an ingredient to New Wave music as you're going to find, with Blondie and B-52's and Talking Heads and XTC and Human League and acts like that. 

Devo belongs in a big salad of the best New Wave music circa 1977 to 1983.

"Alien Point of View," Nervous Gender (1981)

Pounding tribal tempo, alien punk explicit sex body shaming ranting. Electropunk OGs from LA. Wonder if NG ever played a Burning Man, although do BM's go back that far? Speaking of, a missing piece in Erik Davis's otherwise very engaging book, High Weirdness (2019), was more musical analogues to the druggie hippie cyberpunk synthesis networking through California during the 1970s. The Dead were throwbacks and don't seem to count, not techie enough. One strong candidate is Nervous Gender, along with SF's Chrome or Tuxedomoon or even The Residents. All from the same classic punk/New Wave/post-punk 1978 to 1982 window, or that was their wheelhouse anyhow. Technologically mutant punk rock. Psychedelic cyberpunk. Sexually explicit acid-punk. Scifi-punk. Art-punks having sex with cyborgs. A nugget of high weirdness, "Alien Point of View," in '70s/'80s California music. BTW, you might remember lesbian folk singer Phranc from the '80s. Started out in Nervous Gender but was gone before this recording. Many parts of other classic LA punk rock bands, Germs, Screamers, The Bags, support and cycle through NG. Edward Stapleton and Matt Comeione, core band members, are still at it. Gerardo Valazquez, another founding member, died in 1992.  

More background on Nervous Gender. 

The Horrible (And Not So Horrible) Truth About Mission of Burma

Post-punk Amerindie guitar band Boston legends 1979 to 1985. "Peking Spring" was a local hit in '79 but the first I heard Mission of Burma was a 7" vinyl single, "Academy Fight Song," I bought with my hard earned dough at Singles Going Steady in Portland, OR in '80. Loved the bad college roommate tirade in it; I'm not your academy, your school, your philosophy, club, etc. Prep school punk; real Catcher in the Rye stuff; i.e., catchy, angry, and self-righteous punk declaration of independence. In an interview much later Clint Conley, the songwriter, says he was trying to do a Talking Heads song. And, indeed, there is a jittery New Wave-y pop quality to the song they rarely if ever return to in later records. 

Back in the day I was a little underwhelmed by their next record and first EP, Signals, Calls, and Marches. There were standout tracks. "All World Cowboy Romance." And I like "(That's When I Reach For My) Revolver," although, apparently, most other musicians and artists think it is Burma's signature song. It's the most covered of their songs. I get this, I think, but actually prefer another version of the same song they do later on Vs, their only album, '82, or only album in their original post-punk era incarnation, at any rate, called "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate." Which is a sort of a punk rock Trustfall-song or an inside-out love song that Burma plays with all their scrappy might. Rocking out is in the ear of the beholder, of course, but these guys play music loud and hard. The principle reason they disbanded after a '83 tour, not forgetting the live album of a tour they put out in '85 as the maybe underrated The Horrible Truth About Burma, was because the Tinnitus in Roger Miller's hearing was getting so bad he couldn't continue to be around loud music so much anymore. Their material is heavy, dour, and obviously hard work, if a pulverizingly effective sonic force. But the exhilaration in "Certain Fate" is gleeful and rhapsodic. And in keeping Conley has said of this song that he was trying to do the Buzzcocks. 

Live version gives you a look at Burma in their prime, with their original audience and band supporters at the Bradford Ballroom in Boston in '83. 

Rock critics, it is my memory, used to disparage instrumental psychedelic riff rock droning like this as tedious filler. This might be known as the English major bias in rock snob era rock criticism, 1960s to 1980s. No words here. Just sounds; that sound like Glenn Branca's symphony of guitars covering Tommy James' "Crimson and Clover." Moment of zen. 

I even liked a lot some songs off drummer Peter Prescott's Volcano Suns albums. I think there is that sense that Burma never quite lived up to their potential. Never broke through, had a smash hit. No A+ records or  albums. True, maybe. But "Academy Fight Song" and Vs. are close. They were one of those volatile the-sum-is-greater-than-the-parts post-punk bands, brilliant, erratic, too loud and dissonant for the radio or anything beyond college radio but a creative burst of their own post-punk noise rock thing.

"Blinded" or "(Deaf and) Blindness," The Fall (2005)

Latest thing, 2005, w/ The Fall still rocking out, guitars lumbering in extended dirge, 26 minutes of glorious drone stuff, at this stage full-on legacy post-punk legends. This is a Peel Sessions collection of five studio produced versions of a song called Blinded and sometimes goes by (Deaf and) Blindness. I'm calling it stimulating background music for Dad Rockers, somber, hummable, relentless, Smith's penetrating if inarticulate ranting warble, howling at the dying of the light. Hawkwind and Krautrock lovers will rock this, promise. It's all the sound for me tho, not much idea what he's yammering on about. But reminds me of my favorite quote from Smith, "I used to be psychic but I drank myself out of it." Actually, I imagine Smith in a tradition of British ranters going back to the 17th century, mock declaiming, denouncing, traitors, digital illustrators, chanting slogans from his bag of attitudes, mumbling indecipherable snarky asides. Hooks jab at you in short provocative catchy phrases, but mostly remain to me mysterious, cryptic and maybe a little nutty or at least eccentric in a singular Mark E. Smith kind of way. I was walking down the street. Perverted by language. Godfather of post-punk. 

PRT

The Fall's Mancunian Post-Punk Prole Art Beat Therapy

North country and western England prole art dance music 1983. From album, Perverted by Language, on a short list of my favorite Fall albums for sure, and an even shorter list of truly great post-punk albums. And it's not just Mark E. Smith, in your face, clever, obtuse, cryptic, provoking suspicions, homophobic "Sodmized by presumption," antifa "In a German history book," or antisemitic "a Jew on a motorbike," but the band, who he apparently rarely speaks to, so under him or behind him or in whatever hierarchical relationship to him, actually, rock out with him in rivetingly tight post-punk shambolic intensity. Classic Fall. 

"Who Makes The Nazis" (1982),  post-punk legend Smith tells you: White-O's [flag waving white supremacists], All the Os, Intellectual half-wits, balding smug faggots [great, more potential homophobia and lumping all us bald guys w Nazis], long horn breeds, smiling Buffalos [atavists?], rapists in mirage Spa Motels, real Irish know [underground violence?], Joe, Benny's cob-web eyes, bad bias TV, BBC, George Orwell [note to self: read that James Burnham book], Burmese Days [colonialism], Black burnt flesh, and Crack unit species [militarists? decade before the Crack epidemic]." And a word from anti-fascist (and, again, likely homophobic) Bobby: "If you're out of love, just give them real soap. Hates not your enemy, love's your enemy." Let me guess: "Bush warriors" have menaced Smith/Benny and they're suffering untreated PTSD? And you still can't argue it isn't a little Hitler like for Smith to fire a musician for eating a salad, as he allegedly once did. Nonetheless, poet laureate of anti-fascist soccer hooligans. 

After a long career as one of class of '77 punk's most stylish, accomplished post-Dadaist ranters, Smith tries crooning. No Ray Davies, to be sure. But something semi-sweet in a mumbly wounded animal kind of way. Put out on Cherry Red Records in 2003. 

PRT.

"The forces of control" "The forces of control" "The forces of control"

 They are closing down

Communications

They're taking control

Of our situations.... 

"Headache for Michelle," Au Pairs (1981): I think I thought of the Au Pairs at the time as Johnny-come-latelies, last year's news, or by the time I had caught up with Playing With a Different Sex, anyway. But they actually went back to 1978 and had a way with the post-punk song that shoulda coulda produced in a better world several sharp Top 40 singles; It's Obvious, America, We're So Cool, and this moody, caustic, finely etched post-punk record, for just a few striking instances. Vocalist Lesley Woods was their signature, and a savage critic of contemporary sexual politics. And not bad with the pop hooks. You wouldn't go terribly astray to think of the Au Pairs as a distaff counterpart to the Gang of Four, or as they were. Both inspired by the art school side of the class of '77 punk protest. Both into funk but it comes out more nervous and herky-jerky and clinical when they do it. Both sound like they read hip academic literature on sexual politics, and they chatter a lot in songs about demystifying patriarchy and capitalism. And although the Au Pairs were from Birmingham, they actually did play together often live with Leed's Gang of Four during post-punk's original heyday. And what a double-bill that would have made. The Au Pairs music has aged well and stands as an exemplary model of early 1980s post-punk agitprop feminist dub funk. Shouldn't be missed.   

Hedwig & the Angry Inch (2001)

"Angry Inch," Hedwig & the Angry Inch: In theatrical form as pure a piece of punk rock as you're likely to find in the 21st century. The sound is rooted in early '70s glam rock, T-Rex, Bowie, so it's transgender glam rock punk rock. Intense, funny, and brutally poignant. This is the DIY punk aesthetic in the 21st century, tightly scripted and catchy as hell. Cinematic punk rock. 

"The Medium Was Tedium" b/w "Don't Back the Front" The Desperate Bicycles (1978)

 Simon Reynolds, in his book Rip It Up, argues the Desperate Bicycles were more important to the developing DIY ethos than the arty moves made by '77 punk rock bellwether record labels like Fast Product or Factory. The DB's were from London, and didactic as the Gang of Four but not as collegiate or sarcastic or ironic. The drummer on this single was 14. Their direct DIY message: "It was easy, it was cheap-- go and do it!" In other words, start a band and make a record. If we can do it, they said, you can too.  

This is the 'A'-side of the DB's second single, "The Medium Was Tedium" followed by the 'B'-side, from 1978.  

"Don't Back the Front" 

Punk Rock Tuesday

British Post-Punk Goth Rock Ground Zero

You might have heard of this thing where film critics of a certain age have this thing for the movies of 1999. A generation older, I think I have maybe something similar for the music of 1979. I turned twenty. The possibilities felt exciting and endless and endlessly exciting. I'm still ready to dismiss it all as coincidence but I keep finding all these extraordinary music performances from 1979. 

"Inner Sanction," Insex: Obsessive dark tribal pounding tom-tom drums and monster guitar riffing produces compelling prototype obscure British post-punk Goth Rock. Think Bowie's Berlin period with even bigger stacks of speaker feedback. Gives Joy Division a run for the money, even if Insex lost. They had to. Killing Joke. Etc. 

Punk Rock Tuesday. 

 

"Halleluwah," Can (1971)

 

One particularly cool thing about how Can take inspiration from the Velvet Underground is how they did so without ever sounding slavish about it. One particularly cool thing about this 18-minute monster jam from Can is how the beat, '71, sounds like a 1991 cold chillin hiphop sample. Even if hiphop doesn't really get around to sampling this song until A Tribe Called Quest's "Lost Somebody" in 2016. "Halleluwah" is an extended jam, 18-minutes worth, with beat flow and exotic, squiggly, jazzy interludes. Minimalist, but not excessively so; more like a keep-it-simple ethic. Vocalist Damo Suzuki only joins in for two buildups. He strikes largely indecipherable poses, like some inspired Karaoki street performer crashing Can's jam session, working himself up to a rat-a-tat-tat eruption of "Halleluwah, Halleluwahs." The first ten times I heard this song I had no idea he was saying "Halleluwah," sounded more like "Yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah." A rhythmic repetition of one syllable in a catchy barked tempo. Anyway, it's hypnotic and frenetic and inscrutable. Krautrock is many things but it strikes me right now like progressive music for people bored with the high-culture pretensions and all the fantasy Medievalism of British and American prog rock. Or how about Krautrock is for people when you really get down to it who prefer post-punk to prog rock? I don't go to live shows any more (or I haven't since Covid, anyway) but I still fantasize about dream triple-bill live shows: Miles Davis, Hawkwind, and Can at the Fillmore West, 1971. Hard experimental psychedelic bliss. 

"Toy Love Song," Toy Love (1980)

 The blare to the recording is harsh but grows into something. Toy Love were an early punk rock band from New Zealand. They originated from Dunedin and were active between 1978 and 1980; ofter referred to as progenitors of the Dunedin sound that Flying Nun Records began documenting in the 1980s. More Chris Knox, Alec Bathgate (later Tall Dwarfs), and Paul Kean (later The Bats). 

"Nothing," The Enemy (1978)

Chris Knox in a 1978 punk rock mohawk. The Enemy were one of the first punk rock bands from Dunedin, and for some mark the beginning of the "Dunedin sound"; New Zealand's indie rock sound documented and spread by Flying Nun Records. Very crude live recording. A guy in the band, probably Knox, complains about not being ready to play for the people who traveled a 100 miles from Christchurch to see them. Flying Nun was formed in Christchurch. Proto-NZ punk rock. 

Bonus: Knox's next band, Toy Love, was definitely ready to play. A power pop songfulness pokes out of their headstrong noize. 

"Click Click," The Wedding Present (1994)

Should have been called "No In-Between," reflecting the song's uncompromising romantic intensity. In the 1980s the Wedding Present were associated with the C86 indie rock label in the UK. David Gedge, WP's only constant member (at least 28 others have played with him), is a bonafide two-way player-- i.e., he plays guitar with ferocious speed and drone pop grandeur and matured into a master of punk rock heartache and melodramatic love songs. Gedge lived for a spell in the 1990s in Seattle but never succumbs to grunge's dinosaur rock bombast. In the long run carving his own hard jangle punk pop path proves to be Gedge's superpower. The classic sound of the Wedding Present is terse, frenetic, buzzing with thick feedback energy, and ringing with dissonance and harmony. Noise pop. (And another fundamental inspiration to 1990s shoegaze.) The backup singer echoes Gedge, as if to soothe his restless mind with her soft banter. Even if the bad romance gets old the roar of the careening guitar noise never does. 

"Beat on the Brat," Ramones (1976)

In my early years teaching, on particularly bad days, after school, no more students, the coast more or less clear, I'd shut the door to my classroom and blast this and feel like slam dancing off the walls as I angrily straightened desks and stack books and papers, trying to restore some order to my chaos before heading home. 

The habit reminds me of this anecdote about the early years at Creem magazine. Several summers, pivoting around 1970, some staff members shack up outside the city of Detroit. Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, and, the publisher, Barry Kramer, were the regulars, I think, but at any rate the house they were sharing was owned by Kramer. Bangs and Marsh were there possibly to escape the city heat in summer but definitely to save on rent. They get along okay but all cooped up like that for weeks on end they need some escape and downtime. Bangs said he found his solace by regularly retreating to his small room, closing the door, and blasting Black Sabbath at full volume. 

I was doing something like that with this Ramones song. I remember at least one time when a student walked into the room on afternoon when I had this song on and the volume turned up to eleven. Initially there was incredulous shock at how loud I was playing the music. But I turned it down quickly, although not off, and helped them. The song continues to play in the background, like a runaway subway train, if now muted, the student, a nerdy boy, into video games, standing around while I find some paper they need. Finally, the student exclaims almost quizzically, "beat on the brat with a baseball bat"?!  

"Of course, I would never," I chuckled nervously. 

Two seminal forms of pre-'77 punk anger: The Stooges were angry punk and dangerous; and The Ramones were angry punk and funny. Unsuspecting students were lucky I didn't play "Search and Destroy"!