(TV) The Nation: Punk Repunked (part 1)

[Scott M Neukam <scottneukam@yahoo.com>]

Nation, November 2, 1992 
Section: BOOKS & THE ARTS 
MUSIC.

Punk Repunked 

The received wisdom on punk, that explosion of energy in
mid-1970s rock, goes basically like this: Post-1960s
rockers had become bloated and pretentious--so-called
progressive bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer,
who flailed away at pastiches they called "suites" or badly
refried classical chestnuts like "Pictures at an
Exhibition." Radio had already frozen into the prototype of
today's strict market segmentation after its free-format
heyday. Corporate rock--a combination of bland,
interchangeable licks and sobbing vocals with a touch of
inchoate rage about heartache-filled arenas in the form of
groups like Journey and Foreigner. It was the trough
following the exploratory tidal wave of the preceding
decade. 

Punk, the story goes, changed all that. Hippie--the
subculture personified by bands like the Grateful
Dead--became an epithet. Pre-hippie dinosaurs like the
Rolling Stones and the Who were dismissed as old farts.
Three-minutes-and-under tunes, blasting at neck-snapping
speeds, suddenly became the order of the day. Solos were
out. Technical polish disappeared in the firestorm of
deliberately amateur,
I-just-picked-this-up-for-the-first-time-this-afternoon
thrashings that reflected the garage-band ethos at rock's
roots. Politics, leftist or anarchist or simply
rejectionist, reappeared in lyrics. Sum it up by saying
that what returned to rock was attitude, the curled sneer
and piss-off shrug that has fired the hearts of rockers
since the early 1950s. 

All generalizations, including this one, are false, runs
the old conundrum. It's no less true for the thumbnail
sketch above. As usual, history itself is messier than the
overlays we'd like to impose on it. What's really
interesting are the revaluations that hindsight and
history's own twists bring. Take Aerosmith. They started
life as a sort of down-market Stones, pitching singles at
the teeny-bop crowd. Because of that, early rappers
Run-D.M.C., who grew up on their music, did a remake of
"Walk This Way," one of Aerosmith's 1970s chart-toppers,
that became an early hip-hop crossover hit. That led to
joint appearances and the resuscitation of a band that,
frighteningly enough, probably sounds better today than the
first time around. 

Frightening, because things aren't supposed to work like
that in rock and roll. The mythology is still live fast,
crash, burn, and push the envelope along the way. But as
the mythology collides increasingly with the actual fact of
rock's longevity, the music is beginning to reflect its
history. As happened in the revivals of the early 1960s,
bands are covering tunes that could be considered the rock
equivalent of standards--songs by the likes of the Stones
and the Velvet Underground. In some ways, that's because
rock's history looks like it's closing, thanks to the
inevitable generational shift that's propelling hip-hop,
one of its offspring. With the pressure to be at the
cutting edge lifted off it, rock can take the time to
reflect--and continue, like bebop, as the musical
mainstream's underlying syntax. Maybe. Or it can dwindle
into the kind of timeless twilight the big bands now
inhabit. Or maybe the two are inseparable. 


Television has stepped out of that twilight, though you'd
never know they'd been gone from Television (Capitol). They
sound like...well, Television, but they're not exactly a
rerun. The band was one of the critics' darlings of
mid-1970s CBGBland, when protopunk and proto-New Wave were
being birthed at the Bowery dive with the flophouse
overhead. The quartet, featuring the dueling guitars of Tom
Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, refracted jazz influences
(Verlaine adored Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler) and
sixties psychedelia (he loved the Grateful Dead, also
jazz-influenced, and Jefferson Airplane as well). The
guitar duo strafed each other in stretched-out jams, while
bassist Fred Smith drove or floated and drummer Billy Ficca
nailed the four-four into the audience's skulls. In other
words, they drew from sources and played in ways that
punkers, their alleged descendants, loved to hate. 

That was live. On disc, the critics' darlings (who never
even broke into six-figure sales--so much for the power of
the press) edited things to a tighter-lipped ferocity.
Television (which is to say Verlaine, who steadfastly
refused to share composing credits with the band) made
songs. Moody, raunchy, delicate or hurtling, their tunes
are such stuff as dreams are made of. 

Their ellipses make them so. The best of them haunt because
of their very unpunklike hovering suggestiveness. (Lyricist
Verlaine, who changed his name from Miller after the
symbolist poet, is an apt student.) Glimpses of the
underlying tale flash, dart, disappear. Listening is like
watching the lostin-the-funhouse finale of Orson Welles's
Lady From Shanghai, where killers stalk each other by means
of misleading reflections in an endless series of facing
mirrors. 

It's not surprising that the band always says how centrally
important Ficca's high-hat is to their idiosyncratic
sound--which underlines one of the more curious aspects of
Television's music. Like Verlaine's elliptical lyrics, the
accompanying sounds are shards. Now, rock's African roots,
along with its American pop heritage, tend to make it
riffbased. In its best examples, short repeated phrases
cycle around, and those tags create a call-and-response
atmosphere that yields a forward thrust-what jazzers call
swing. But Television creates its swing in a
characteristically odd fashion. Guitar riffs stuff each
tune, gyring around one another like a sometimes exquisite,
sometimes snarling series of dissolves and overlaps. But
the underlying beat would seem static, flatfooted to a
jazzer--slam, slam, slam. There's no real bounce.
Nevertheless, the tense space between the two elements, the
cast-in-stone foundations and the soaring, kaleidoscopic
riffs, opens up its own strange throttle. It's like idling
at 120 mph. 

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