Adam took a sip of his double espresso, licked his lips a little, and concluded: “It’s the perfect anti-song.”
I took a giant gulp of my iced coffee, thought for a moment, and then nodded in agreement.
Sure, our tendency to wax philosophic while drinking caffeinated beverages sounds pretty booshie1, but make no mistake: getting paid to so stand around, drink all the coffee we could desire, and talk about punk rock is a prettty nice way to spend a sunny Spring afternoon.
We talk about Wire a lot. Adam likes to trace the evolution of their sound, especially how they went from the abbreviated, rigorous stomp of 1977’s Pink Flag to the exploratory, spare, and often funky sounds of Chairs Missing not even a year later. I like to be the instigator and proclaim acerbically that Wire, despite appearing on the early punk compilation The Roxy London WC2 in early 1977, was just a bunch of silly art kids who just happened to be around at the birth of a new subculture and used its ethos and aesthetic for their own artsy-fartsy experimentation.
Mostly though, I like to talk about the song “Heartbeat.” Adam is correct in calling it an ‘anti-song’ in that it is basically a slow churning of muffled notes with dark, stream-of-consciousness lyrics spoken, shouted, or whispered over the seething brew. The entire guitar part is comprised of a muted vamp of the open E and A strings and the drums come out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly and feel almost unsure of themselves all the while. The song feels as if it’s always on the verge of erupting into chaos, yet it never does, leaving me feeling unsatisfied but completely blown away every time. I think this is what real rock critics would call “expanding the sonic boundaries of music” or some such overblown blurb of the kind that’s included in retrospectives, discographies, and ‘best-of’s.
I, on the other hand, just chalk it up to Wire’s ability to say a whole-hell-of-a-lot without saying much of anything at all. Like how Vonnegut uses the phrase “so it goes” one hundred and six times in Slaughterhouse-Five, or how in jazz they always say that it’s the space in between the notes that’s really the most important thing of all.
1Booshie as in bourgeois. I use this colloquialism probably at least once a day, but this is the first time I have had to spell it. This is how urbandictionary.com spells it, so that’s what you see here. I would love to hear of alternatives if you’ve got ‘em.
Tags: 1977, Art-punk, Chairs Missing, coffee, Heartbeat, jazz, Kurt Vonnegut, Pink Flag, Wire
