No wave

Based on Wikipedia: No wave

In the late 1970s, while most of New York City was either burning or being abandoned, a small pocket of musicians in downtown Manhattan decided that punk rock wasn't angry enough, that rock and roll was too comfortable, and that the only honest response to a city in ruins was to make music that sounded like those ruins felt.

They called it no wave.

The Sound of Negation

The name itself was a rejection. By the late seventies, "new wave" had become a marketing term—a way to sell cleaned-up punk to mainstream audiences. No wave musicians wanted nothing to do with it. The name was also possibly inspired by French filmmaker Claude Chabrol, a pioneer of the French New Wave cinema movement, who once remarked: "There are no waves, only the ocean." It was the perfect philosophy for artists who refused to be categorized.

What made no wave distinctive wasn't any particular sound—it was the systematic destruction of everything rock music was supposed to be. Where punk had stripped rock down to three chords, no wave stripped it down further, past the point where it resembled music at all. These musicians took standard rock instruments—guitars, bass, drums—and used them to produce noise, dissonance, and what music theorists call atonality, meaning sound that deliberately avoids the familiar patterns of melody and harmony that our ears expect.

But they didn't stop at deconstruction. No wave musicians folded in influences from free jazz, funk, disco, and the avant-garde classical minimalism of composers like La Monte Young, who had been making experimental music in downtown New York since the 1960s. The result was something that couldn't be easily categorized, which was exactly the point.

As music critic Steve Anderson wrote in the Village Voice, no wave pursued "an abrasive reductionism which undermined the power and mystique of a rock vanguard by depriving it of a tradition to react against." You couldn't rebel against no wave by playing louder or faster because no wave had already gone past loud and fast into something else entirely.

The Ancestors

No wave didn't emerge from nothing. Its roots stretched back to the 1960s, to a New York band called the Velvet Underground. Led by Lou Reed and featuring avant-garde musician John Cale—who had studied with La Monte Young—and operating under the patronage of pop artist Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground had already proven that rock music could incorporate noise, minimalist drones, and artistic pretension without losing its essential power.

The proto-punk performances of Iggy Pop and the Stooges, while not from New York, demonstrated that rock could be physically confrontational, even dangerous. Captain Beefheart showed that you could deconstruct blues and rock into something alien and challenging. And in Canada, a group called the Nihilist Spasm Band had been making noise music since the mid-1960s, plastering the word "NO" on their homemade instruments and releasing an album in 1968 called, appropriately, "No Record."

But the most direct ancestor of no wave was Suicide.

Alan Vega and Martin Rev formed Suicide in 1970, years before punk rock existed. Their music consisted of Rev's primitive electronic keyboards generating repetitive, menacing patterns while Vega howled, crooned, and threatened the audience like a rockabilly singer possessed by something malevolent. They performed with confrontational intensity, often provoking near-riots. Glenn Branca, who would become one of no wave's most important figures, later declared: "If you have to find out who the godfather of no wave was, it was Alan Vega."

Another crucial predecessor was Jack Ruby, a band formed in Albany in 1973 that relocated to New York. Their lineup included Boris Policeband, who played viola through an FM transmitter while wearing police walkie-talkies strapped around his waist. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth would later describe them as "a band whispered about from the most inner circle of no-wave knowledge, as they pre-dated a lot of the aesthetic weirdness and wild style of so much of that scene."

The Explosion

In 1978, everything came together.

That year, an art space in Manhattan called Artists Space hosted a five-night festival organized by artists Michael Zwack and Robert Longo. Ten local bands performed, including Rhys Chatham's groups The Gynecologists and Tone Death, and Glenn Branca's bands Theoretical Girls and Daily Life. But the final two nights were the ones that mattered most: DNA and the Contortions on Friday, Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks on Saturday.

In the audience sat Brian Eno, the English musician and producer who had helped define ambient music and had just produced Talking Heads' second album. Eno was fascinated by what he heard—music that seemed to come from somewhere entirely new. Encouraged by scene insider Diego Cortez, Eno proposed documenting this movement with a compilation album.

The result was "No New York," released in 1978. It featured four tracks each from the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and DNA. The album became the essential document of the scene, the artifact that would allow future generations to understand what no wave actually sounded like.

What did it sound like? James Chance and the Contortions played something like funk and jazz, but wrong—deliberately wrong, with skronking saxophone and jerky rhythms. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, led by the teenage Lydia Lunch, created short bursts of abrasive noise rarely lasting more than two minutes. Mars made guitar sounds that barely resembled guitars. DNA stripped rock to its most minimal and repetitive elements, creating hypnotic patterns of noise.

The Philosophy of No

No wave wasn't just an aesthetic choice. It was a worldview.

Downtown Manhattan in the late 1970s was a wasteland. The city had nearly gone bankrupt in 1975. Entire neighborhoods had been abandoned. Buildings burned regularly, sometimes set ablaze by landlords hoping to collect insurance money. The South Bronx looked like a bombed-out war zone. Times Square was a haven for prostitution and peep shows. Crime was rampant.

For the artists living in this environment, the optimism of the 1960s counterculture seemed like a cruel joke. As Lydia Lunch wrote in a 2020 essay, calling 1967 "the Summer of Love" was "a bald-faced lie." The no wave musicians responded to this reality with what critics described as nihilism—the rejection of meaning and value, the embrace of negativity as the only honest position.

This wasn't mere teenage angst dressed up in black clothes. It was a considered philosophical stance. If commercial music was designed to make you feel good, no wave was designed to make you feel the truth of your situation. If rock and roll promised escape, no wave insisted you stay present in the ugly reality of a dying city.

The Split

By the early 1980s, no wave had begun to fracture into two distinct directions.

One path led toward the dance floor. Musicians like Liquid Liquid, Arthur Russell, and James White and the Blacks (James Chance's new project) developed what critic Lucy Sante memorably described as "anything at all plus disco bottom." They took no wave's experimental impulses and married them to the irresistible pull of dance music. The ZE Records label documented this transformation with compilations like "Mutant Disco" in 1981, which showcased a scene that had absorbed influences from hip hop, disco, punk, dub reggae, and what was then called "world music."

The other path led deeper into noise. Swans, formed in 1982, took the heaviness of no wave and made it crushing, creating music of almost unbearable intensity. Glenn Branca composed symphonies for massed electric guitars, walls of harmonics that approached the physical force of a natural disaster. And Sonic Youth, formed in 1981, would eventually carry no wave's DNA into the mainstream of alternative rock.

Sonic Youth's founding member Thurston Moore had been deeply embedded in the scene. In June 1981, he curated Noise Fest at the art space White Columns, an influential festival of no wave noise performances where Sonic Youth made their first live appearances. Two years later, members of the band Live Skull organized Speed Trials at the same venue—a five-night noise rock concert series that included Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, an early version of the Beastie Boys before they became rappers, and the San Francisco band Flipper, who closed out the festival at the legendary disco Studio 54.

No Wave Cinema

The musicians weren't the only artists making noise in downtown Manhattan. Filmmakers were there too, working in the same abandoned buildings, drinking at the same bars, often playing in the same bands.

No wave cinema emerged in the late 1970s in the neighborhoods of Tribeca and the East Village. Like the music, these films rejected mainstream conventions. They were shot on handheld Super 8 cameras—cheap, portable devices that produced grainy images far from Hollywood's polished aesthetic. Directors filmed in the streets, in nightclubs, in cars, in apartments, using whatever available light existed. Budgets were minimal. Polish was considered suspect.

The first no wave film was "The Blank Generation," shot in 1976 by Ivan Kral and Amos Poe. It documented the music scene at CBGB, the legendary Bowery club, featuring the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, and Patti Smith. The second was "X-Terminator," a 1977 short directed by Michael Oblowitz while he was a student at Columbia University. Oblowitz made the film while editing the avant-garde theory journal Semiotext(e) alongside future Hollywood director Kathryn Bigelow.

The filmmakers who followed included Jim Jarmusch, whose 1984 film "Stranger Than Paradise" would eventually bring no wave aesthetics to art house cinemas worldwide, and Susan Seidelman, whose 1985 "Desperately Seeking Susan" brought a downtown sensibility to mainstream audiences. Vincent Gallo, Steve Buscemi, and Debbie Harry of Blondie all appeared in no wave films. The scene centered around the Mudd Club and a screening room on St. Marks Place run by Colab, an artists' collective.

The definitive example of no wave cinema's ultra-low-budget approach might be Eric Mitchell's 1985 film "The Way It Is or Eurydice in the Avenues," which was shot on 35mm film but had its entire dialogue track dubbed in during editing—a technique born of necessity that became an aesthetic statement.

The Visual Artists

No wave was never just about music and film. Visual artists were central to the scene from the beginning, often playing in bands while making paintings, sculptures, and videos.

Alan Vega of Suicide had been creating electronic junk sculpture before he ever picked up a microphone. The artist collective Colab organized landmark exhibitions including "The Times Square Show" in 1980, which took over an entire building in the then-seedy heart of Manhattan. That same year, the ABC No Rio gallery opened on the Lower East Side, providing an ongoing home for no wave visual art. From 1982 to 1986, a no wave punk aesthetic dominated the art galleries of the East Village.

Barbara Ess's "Just Another Asshole" show and compilation projects documented the visual side of the scene. Colab's "Real Estate Show" and "The Island of Negative Utopia" at The Kitchen (an important performance space) demonstrated that no wave's ethos of confrontation and negation could be expressed through visual art as effectively as through sound.

The Legacy

No wave as a coherent scene lasted only a few years, roughly from 1978 to the mid-1980s. But its influence continued to ripple outward.

In Japan, the Kansai no wave movement emerged in Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto, featuring bands like Aunt Sally, Inu, and SS. This scene would later evolve into what became known as Japanoise, the influential Japanese noise music movement that produced artists like Merzbow.

In Chicago during the early 1990s, musician Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers began describing bands he played with as "Chicago no wave," consciously invoking the New York precedent. Walter would later write the foreword to one of the definitive books on the original scene, describing how no wave's ideals had appeared "in many other archetypes before and just as many afterwards, but for a few years around the late 1970s, the concentration of those ideals reached a cohesive, white-hot focus."

In 2004, director Scott Crary released the documentary "Kill Your Idols," tracing a line from the original no wave bands through their descendants. In 2007 and 2008, three books on the scene were published almost simultaneously, a sign that no wave had achieved historical status. And in 2023, the Centre Pompidou in Paris—one of the world's most prestigious modern art museums—mounted a major exhibition on no wave's visual culture, finally granting institutional recognition to a movement that had defined itself by rejecting institutions.

The Sound of Taking Risks

What made no wave matter wasn't its sound, which was often deliberately unpleasant. It was the demonstration that taking creative risks—real risks, not the calculated "edginess" of commercial art—could produce something genuinely new.

The no wave musicians weren't trying to succeed in the music industry. They weren't trying to become famous. They were trying to find out what happened when you stripped away everything familiar about rock music and started over from nothing. Some of what they discovered was ugly and alienating. Some of it was thrilling. All of it was honest.

Lydia Lunch was a teenager when she fronted Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, writing and performing songs of focused rage that rarely lasted more than two minutes. James Chance incorporated jazz and funk into his confrontational performances. Glenn Branca created guitar symphonies that influenced musicians from Sonic Youth to contemporary classical composers. None of them asked permission. None of them waited for the industry to tell them what was acceptable.

In a world that constantly encourages caution—that rewards the familiar and punishes the strange—no wave stands as a reminder that the most interesting things happen when artists refuse to play safe. The scene only lasted a few years. The impact lasted decades. And the central insight—that negation can be creative, that saying "no" can open up more possibilities than saying "yes"—remains as relevant as ever.

Sometimes the only way forward is to refuse everything that came before.