"No New York," the 1978 compilation produced by Brian Eno, remains a snapshot of lower Manhattan's music scene at that time. The pioneering punk club CBGB's was thriving, the influential performance space-cum-disco, the Mudd Club, was about to open and a musician could still afford to live in the East Village without getting a day job.
The four bands on the record -- Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, Mars and James Chance and the Contortions -- and the scene that spawned them were lumped together by critics as "no wave." Though they hardly defined a movement, aside from an embrace of lower Manhattan's avant-garde traditions and low rent, the label nicely summed up the negation that permeated this second generation of American punk rock. Song structure was, for the most part, discarded. The default vocal style was a scream.
First generation groups like The Ramones, Johnny Thunders and even Television still sounded like rock music, albeit a speeded-up or weirded-out version of it. For many listeners, no wave initially sounded like noise, yet its fierceness and fusion of rock, noise and art set an enduring template for independent music. The recent explosion of dance-punk groups such as LCD Soundsystem and !!! definitely owe something to the genre-hopping energy of no wave.
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