D-Generation - or, the dawn of K-Punk

Yes, that's the young Mark Fisher staring piercingly out of the picture!

As I discuss in the foreword to k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, I had a meeting of  minds with Mark  several years before I actually met him in person, or indeed even knew of his existence. In 1994 I wrote a mini-feature on  D-Generation, an ideas-packed groop whose press-release spiels caught my fancy. They sent me a press release / letter and a demo tape for an EP titled Entropy in the UK.

 I tried the three numbers listed and got through to one of them, Simon Biddell. And it was he who I interviewed. In the piece (below) he is identified as the D-Generation's ideologue. It never occurred to ask about the other members of the group - it was a total ideas-oriented, polemic-oriented discussion. Zero factual information! Not untypical for me in those days....   

But Mark was certainly co-ideologue with Biddell - his mindprints are all over the group's self-framing, the titles, choice of samples etc etc. (I don't know what the role of Lee Thompson, the third member of D-Generation was). Prefigurings and portents of K-punkian obsessions limn the D-Generation manifesto.

Below are two pieces on D-Generation from 1994

D-Generation

Melody Maker, 1994

by Simon Reynolds

D-Generation are highly influenced by '60s mod and freakbeat. This Manchester trio took their name from The Eyes' "My Degeneration", a parody of The Who's anthem. D-Generation love the psychedelic/psychotic intensity of freakbeat bands like The Eyes, John's Children, The Creation, but they don't want to recreate it. Psychedelia means abusing technology, they argue, and today that means fucking with samplers and sequencers, not guitars.

Unlike These Animal Men and Blur, D-Generation haven't forgotten that mod was short for modernist. The original mods wanted to fast-forward into the future, not replay lost
golden ages. So D-Generation's "psychedelic futurism" draws on ambient and jungle--music that's absolutely NOW, absolutely BRITISH. And instead of the usual iconography of swinging London or English whimsy, D-Generation pledge allegiance to a "dark, deviant tradition"
of Englishness that includes The Fall, Syd Barrett, Wyndham Lewis, Powell/Pressburger and Michael Moorcock.

D-Generation's atmospheric dance is like a twilight-zone Ultramarine--lots of English imagery, but instead of bucolic bliss, the vibe is urban decay, dread and disassociation. On
their EP "Entropy In the UK", "73/93" rails against the "Nostalgia Conspiracy", using Dr Who samples of "no future". D-Generation call their music "techno haunted by the ghost of
punk" and on 'The Condition Of Muzak' that's literally the case, as it samples Johnny Rotten's infamous taunt: 'ever get the feeling you've been cheated?". Originally, the target was
rave culture itself, but this has widened out, says band ideologue Simon Biddell, "to implicate the entire culture of cynical irony." Then there's "Rotting Hill", a stab at "a 'Ghost Town' for the '90s"; Elgar's patriotic triumphalism is offset by samples from the movie Lucky Jim--"Merrie England? England was never merry!".

D-Generation, says Biddell, are dismayed by the way "young people are content to embrace a rock canon handed down to them, and seem unable to embrace the present, let alone
posit a future." But they're optimistic about the emergence of "a counter-scene, bands like Disco Inferno, Bark Psychosis, Pram, Insides, who are using ambient and techno ideas but
saying something about the 'real world', not withdrawing from it".

Add D-Generation to the list of this nation's saving graces.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The second piece about, or touching upon / deploying D-Generation, was a side-bar to a one-pager I contributed to  Melody Maker's "New Wave of New Wave" cover-story feature package, March 26th 1994. This was the side panel to an interview with Jon Savage about the NWofNW, groups like SMASH, These Animal Men, and Fabulous. 

Actually, now I think about it, this came out before the proper mini-feature on the group above. When this side bar to Savage piece appeared, some of my colleagues at MM simply assumed that I had made up the group to fit my polemics of the time. So the 'new band of the week' in the Advance section of MM was a kind of rejoinder, maybe - "see, they are real!".

TECHNOPHOBIA! 
The New Wave of New Wave versus d-generation

The great failing of the nouveau punk bands is their willful denial of the music of the last six years. The Sex Pistols had a relationship with both their era’s chartpop (glam’n’glitter like the Sweet) and its underground rock (The Stooges). Any band hoping to have the same impact today would have to take on board the innovations of sampler-based music, from rap and rave to ambient and avant-rock. A Nineties Pistols would be something like a cross between The Prodigy (this era’s Sweet), The Young Gods (this era’s Stooges) and Public Enemy (the black Clash).

Another big failing is that the NWONW’s refried Who riffs lack any kind of relationship with contemporary black music. Although the influence of roots reggae and dub really came through musically in 1979, punk had a spiritual kinship with reggae: both punk and Rasta were about exile and alienation. A Nineties punk should also have at least an awareness of - if not outright alliance with -  today’s black British subcultures. And that means ragga and jungle techno, music of pre-political rage and urban paranoia. If These Animal Men are really into speedfreak music, they should be making 160 bpm ardkore jungle, which is driven by a rage-to-live that’s pure punk. THIS is the sound of youth today, whereas These Animal Men’s “This is the Sound of Youth” is the sound of youth yesterday: 1966, or worse, that year’s dismal replay in 1979, with neo-mod bands like Secret Affair and Squire.

We need real modernism, not mod revivals. So let me introduce: d-generation. As the name suggests, their music is informed by, but also a swerve away from, the music of the E Generation: “the corrupt modernism” of dark techno, jungle, ambient and ragga.

“We would have been punks in ‘77”, admit d-generation, “but today we can’t see why anyone would ignore modern music.”

They call their sound “psychedelic futurism, techno haunted by the ghost of punk”. It sounds like Ultramarine gone noir: ambient drones, lonesome dub-reggae melodica, stealthy junglist breakbeats. Like Ultramarine, d-generation deploy imagery of “Englishness”, but instead of pastoral quirkiness, the vibe is urban wasteland, influenced by “the dark, expressionist, deviant tradition” of Wyndam Lewis, The Fall and Michael Moorcock.

On their yet-to-be-released EP Entropy in the UK, ghostly allusions to punk are omnipresent. “73/93” turns around the sampled phrases “eroding structure, generating entropy… no future”. “The Condition of Muzak” (the title is from a Michael Moorcock novel) goes even further, using Johnny Rotten as a stick to beat the rave generation. A sample from the Pistols’ last performance at Winterlands is turned into a techno riff: Rotten’s famous “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated” and mirthless cackle “ha ha ha”. Perfect: if this was played at a rave, it would start a virus of disaffection that would undermine the whole subculture. So many ravers have a cheated look on their faces, sometimes cos they’ve been sold dodgy E, mostly cos they’re burned out and can never get as high as they used to.

Rave is full of submerged utopian longings (“living the dream” etc). But because they aren’t articulated, the culture ultimately functions as a safety valve, releasing frustration at the weekend then returning you to workaday drudgery.

It’s not a culture of refusal, but an anti-culture that defuses. d-generation suggest one way that a true successor to punk (rather than a mere replay) could operate: as spies in the house of the loved-up, sowing seeds of discontent, making a grim dance of our national decay.

The second - but unreleased -  EP from D-Generation - Concrete Island. 

Although I have two pre-release cassettes with D-Generation on the spine in my possession still, in the event they only put out just the one vinyl EP . That's because they were forced to change their name on account of the existence of a fairly dreadful NY trad-rebel-raunch'n'roll outfit of the same moniker - if I recall right, they got sent one of those cease-and-desist type letters from the management or the record company. But D-Generation did continue under a different name, The Lower Depths, and released at least a couple more EPs. One of the Concrete Island tunes appears on the first Lower Depths EP. Press releases below - again, spot the proto-K-punkian elements!

Jim Jarmusch movies - and their soundtracks

In the Key of Jim Jarmusch: the movies and the soundtracks

Film Focus, May 2009

director's cut version (snigger)

by Simon Reynolds

STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984)

During the late Seventies and early Eighties, New York City was a cauldron of experimentation and hybrid creativity.  Artists moved back and forth across the suddenly porous boundaries between postpunk rock, the visual arts, the worlds of underground cinema and theater, and the emerging hip hop scene.  If anything was central, though, it was rock, which became the cultural hot spot with the arrival of punk and flourished further with the confrontational No Wave movement and then the more colorful, playful genre known as mutant disco. There was a time when almost every artist was also in a band:  painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and future actor/director Vincent Gallo, for instance, were both in the weird noise outfit Gray, while Jim Jarmusch sang and played keyboards in The Del-Byzanteens.  "At that time everyone in New York had a band," Jarmusch recalled in 1984. "The idea was that you didn't have to be a virtuoso musician to have a band. The spirit was more important than having technical expertise."

It was while he was moving through the incestuous downtown Manhattan scene that Jarmusch became friends with John Lurie, who would not only star in Stranger Than Paradise but score the film and help the director come up with the idea for the story's first part.  Lurie fronted The Lounge Lizards, whose scrawny mutant take on bebop he described as "fake jazz" in an unguarded interview moment.  The quip became a millstone but actually fits the Lounge Lizards musically and sartorially: their retro-tinged sound and suave suits harked back to some bygone pre-rock era but subtly warped it.  

Much the same could be said for Stranger Than Paradise, which seems to be set in some indefinable era that's neither present nor past. Being shot in black-and-white contributes to this effect, as do the old-fashioned clothes worn by Lurie's character Willy and his buddy Eddie (pork pie hats, suspenders and jackets that seem to come straight out of The Hustler), the quaint household appliances , the vintage TV and movies on the portable black-and-white television,  and the one non-Lurie composition on the soundtrack, Screamin' Jay Hawkins's ghoulish R&B classic "I Put A Spell On You".  

The movie is suffused in Americana (at one point Willy tries to explain the football on TV to Eva, his visiting Hungarian cousin, only to give up) and in some sense is about America as a mythic wonderland that somehow eludes the grasp even of those born in the USA.  Lurie's score, though, avoids jazz or R&B for a faux-European vibe: a neurotic chamber music of cello and violins that sometimes sounds agitated and highly-strung, sometimes subdued and achingly melodic.  It's perfect for the uncanny way Jarmusch's movie makes middle America (a snow-covered and shadowy Cleveland, a blizzard-shrouded  Lake Erie) look like Mittel Europa. Even Florida, which Willy, Eddy and Eva visit on a disastrous vacation, is made to feel chilly, bleached of color and cheer by cinematographer Tom DiCillo.

DOWN BY LAW (1986)

Jarmusch's second movie to feature Lurie's on-screen charisma and atmospheric score, Down by Law was actually born of the director's musical obsession with New Orleans, the city in and around which the film is set.   Jarmusch had never been there, but felt that he had gleaned "a very strong sense---maybe abstract, maybe inaccurate--of New Orleans from its music culture." By this he didn't mean jazz so much as the city's 1950s and '60s rhythm-and-blues and early funk, figures like Professor Longhair, The Meters, Irma Thomas, Dr John,  Allen Toussaint, Ernie K. Doe, and  Irma Thomas (whose "It's Raining" appears as a jukebox tune at one point).  This music, along with the Louisiana port city's historical associations with voodoo and pirates, and its unique architecture and food, gave New Orleans a pungent mystique for Jarmusch. 

Like Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law has a curious time-out-of-joint, twilight zone atmosphere, the sense of a present almost oppressively haunted by the past's ghosts.  Lurie plays Jack, a pimp who ends up sharing a jail cell with a deejay called Zack and Bob, a mysterious Italian buffoon.   Zack was played by Lurie and Jarmusch's friend Tom Waits, recently relocated to New York after a long period in Los Angeles where he'd become a cult singer-songwriter with his beatnik -barfly image and huskily drawled vignettes.  Probably influenced by the New York postpunk scene that the Lounge Lizards belonged to, Waits music shifted in an experimental direction with the albums  Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs. The latter album contributed two tunes to Down by Law's soundtrack, the  blues-tinged but dissonant "Jockey Full of Bourbon" and "Tango Till They're Sore."   

Lurie's own compositions come from a similar place-- a mongrel sound midway between the art house and the burlesque hall--and use some of the same musicians who played on Rain Dogs.  The style is a gumbo of American bohemian and lowlife musics, all clanking percussion,  low blares of lugubriously sleazy trumpet,  cold-turkey scrapes of guitar, and plinky sounds that recall the invented instruments of hobo composer Harry Partch.  Defective yet affecting,  moodily atmospheric yet somehow audibly in quotation marks, it's the perfect soundtrack for a movie that deliberately skips the narrative's most dramatic moment (the escape from prison) and cuts to the Louisiana swampland, where Bob announces "we have escaped, like in the American movies".

DEAD MAN (1995)

Neil Young and his backing band Crazy Horse are the Wild Bunch of rock, haggard but heroic survivors of a grander, free-spirited musical era.  One of Neil Young's most famous albums, After the Goldrush, echoes that elegiac sense of the frontier having closed a long time ago, the ache left by the loss of American wilderness and wildness.  The name Crazy Horse itself comes from the Lakota warrior chief who rebelled against the Federal government in the hopes of preserving traditional Native American folkways. 

All these associations made Young the ideal candidate to score Dead Man, a sort of postmodern Western that in typical Jarmusch style manages to be poignant and playful at the same time.  The story concerns a city slicker by name of William Blake (Johnny Depp) who migrates from Cleveland to the very end of the railroad line in pursuit of a promised job only to find himself stranded out West,  an incongruously clean-shaven and smart suit-wearing figure in a land of rugged, hairy trappers and prospectors. Yet the Industrial Revolution has already reached this wilderness: the town is called Machine and Blake's job was supposed to be working at a metal-works firm.  

For the score, rather than write fully-fledged songs, Young improvised in a recording studio while watching the film. Minimally titled on the soundtrack CD as "Guitar Solo, No. 1", "Guitar Solo, No. 2" and so forth, the result was a sequence of guitar miniatures: flickering micro-riffs full of tension and strangeness,  glistening golden trails of melody that cut abruptly to a single crunching powerchord like the report of a rifle.  The music gestures towards the epic grandeur of Young in his full-bore, Crazy Horse-assisted mode but its fragmentary form withholds the full ragged glory the listener craves, just as Jarmusch's movie alludes to the Hollywood Wild West but slyly frustrates one's expectations with absurdist twists.

GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999)

Yet another Jarmusch movie that involved the creative input of a musician from an early stage, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is described by the director as a three-way collaboration between himself, lead actor Forest Whitaker and legendary hip hop producer The RZA.  All are fans of martial arts culture. As soon as they arrived in American theaters in the early Seventies, martial arts movies struck a chord with inner-city audiences: the notion of violence contained by discipline and given spiritual meaning by a code of honor resonated with youth from the ghetto, where gangs functioned as surrogate clans and often thought of themselves as a kind of nobility of the streets.  The RZA's rap ensemble the Wu Tang Clan named itself after a renegade sect of Shaolin monks in China and titled their 1993 debut album Enter the Wu-Tang in homage to the Bruce Lee classic. 

By the late Nineties the RZA was exploring modern polished production styles but Jarmusch was keen to get the "poetically beautiful, slightly damaged sound of early Wu Tang".  Right from the start the RZA's style was praised by critics for its "cinematic" qualities, while the producer himself argues that  "all my music is pitched to the pictorial."  Weaving mood-manipulative snippets of orchestration over looped breakbeats , the RZA has often been playing games with ideas of "the soundtrack" in the same way that Jarmusch's movies have fun with movie genre by--in Ghost Dog's case--mixing up elements from the mob movie, blacksploitation films, and the samurai epic.  

Like a worn-out through over-playing bootleg video of a kung-fu film, the RZA's samples  have a  corroded, wavering out-of-focus quality, while the rhythms manage to be both disjointed and funky. It's very much a digital-era update of the archetypal Black American interest in the blue note and the off beat.  One of the main Ghost Dog themes is a faltering loop of a faded-sounded electric  piano lick that almost focuses you to sharpen your perceptions,  placing you in the mindset of Whitaker's character, a professional assassin. Another theme made out of flutters of vaguely Oriental orchestration and pugnacious breakbeats perfectly choregraphs the great swordfight practice scene on the rooftop. There's also some nice hip hop savvy uses of music within the film's action. A gang of B-boys rapping  the tune "Ice Cream" by Wu Tang clansman Raekwon sets up the first appearance of Ghost Dog's only friend, a Haitian man who sells cones from a truck called Ice Cream Palace. And in a cute scene the evil Mafia boss is seen grooving, absurdly, to Public Enemy's Flavor Flav in his deluxe bathroom suite, dressed in a Hugh Hefner-style dressing gown.

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL (2009)

Like Ghost Dog, the protagonist of Jarmusch's latest movie is a black killer-for-hire. Played by Isaach De Bankole, the Lone Man (as he's identified in the credits) is an inscrutable,  immaculately dressed, hyper-alert (he seems to hardly ever blink) perfectionist who is excessively, almost ludicrously fastidious in all his actions. When he eats a pear he cuts it up so exquisitely it looks like a still life; when he visits a café he insists on getting two single espressos in separate cups rather than a double espresso.  

In one of his most interesting deployments of music yet,  Jarmusch calls on the Japanese heavy rock band  Boris for sounds that contradict the film's repressed emotional atmosphere and  crisp camerawork. Inspired by acid rock and doom-laden metal  of the late  Sixties and early Seventies, Boris's blissfully amorphous  waves of guitar distortion seem to spill across the screen, evoking all the limitlessness and uncontrol that the Lone Man has banished from his existence.  (When a  gorgeous secret agent with an unexplained penchant for wearing no clothes tries to seduce him, Lone Man explains he never has sex while on a mission).  The tingling ambient horizons of Boris's "Farewell", which recurs at several key points in the movie, initially conjure a mood of swoony reverie, before the tune erupts into pummeling bombast, as if to promise the violence to come later in the movie-- an orgiastic spilling of blood to release the tension built up by Lone Man's self-discipline.  

Intriguingly, Boris's sound is the polar opposite of the music listened to for pleasure within the movie's action by Lone Man: refined and courtly classical by Schubert. Somewhere between the two  extremes lies the flamenco performed in another scene,  which  fuses the catharsis of extreme emotion with the poise of the staccato dance style.  In a black-humorous joke, the flamenco performance prefigures the assassin's use of a guitar string as a lethal weapon. It's yet another example of the centrality of music to Jim Jarmusch's warped and witty imagination.

Mark E. Smith at Xmas

Mark E. Smith

(mini-interview as part of The Observer's package feature on the kind of Christmas being enjoyed by famous people with the name of Smith)

The Observer, December 23, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

Given his curmudgeonly image, you might expect Mark E. Smith to regard Christmas as a time to endure rather than enjoy.

"I don't mind it," he says. "I'd like it more if it was just for a couple of days. But when the whole country shuts down for two weeks, I find it gets on me nerves a bit. Christmas in this country just drags on and on. Apart from that, it's okay. You can't knock it, can you?"

Mark E. Smith's group, The Fall, are something of a post-punk institution. But, unlike most institutions, The Fall don't stand for anything.

In the 14 years of their existence, they have recorded a gargantuan body of work as demanding, wayward and cryptic as Dylan's, while Smith has been a perennial and voluble presence in the music press.

His Northern bloody-mindedness and bracing inflexibility of character has been reflected in The Fall's coruscating sound — and his views on the so-called festive season.

"Usually, I try to get away altogether. I try to avoid the claustrophobia of being cooped up with the family, and all the arguments," he says.

"This year, though, I'm spending it with my mum, 'cos she's on her own."

And how about the grisly business of giving? "I do all the present buying the day before Christmas. I'm not much of a shopper. I go by instinct. On Christmas Eve, the shops are clear.

"Overall, I enjoy New Year much more than Christmas. I used to live in Edinburgh until recently, and I like the Scottish attitude to New Year. I have a lot of friends up there — real friends, who don't know who I am, if you know what I mean."

Smith migrated to Scotland from his native Manchester after splitting up with his American wife, Brix, last year. During Brix's stint in the band, The Fall shifted somewhat in the direction of pop, and even enjoyed some chart success.

Now 32, Mark E. Smith says he's enjoyed the return to the single life. "It's fantastic, and I need space to work in anyway." Meanwhile, Brix is pursuing a solo pop career and has been romantically linked with violinist Nigel Kennedy.

Smith has his own connections with high culture. The Fall have collaborated with Michael Clark, most notably in a genre-trashing ballet, called I am Curious, Orange, in 1988.

Currently Smith is working on a musical, the details of which he prefers to keep under wraps. It's indicative of the singer's contrary nature that if anybody else in rock had dared to make similar dalliances with high art, they would have been lashed with his most scathing derision.

Smith has often fulminated about how rock 'n' roll was ruined when the students and art-college kids got hold of it. And he's long been the music press's token anti-liberal.

His out-of-kilter notions and pet bigotries are relished as an antidote to the right-on pieties of the alternative scene. In interviews he's typically to be found ranting about how wholemeal bread tastes like dust, or why nuclear weapons are preferable to conscription.

"I think aloud when I'm doing interviews," says Smith. "Sometimes the things I say are just a wind-up, but they get taken seriously. But if you're looking for an illiberal quote, then I can tell you that I believe we should be at war with Iraq right now."

If Smith has a creed, it's probably a kind of brass-tacks scepticism, a thoroughly old-school British distaste for humbug and cant.

"There's two things wrong with Britain nowadays," he says. "There's too much media, TV is too much in charge. And everybody's starting to take politics seriously again, now that Thatcher's gone.

"I was always brought up to think that politicians were all as bad as each other, that they were all idiots. I always thought that the good thing about Britain was that everybody thought politics didn't matter, whereas in Europe they think it does."

With his cut-the-crap nature, does he find Christmas nauseatingly twee? Or does he have a secret sentimental streak?

"Well, I'm actually a very nice bloke, I'll have you know. I tend to get written up in a particular way. Of course I have a sentimental side, perhaps overly so. I have a family and all that. I'm just about the only man left among 80 women. All the menfolk are dropping off like flies."

This Christmas, it seems, "our Mark" will be smothered firmly in the ample bosom of his family.