107. 106 Beats That

Wire: Pink Flag (Harvest, 1977);
composed by Colin Newman & Graham Lewis

“Primitive” is an ill-informed value judgment; “primitivism” is an artistic strategy. How few informational elements can you place in proximity to each other such that they still generate a charge? That is what punk was – or came out of – and it is also what post-punk was, which is why what distinguished them (or not) had nothing to do with chronology. Wire’s debut was an art project comprising twenty-one songs running about thirty-six minutes, each of which addressed this question with minimal drums, overdriven guitar noise, and a snarl sounding alternately sardonic and terror-stricken. The title of this track – which runs a minute and twelve seconds - refers to the number of words in the lyrics: a third-person vignette of some irritating arty type. When the words run out, the song simply stops. Notwithstanding this formal stricture, almost half of it – splitting the words into two discrete blocks - is given over to one of the most sinister rave-ups in the music, moving from the simplest descending single line tracing the notes of the major chord, and then quickly doubling to a chorded barrage that instantly feels like it is coming through your bones. People dick around while the world ends.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) until Donald goes away.