NO BUBBLES: WIRE’S PINK FLAG

Last THIC MASC practice, while playing one of our shortest tunes, Cass waited until we cycled through the main riff a couple times before singing the final verse.

“I thought it should breathe a little at the end there,” she said.  

“Blackshirts” crams three verses, two choruses, and a two-part bridge into about a minute and fifty seconds. There’s no breathing room in it.

Once, when asked why his band wrote such short songs, Black Flag’s Greg Ginn responded, saying that their songs were regular length, but they just played them really fast. 

The old punk in me loves that the demo for “Blackshirts” runs less than two minutes. There’s something elemental about it, like it’s a Buddy Holly or early Beatles tune. Since rock radio’s birth in the 1950s, it has preferred songs that run between three and four minutes. But what if you could give the audience everything they want and nothing that they don’t in less than three? How about less than two? 

Steve Jobs supposedly dropped one of the iPhone betas into a fish tank and then pointed at the bubbles that came out. “If there’s empty space in there, you can make it smaller.” 

I love that – as a story or metaphor, not necessarily as appropriate behavior from a CEO. I believe that a piece of art or entertainment can be machined down to microns. 

Mclusky’s Andrew Faulkous recently told Guitar.com: “In terms of the kind of basic rock music that we play, there was an ideal length that comes between 28 and 36 minutes…That gives you enough time to kind of exist in this very real, visceral thing, but it also leaves you wanting more. There’s this finality to it but your first instinct should be to play it again immediately.”

Mclusky’s biggest hit (and most popular song on Spotify) is “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues.” It runs 1:51. 

When I saw him open a show at the Marquis Theater, he began running out of gas shouting the torrid final verse. His bassist Damien Sayell explained that the Mile High City’s elevation was getting to the Scottish band. 

I said to Cass at practice, “If you need a moment to catch your breath, we can add one.” 

“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s not for me. It’s for the audience.”  

More than anything else, I’m worried about boring people. I feel that anyone who grabs a microphone in front of an audience better have something more interesting to say than anyone else in the room, and that once you start repeating yourself, you’re fucked. 

But…that’s not true for music. As anyone who has grooved to a funk band working a single chord, or blissed out to a DJ riding the same beat, or got caught up singing a chorale round can attest, in music, repetition is a feature, not a bug. Look at “Hey Jude.” 

After Heck Reckoners played one of our first shows, Kylee told me one of her friends wished we would let the songs unspool a little more so that they, in the audience, could rock out a little more. 

Faulkous wants his listeners to replay his record when they want to rock out…. Uh, but you can’t replay a live band (at least not live). Maybe Heck Reckoners should’ve been more generous with our repetition. 

While making our industrial music, Brent and I often err on the side of going long. It’s germane to genre (which prizes repetition like any other dance music), and we’re trying to hook listeners, so to do that, you need hooks, which need to be repeated. 

Back to THIC MASC, “Blackshirts,” and Cass. We compromised. Live, we’ll go long (it’s not like we have a choice; singers are the big head on the hydra), but on the album we’ll get the compressed diamond of the song, with no bubbles coming out. 

For the record: we’re talking about the difference between going for 1:50 versus 1:56. Maybe your homeboy here needs to loosen up a bit. 

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This week’s album has no bubbles coming out. Wire’s Pink Flag is 35:17 of pure, compressed art punk. The band goes longer than two minutes on six of the album’s 21 songs, longer than three minutes on three songs, and longer than four on none. 

Before the punk rock revolution, Wire would’ve been lumped in with art rockers like Roxy Music and David Bowie, artists who shared Wire’s interest in sonic adventuring, but not their insistence on brevity. Seeing as Pink Flag arrived in November of 1977, Wire joined Talking Heads’ 77 and Television’s Marquee Moon among the first class of art punk albums. 

“Reuters” begins the album sounding more like Pink Floyd than The Ramones. Surrounded by a smidge of delay, one guitar pings another, before they lock together and run down a single chord for three minutes, as bass and drums keep a simple, unyielding beat. 

“Our own correspondent is sorry to tell / Of an uneasy time, that all is not well.” Over the next nine occasionally rhyming lines, Wire’s reporter character describes a country on the brink of war. The only thing close to a chorus is the word “rape” in the final line, “Gunfire’s increasing, looting, burning, rape,” which gets repeated until the song dissolves after a long fade out. Three minutes. 

The next track, “Field Day for Sundays” sketches a Matisse line drawing about a celebrity publicity scandal before vanishing in less than thirty seconds. 

In two tracks, we get Wire in a nutshell. They either play with a novel sound (“Reuters’” delayed guitar), or write a portrait in miniature and trap it in the thumbnail of a punk song. 

What’s remarkable about the album, though, is how willing the band is to take a good idea and just drop it. “Three Girl Rhumba” has such a catchy guitar part that Elastica turned it into the 1994 hit single single “Connection.” But Wire only uses it for a minute and 20 seconds before moving on to play with something else. 

In fact, there’s a cottage industry of bands who picked up and ran with ideas that Wire tossed off. R.E.M. turned Pink Flag’s epic (at 3:58) “Strange” into one of the highlights on the compilation Document. Minor Threat sped up closer “12XU” so fast, they nearly cut its length in half, and defined hardcore in the process. And New Bomb Turks blew up the minor “Mr. Suit” into a burly fuck work anthem on their debut !!Destroy-Oh-Boy!!. 

Now I’m talking about the songs, but when I think about Pink Flag, I don’t find myself thinking about its songs. The entire album flows more like the suite instead of a discrete collection of songs. When it comes to pacing, Pink Flag more resembles the second side of Abbey Road instead of, say, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. 

But what’s so amazing about Pink Flag is how perfectly everything fits together. Pink Flag has 21 songs and no skips. That’s an incredible shooting percentage. Even masterpieces like Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime have fast-forwardable moments like their Creedence cover or “God Bows to Math,” which runs out of juice before its 1:16 runtime is up. 

Nothing runs out of juice early on Pink Flag. In writing this column, I’ve listened to this entire album three times, and I’ll gladly go for a fourth. 

Wire’s next album, 1978’s Chairs Missing, runs 42:27 and has only 15 tracks, three of which go over four minutes (and one, inexcusably, goes over five). It’s a classic, foundational album of post-punk but it’s got bubbles. 

Throughout the rest of their still ongoing career, Wire expanded their sound, their lyrical palate, and their song lengths, but they never returned to the airtight songwriting of Pink Flag.