Flipper - The Sound of Alienation

In the '80s, while Dream Syndicate are the Velvet Underground of “Sunday Morning”, Flipper are the Velvet Underground of “Heroin”. Flipper were formed in San Francisco in 1978 by Will Shatter. In their early years, Flipper presented themselves as the most depraved, nihilistic, self-destructive, violent and paranoid hardcore band around. Then they went into the studio, and (who knows how much was down to the terrible mixing equipment they had on hand) internalized their despair at the level of pure sound. In fact, they really only made one album, but it's a monument of noise in its own right, since it hauls the style invented by the Velvet Underground (and this was their revolution) bodily into the “modern” world. From it will spring everyone from Sonic Youth to Swans, from Royal Trux to Nirvana.

Every track on Generic (Subterranean, 1982) is seminal almost beyond belief. You get the feeling you're standing in the middle of a mine everyone has had to draw from. The outlook on life is the kind of incurable “optimism” typical of Joy Division, even though the setting is the depraved, thuggish world of Motorhead, and the sound is descended from the quintessential hardcore band, the Germs. As for psychedelia, you can feel its weight in the form of a permanent, enveloping brain injury that pounds away relentlessly: it would be the effect of Captain Beefheart's jazzy, bluesy proto-punk, were it not for the fact that with Flipper there's no longer any room for self-indulgence, irony or sarcasm. Only incontrovertible tragedy.

“Ever” immediately crams itself into a distorted, hallucinated, subterranean setting; a forge or a smoky cellar, where you sweat and languish in decay. The ugly, clap-clap hand-beaten rhythm only serves to deepen the alienation and drive Shatter's lament even further into solitary despair (his being one of the few, genuine personalities programmatically devoted to their own self-destruction).

“Life Is Cheap” pushes the world even further away, into a total depersonalization and loss of identity, seen from some distant, deathly planet. Or perhaps from close up, but at a point when one is nothing more than stones, or the reification of lives. The pairing of two voices heightens the inhuman quality, while an impassive Joy Division-style bass-and-drums, thrown off balance by the nerve-like shriek of taut, grinding strings, marches toward an unflinchingly apocalyptic end.

“Shed No Tears” is already a Sonic Youth song; Sonic Youth, who took every single element of this track and these ideas (the voice, the timbres, the tones, the rhythm section, not to mention the guitar) and carried them into every song they ever wrote. Sonic Youth, to be fair, merely speculated on this piece (though with such refinement and effectiveness!), expanding and reworking it in every respect. Incidentally, Sonic Youth's first EP is also contemporaneous with Generic, and, like Generic, is afflicted by the same mirage-like handicap.

“(I Saw You) Shine” owes a particular debt to Joy Division, who here are not just the “ideological” inspiration but the “technical” one too, in terms of the sound. Then Shatter's voice verges on roars that Curtis never dared (deliberately avoided, since they would have undercut his cold impassivity). It's on this guitar — more bass than song, more desolate than distorted — that Cobain would build much of his own work (especially “Bleach”, or the “experimental” collaborations with William Burroughs, already anticipated by Flipper). Finally, a sidereal hiss makes this non-song an irreducible one-off, unlike anything else. The rhythm section, proceeding impassively and mercilessly monotonous no matter what happens, bears witness to the inexorability of life.

“The Way of the World” hints, for the first time, at something close to a melodic chorus, but it's that melody of suicidal death, so alienated it feels like it was born dead — straight out of Joy Division.

“Life” carries on relentlessly, without respite or redemption, in the abyss of no return; calling it “death” would have been too obvious; though, given the context, and given the obsessive insistence on equating life with “death,” a title like that would seem just as obvious too (since it's immediately read in its true, opposite sense). With Flipper, the stage of struggle, uncertainty, revolution or hope — even of pain — has long since passed. There's no more suffering, because there's no more living. By now the scales have tipped permanently into non-life. From here you can moan, but you can't even feel it anymore. Every faculty has either been lost or irreparably sealed off. It's not that there's no meaning; there's nothing at all.

“Nothing” is proof for anyone who doubts what's just been said. The Stooges, on their first, inhuman album, had already reached the same conclusions, in both content and form, with “We Will Fall”. Flipper, their first true heirs in this respect, took note. The mid-70s rock of Springsteen and Jackson Browne seems infinitely distant, dead once and for all. Not even its memory survives, erased or swallowed up in that '69 Stooges well that Flipper drew from.

“Living for the Depression” is the most violent (as well as the fastest) track on the album, and shows how you can negate and do the exact mirror opposite of Television. Even the tempo is hardcore, 1 and a half minutes flat: enough to show what real despair and anguish actually are — not the kind intellectually paraded about, but the kind lived and screamed out, in a living-while-dying rather than a dying-while-living.

“Sex Bomb” is the album's absolute masterpiece. One of the few tracks over 5 minutes long that isn't superfluous or boring. And yet it does everything it can to be, because it's always the same. But it's that sameness which is the whole essence, objectified in the synthesized whistle that spills over into a saxophone which, even itself, caught up in sincere existentialism, can't manage to sound bloated or self-satisfied — in the unequalled, cyclically pounded-out scream of Shatter, which alone would be enough to turn a throwaway phrase like “she's a sex bomb” into the most tragic thing in the world. And it's not some ironic reversal, the kind mediocre rockers use to save face after a failure, like the fox and the grapes it supposedly didn't want. It's a phrase to be taken at face value, with nothing more to add. And it's this lack of anything more, this absence, that becomes total — the deepest nihilism imaginable. Sonic Youth will never go to such extremes.

On the sleeve of Generic it reads: “Listen for 45 minutes. 4 times daily or as needed. Caution: to be taken in conjunction with alcoholic beverages at maximum volume.” You'd better believe it.

In 1984 came Gone Fishing. After Shatter's death from an overdose (December 9, '87), American Grafishy (Def American, 1993) followed. The live album Blow'n Chunks (ROIR, 1984) stands as a testament to their catastrophic live shows.

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