Flipper

Only in rock music are certain things possible, and conceiving a masterpiece as the pure satisfaction of a physiological need is one of them. In an art form with no rules, you can absolutely create a work for the sole purpose of satisfying a primordial urge, of freeing yourself from a burden, provided that burden is genuinely felt.

Flipper had plenty of stories to tell, and their geographic origins alone attest to that: they came from the San Francisco of the early Eighties, by then a wreck of the old hippie capital, a metropolitan area plagued by crime, aimless youth gangs and drug trafficking. And Flipper must have seen plenty of drugs — not the flower children's LSD, but the heroin of urban working-class kids with no future, the kind of drug that slowly sucks the life out of you as it runs through your veins (a small anecdote: "Flipper" was the name a junkie friend of theirs gave to all his pets, so he wouldn't forget their names).

Their music is a clear reflection of their drug addiction and their social condition: a whirlpool of murky water flowing slow and inexorable, giving off a putrid, swampy sound, saturated with dissonance and driven by a repetitive, glacially slow cadence bordering on sleepwalking; a sonic flow that mirrors the side effects of the aforementioned drug quite well. It's not hard to imagine the impact such thunderous music could have had in the early Eighties, even within a Californian underground scene already accustomed to the excesses of hardcore punk and to borderline bands like Crime and Screamers; it was precisely their unconventionality — betting on slow, monotone music instead of furious, breakneck-speed punk — that made them a unique case in American alternative rock, closer in spirit to early Swans than to their contemporaries Black Flag.

The four members of Flipper (Ted Falconi on guitar, Steve DePace on drums, Bruce Loose and Will Shatter alternating on bass and vocals) seemed to do everything they could to shed their hardcore background: though not particularly skilled technically, they preferred to accentuate their formal imperfection by slowing songs down to an almost unbelievable degree, rather than hide it by playing at double speed, as was the norm among hardcore bands. The result is among the most alienating music of the Eighties: their long, circular, repetitive songs, fading out into noise codas, have become the stuff of legend, adding to the unsettling sound described above. Vocally too they knew how to wrongfoot listeners, with Shatter and Loose's alienating chants, by turns hoarse as rabid dogs and flat, apathetic; among all the singers of that scene, they were probably the foremost chroniclers of urban decay.

After stints in other bands like Negative Trend and a handful of singles, Flipper put together the album reviewed here, "Albums: Generic Flipper", their peak and point of no return.

No more hardcore: the coordinates of this boundary-pushing record seem to be the noisiest side of Velvet Underground, the Joy Division of "Unknown Pleasures" and the early singles, but above all the most perverse Stooges, the ones from the B-side of "Funhouse".

It's precisely out of the noise of a feedback as insidious as a headache that "Ever" is born, the track that opens the tracklist, a regurgitation of screeching guitars sung through gritted teeth and kept in time by an unlikely bit of handclapping; "Life is Cheap", meanwhile, is a guitar scrawl laid over a simple, repetitive bassline, with Loose's "real" voice doubled by a processed one, mimicking the little voice of a homicidal maniac. There's no denying it: the Stooges would undoubtedly be proud of such ugliness.

The record's crown jewels are its two chants, where the quartet is at its very best: the first is "(I Saw You) Shine", a kind of eight-and-a-half-minute noise-rock mantra, a litany so tormented that not even Ian Curtis could have conceived it; the other is "Way Of The World", their anthem of surrender in the face of the world's injustices, an acceptance of their condition as "inferiors".

Other highlights are "Life" — which lays out with total clarity Flipper's view of the meaning of life: God? An illusion! We live only to live! — and the two most rhythmically driven tracks, which vaguely nod to hardcore orthodoxy, namely "Nothing" and "Living For The Depression".

Few artists have reached such heights of nihilism, disengagement and contempt for life; lines like "Brood in a corner and complain the rest/ but all we're really living for is to die" can only inspire a mix of compassion and dread.

A surprise grand finale with "Sex Bomb", perhaps the only properly constructed song on the album, as well as its absolute masterpiece, one that could easily fill a record all on its own. This is an unrestrained bacchanal, with a vibrant post-punk bassline building the scaffolding of an obsessive rhythm that borders on danceable, synth hisses, a saxophone repeating the same phrase for the track's full seven minutes, and Shatter screaming like a madman or steadily repeating "She's A sex bomb, my baby, yeah!", a line eloquent in its bluntness: when you have nothing, you take refuge in sex, and the swirling sax solo at the end seems to be the orgasm of this incredibly noisy coupling.

"Albums: Generic Flipper" isn't a devastating or shocking record in the short term; rather, it acts like a poison that enters the bloodstream and permanently disfigures the skin, leaving indelible marks of the listening experience. The same goes for its historical weight, which only made itself felt over the long term. Not only other hardcore outsider bands (like No Trend), but also some of the leading American groups of the Nineties, such as Melvins, Nirvana and Unwound, wouldn't have existed without Flipper's slow, deafening songs (it's said that Cobain decided to cut his hair and play in their style after hearing them).

Twenty-five years after its release, it's fair to say we're looking not just at an enormously important record and a wellspring of ideas for the bands that followed, but at a genuine document of the urban alienation of a generation of youth with no future, disgusted by their own past.

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27/07/2008