Half Japanese

In Coldwater, a small town in southern Michigan, the Fair brothers, David and Jad, grew up carefree. In 1974, the two went to live, together with their friend David Stansky, in a boathouse that was dubbed Bessie's Paris. That's where their first "experiments" began, with guitars, a jury-rigged drum kit, aluminum pots (!) and sax. While Stansky had some small amount of musical knowledge to draw on, the two brothers were completely clueless. That didn't stop them, though, from getting to work, running their first sessions in such a bold and reckless way that they stumbled onto a sound previously unimaginable. The standards they reinterpreted time and again ("Gloria", "All Day And All Of The Night", "Ain't No Santa Claus On The Evening Stage") were built on just a handful of chords, but were so thoroughly gutted by their primitive, nihilistic force as to become unrecognizable. Even the original "songs" penned in that period show how the trio had already set out on a path that prefigured the abominable synthesis that Half Japanese would go on to give the world of music, one of the most important and outrageous achievements of all time. Drawing on pillars of primitivism and musical "illiteracy" like Shaggs's "Philosophy Of The World" and Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica", Jad Fair (who would ultimately prove to be the real genius of the outfit) had, in short, worked out the first fully-formed statement on "lo-fi", that musical culture which makes sheer slapdashery the primary driving force of the compositional and performative act.

Right around this time, the moniker “Half Japanese” was also coined (a few words, written on little strips of paper, were pulled at random from a hat). At the same time, David was bedridden by an illness and the other two members had to make do as best they could… Other “musicians” – who were strictly forbidden from learning to play an instrument – took part, sporadically, in the endless musical sessions held at Bessie's in Paris. In 1976, however, the band had to temporarily suspend its “underground” activity. David had in fact moved to California, while Jad relocated to Uniontown, Maryland, following his parents.

Shortly after, however, the two would resurrect the band. David, in fact, joined his brother in Maryland. Without the contribution of Stansky – who had somehow acted as the “glue” holding things together – the sound became even more incomprehensible and lopsided. The repertoire continued to incorporate covers by artists such as the Who, Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, the Sonics, etc., alongside originals co-written by the brothers. On vocals – a role Stansky had handled until then – Jad brought a further sense of disintegration and “reduction”: he sang in a totally unhinged way, slurring syllables into one another, giving the impression of an enormous mass of nonsense, a “nerd” stream of consciousness, almost as if the singing mirrored, in every respect, the torrential, inhuman and highly informal drift of the music.

Half Japanese's music is one that, even before punk, had already absorbed and elaborated on that iconoclastic lesson, surpassing it in a way so revolutionary that it approaches an almost epileptic version of abstract "lo-fi", yet with an intellectual bent. Music that wallows in chaos, that has to reckon, one way or another, with the Shaggs, with master Van Vliet, with the Stooges (the "Raw Power" incarnation), with the "exploded" palettes of Jackson Pollock, with the Velvet Underground (a freeze-dried "Sister Ray"), and, for good measure, with the explorations bordering on psychic automatism of free jazz.

These coordinates were further developed as the new material took shape. It's 1976. The themes of the “songs” are the classic ones: love, sex, money. But in the two brothers they take opposite directions. In David, the love songs, for instance, start from an internal impulse and then converge outward, broadening into something universalist. The approach is almost always “positive”. In Jad, on the other hand, while the same sense of humor is present, the perspective is reversed: from the outside in, mirroring that broader phenomenon which, straddling the Sixties and Seventies, shifted the center of gravity of youth music from the communal spirit of the Woodstock era to the individualism of lofts and the dark, dusty bedrooms of the “blank generation”.

It's no stretch, then, to spot in the Coldwater duo's earliest steps the seeds of that movement, that “aesthetic” of self-flagellation and nihilism in music that would come to be called “no wave”. All the defining traits are already there: the violence and frenzy of punk, dissected and transplanted into the dark territory of atonality; an “intellectual” streak (that of a bohemian of moral squalor) zooming in on the process of “primitivization” of sonic material; the stretching of songs' boundaries that inevitably veers along “free”-jazz tangents, with amateur instinct utterly outweighing calculating reason. The negation of the “wave”, of any movement whatsoever, also shows how the ultimate trait of “no wave” was its “unclassifiability”: of genres, forms and styles.

At the dawn of 1977, amid the full explosion of punk, Half Japanese released their first EP, "Calling All Girls". A year later came "Mono/No-No". Both self-produced records were distributed mainly by mail. Other roughly recorded tapes were sent to their most die-hard fans. A third EP, "Oriental Girls", was planned but never saw the light of day.

1979 is the year of the duo's definitive turning point. Peter Dyer, an English immigrant living in Atlanta, got in touch with Jad and David, offering to put something out on his new label, Armageddon. The brothers set – and got – just one condition: that their debut full-length be a triple LP!

Released in 1980, "1/2 Japanese/Not Beasts" stands, in fact, as the only triple-album debut in the history of rock… and, with very little doubt, as one of the most radical examples of "rock music" to be found anywhere on the planet.

Among the 50 tracks (hard to call them “songs”…), there was room for most of the two previously released EPs, two live documents (on which the Fair brothers are joined by Rick Dreyfuss on drums and John Dreyfuss on sax), a handful of covers, and numerous new compositions (some of them in double versions). For those lucky enough to stumble upon that unsettling cover art, the shock was immense. Suddenly, even the most inept punk band looked like a chamber-music ensemble. And, to this day, not much has really changed… Half Japanese don't want to rewrite the rules. They simply ignore them. Consciously.

An expressionless drum roll sets off the crooked, diabolical, and, in its own way, “danceable” (!) molotov cocktail of "No Direct Line From My Heart To My Brain", ending with gutted guitars. "10th Avenue Freeze Out" reprises (?) Springsteen and turns him into liquid steel, with mangled little guitars and progressions of a tribal, moronic minimalism.

"Ta Sheri Ta Ta" is nonsense for muffled percussion, cymbal thuds, hypnotic bass pulses and zombie-vocals. A shard of sly, murky expressionism. Forget "no wave"! Just "no", full stop… In "My Girlfriend Lives Like A Beatnik" you can already hear the Royal Trux of "Twin Infinitives" (just add more thickness and depth to the sound). "Her Parents Came Home" is a tornado of punk devastation. The piercing frequencies of "Shhh/shhh/shhh" (with faint hints of drums and a sinister, barely perceptible moan) are an example of avant-garde that's anything but gratuitous, which we'll also find in "Rrrrrrrr" (all rickety keyboards and lysergic spasms tearing apart shreds of Cage-like electronics), "Jodi Foster" (a squalid, dadaist tangle of cadaverous guitars that would make Derek Bailey blush, a sinister shadow that also stretches into the folds of the "archetypal" ballad experiment "Ain't Too Proud To Beg"), "Tn Tn Tn Tn Ki" (where a rhythmically beaten snare serves as a backdrop for the aleatory evolutions of a synth line in perpetual fragmentation), "Du Du Du/Du Du Du" (over seven minutes of circular bass and militaristic drum rolls: essentially pointless – same goes for "T/T/T/T/T/T", with its monotone, tar-thick riff, typewriter-like beats and anemic "bleeps"), "I'm Going To The Zoo" (idiotic lyrics and relentless discharges), "Shi Yi Yi" (all moans and sub-human grunts), "BBBBBBB/BBBBBBB/BBBBBBBB" (where a synth figure repeats endlessly, almost as an onomatopoeic counterpart to the title), and finally "Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" (which explores the harmonic boundaries generated by the clash between a noise guitar, synthetic regurgitations and Fair's demented babbling).

These are all solutions that might bring to mind a post-atomic-age version of new-age music, just as "Bogue Millionaires/Cool Millionaires", "Dream Date" and "I Ta Na Si Na Mi Eee" seem to highlight all too clearly. Incredible as it sounds, "Girls Like That" has something resembling a guitar riff and an almost conventional structure, though in the manner of a heroin-addled ballad. The "progressive" manifesto of "No More Beatle Mania" could pass for a Big Black track, but played at supersonic speed. Pure applied aesthetics of annihilation. Somewhere in "Tangled Up In Blue" lurks the ghost of Bob Dylan… "Patti Smith" toys with scraps of lobotomized hard-rock. "The Worst I'd Ever Do" stumbles into sonic nonsense worthy of a criminal asylum, while "School Of Love", "Ann Arbor, Mi" and "Rip My Shirt To Shreds" push even further into the atonal detonation of sonic matter.

These are tracks that grant no quarter whatsoever. Even the covers, which one might expect to retain some tie to the original versions, do nothing but implode disastrously on themselves, torn apart by a dizzyingly murderous fervor. The cover is no longer a tribute to anyone, nor even a way of engaging with someone else's creation. It's a deliberate act of misappropriation. Without respect.

Other artists forced to endure this treatment include Buddy Holly ("Rave On"), the Modern Lovers ("She Cracked", reduced to a demented nursery rhyme punctuated by the scratchy chirping of the synth, before its complete "erasure" in the ending), and the Velvet Underground ("I Can't Stand It Anymore", with tom-toms in a Maureen Tucker vein – even more obsessive – and guitar drones that come and go.

The "minimal", dark and heavy dissertations of "no wave" triumph in tracks such as "I Love Oriental Girls", "Shy Around Girls", "Till Victory" (the latter an impossible surrealist cross between Mars, Zappa and a band of troglodytes dressed up for a party), "I Don't Want To Have Mono No More" (featuring one of the most spastic vocal performances of the whole set) and the toy-fanfare of "I'm Sorry". Buried somewhere within these tracks are also stray mines of cacophonous psychedelia, especially in the miniaturized guitar solos. Like the ones that run riot, for instance, on the two live documents, "Live In Baltimore MD." (20'16") and "Live In Washington DC" (18'16").

Live, the disruptive and brutal force of their assaults becomes even more unbearable, thanks also to the contribution of drums and sax – the latter torrid in tone, neurasthenic to the point of madness (a bridge between Ayler and the "avant-shronk" of Borbetomagus). Deranged bacchanals that fuse the Dead Boys with the annihilating rituals of the Electric Eels erect a monument to irrationality and instrumental incompetence. A non-music played by non-musicians for a non-audience, since it is no longer a spectator but ferried beyond itself, toward the most barbaric of deliriums. In the remaining tracks, even funk is tortured to the limits of endurance, as in "Funky Broadway Melody", where the drums (or whatever stands in for them...) pulse aseptic and resigned. The last flashes of hysteria come from "Battle Of The Bands" (the psychopathic exasperation of the artiest punk, with the generational lines "New Wave, New Wave! No More Beatle Mania!"), "Knock On Wood" (which hurtles headlong into an impenetrable polyrhythmic maelstrom), "Top Secret" (a very brief circular percussive cataclysm), "Guitar Solo" (a trilling concert of dissonant chords) and "Calling All Girls".

The devastation is relentless and all-consuming. It's the very essence of rock that gets undermined. A colossal patchwork of genres, blended by a violently post-modern impulse: this is what youth music has become. Automatic writing of spirit and body. Music "too naked and pure to be misunderstood", as Byron Coley once observed. Music as instinct, as a liberating scream, as absolute and uncompromising expression. A faded technicolor snapshot of a generation in pieces.

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30/10/2006