Suicide

If you stare for a moment at the blood-dripping word "Suicide" on the cover of this legendary album, sounds may start to appear before you in the shape of obsessions. You might get a sense of what awaits once you slip the record into the player: an insidious, abstract, metaphysical pulse; a voice like a slimy film, a malevolent bank of fog separating reality from the otherness we carry within us, like an inexhaustible nightmare (or perhaps a dream?).

New York, 1977. There you have it: the coordinates of the whole thing, laid bare. Not just any city, not just any year. Precisely this: New York, 1977. And then: Martin Rev, electronics. Alan Vega, voice. Nothing else. Or almost nothing.

The correct definition is: "New York City blues." Alan Vega's own words. Except there's precious little blues left in it (or rock, or jazz, or avant-garde—call it what you like): only the projection of the soul, the fire that blazes up, a hand reaching out toward time, forever ungraspable. Everything else is pulse, throb, energy; suicide, sure, but as a reclaiming of life, a return to its source. Not death as rebellion, but rebellion taken to the extreme as a scream against the darkness that blinds life. In this sense, "Frankie Teardrop" is built as a cathartic performance, an upheaval and liberation of the senses, in pursuit of a higher, more abyssal way of feeling. Its skeletal, and at the same time monstrous, minimalism slowly drags the voice (that voice like an icy whisper) toward dissolution — the scream that heralds the descent into hell, only to realize — as Strindberg put it — that hell is already out there, among the rubble of this earth, amid gusts of synthetic wind and chilling presences.

Frankie is locked inside himself, sealed within his mystery as a man. The technological age has failed, killing off every last shred of solidarity with the world. Frankie may not know any of this, but his act (killing his wife and child, then himself) is the product of it. Yet all of this already recedes into the background, pushed aside by the "theatrical" turn the song takes, by its "post-industrial dramaturgy," which is also, and above all, an attempt to make sense of existence. It no longer makes sense to talk about rock here. Perhaps it's fairer to speak of "Total Music." How else to describe the tremulous echo of "Che," with its fluorescent organ and that infinitesimal circularity that lets the album culminate in cosmic void? And what of the exhausting beauty of "Cheree," a mechanical litany with a human heart? What of its sweetness, stained with guilt and the possibility of redemption?

"Total Music," then, which is to say there's no longer any difference between the (musical) representation and the thing represented. New York is right here, this is New York. This is reality, and only this. This is the sound of humanity sacrificed on the altar of modernist utopia. And to tell of this sacrifice, it's only right to keep the past firmly in view. Hence the resurfacing of rockabilly, but disfigured and deconstructed, driven toward its mechanical apotheosis: "Ghost Rider." But, in the end, there's nothing mechanical about any of it. There's only a sense of acid frenzy, of layered tension, made of blinding reverb, like Vega's voice constantly losing its footing within the song's structure, battered by filthy feedback, as also comes through in the following "Rocket USA," almost a tribal dance in constant "devolution," or a proto-techno remix of "I'm Waiting for the Man" by the Velvet Underground.

"Johnny," for its part, confirms the taste for reworking rockabilly through an electronic lens, though this time it's packaged up and shipped straight into the future. All that's left is the sensual "Girl," swaying dazedly over a bed of organ embroidery and muffled pulsations.

Seven wild shards. Seven rituals of self-destruction. Thirty-one minutes and fifteen seconds that music history will never be able to shake off. After this first outing, there would be no more room for results of this caliber in the duo's career. And really, what could they have done after a masterpiece as extraordinary and as unsettling as this one? Only wait for time to do justice to their greatness...

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12/11/2006