Wire: Pink Flag (1977)

(Harvest)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

What do you think rebellion sounds like? Musically, I mean. Is rebellion a flower-power thing, an anti-war newspaper song, "folkies playing drums" and all that? Is rebellion even something tangible to be primarily associated with adolescent fervor, or are we talking more about just the basic expression of nonconformity? Is rebellion "Revolution 9"? The bold strokes of individualism like when Patti Smith covers "Gloria" and makes it her own on Horses, or when John Lydon goes under the Berlin Wall, or when Poly Styrene snarls in response to the adage that little girls should be seen and not heard -- that's a favored definition. But there's something about Wire's Pink Flag, one of the most unique and strange artifacts of punk rock, that seems deeper, weirder, more devoted. There is a casualness, an almost mechanical deadpan to the repetitive riff "3 Girl Rhumba" and its brash, half-assed insights ("Think of a number, divide it by two / Something is nothing -- nothing is nothing!") that is more than just gleefully primitive and raucous-past-the-distortion-point. Both those aesthetic qualities are valid and significant, of course, but this song is a threat. And it's a threat because, well, it sounds like these boys just don't care how you feel about the results.

They say it themselves in the demonic earworm "Mannequin": "You don't even start to interest me / Not even curiosity / It's not animosity, it's just you don't interest me." The strongest of kiss-offs: apathy (though "My mind is unwilling and your flesh is so weak" will do in a pinch). Ultimately, nearly every other landmark punk album had some degree of audience service in its philosophy. The tip of the iceberg must be Never Mind the Bollocks, essentially such a barely-disguised greatest hits package as to be three steps away from A Collection of Sex Pistols Oldies. Don't even limit yourself to Great Britain. The Ramones, the Clash, the Damned, Blondie, the Saints, and certainly Patti Smith and Television all exorcised their small rebellions in the firmly established context of good old rock & roll. The song structures, for example, in the Saints' "Messin' with the Kid" or virtually any Ramones song are essentially pared-down revisions of ideas wrought by the Stones, the Beach Boys, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry two decades earlier. It isn't that Wire is immune to such pleasures so much as they are interested in brushing away the dross and cutting it all down to its essence even more so than their peers. These songs rush in, make their point and then leave -- with no friendly repetition or carefully orchestrated hooks. If there is a hook, you might hear it once. Then it's gone.

So the band -- consisting of fussy, restless renegades Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis, Robert Gotobed and razor-sharp but subtle frontman Colin Newman -- rewrites "Wild Thing" as a sarcastic parody of self-help manuals and feel-good relationship philosophy in "Feeling Called Love." All the big riffage, even a singalong peak, but it's all over in eighty-two seconds. "Champs" even offers handclaps and a certain curious joy. In some alternate universe, "Start to Move" and "It's So Obvious," only one of which even exceeds a minute, might sound like radio hits but they're out the door in a flash. Even for someone who loves Wire's approach here, it's hard to hear the wittily pouty "Fragile" and "Champs" without thinking of what a career this band might have had if they'd further explored their effortless, focused popcraft. Minimalism in this context amounts to a certain gleeful denial of pleasure, but it also renders Pink Flag both an enigma and an addiction -- because its ideas are so numerous and come at such a rapid pace, all quickly discarded, the immediate need is to hear it all again.

Raw as it is, it's also intensely well-recorded. Among the more elaborate constructions here, the instant classic "Ex-Lion Tamer" has, like "Mannequin," a fully fleshed-out structure with a bridge, chorus, backing vocals and a tight rhythm, all peaking with the ultimate in fascistic commands: "Stay glued to your TV set." Throughout the song, the volume level goes up, and up and up, so slowly it's almost unnoticeable, but pronounced enough that the track is deafening by the end. The unsettling slow-burn "Strange" -- the longest track here, and one of only three longer than three minutes -- adds interlocking guitars and a flute, yet its variation upon the nightmare is equally unforgiving given the time to engulf us all.

"Strange" is, by this band's standards, something of an epic concoction. But it's long strictly because it can hold their sinister interest for that long. "Pink Flag" is more of a dramatic, overblown stage piece, meaning apparently to mock the flamboyant extremities of prog rock; even it devolves into a series of broken one-chord rave ups, strikes of drum and guitar like some demented H.P. Lovecraft reversal of the beginning of "A Hard Day's Night" drowned out eventually by the band's screams. This only enhances the worldview of "Field Day for the Sundays," which slags off bourgeois lifestyle, middle class fantasy and the TV set you're glued to in under thirty seconds and two spit-out sentences: "I want to be a field day for the Sundays so they can fuck up my life, embarrass my wife and leave a bad taste striped toothpaste can't remove on Monday morning. I want to be a target for the dailies so they can show pictures of me with a nude on page three, so lacking in taste, touched up near the waist looking as limp as Monday morning." These two extremes of Pink Flag don't run in opposition. They both demonstrate that only the barest elements are necessary for a reformation of rock & roll as a catalyst of astonishing tension, fury and barbaric humor.

Musically, it's one thing -- more implosive than explosive but inspiring of plenty of danceable glee, if clipped and frequently interrupted. But rock & roll never was just rhythm and melody, it's the whole package -- the attitude, expressed less often in a lyric than a snarl. Pink Flag's vaguely apocalyptic, dada-influenced fuck-it-all worldview would seem like an expression of almost deathly nihilism if it did not circumvent any attempt to interpret it so straightforwardly, unimaginatively. It must be said, the lyrics -- many by Newman, many not -- are a delight even at their deathliest, and are at times arrestingly poetic ("If you had a room he'd paint it white / Survives the day, prefers the night"). The inner sleeve reads like the world's strangest advice column or autobiography, all detached philosophy and mathematical oddity. But is the inaudibly shouted "Mr. Suit" -- "Take your fucking money and shove it up your arse... I'm tired of fucking phonies, that's right, I'm tired of you!" -- a satire of lesser punk bands' empty anti-authority ethos? Is it a sincere attack upon capitalism? Is it a mockery of the duplicity of so many of Wire's peers? Unlike the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Ramones, and well, basically everyone else, Wire wasn't on a major label; they never shook hands with the Mr. Suits. One thing's for sure: the song is a riot, and a joy -- even Newman is having a blast, you can tell by that cheerful "come on!" he emits after the first verse. But it's also scary, threatening, and that makes it all the more cathartic.

The guttural abandon of most great popular music is key here, but so is a rare sort of imagination; Wire may have rebelled against the same systems -- mostly musical and infrastructural, maybe a few political -- as all other punk rock groups from the first wave, but no one else did it in quite the gleefully oblique way they did. The Pistols could scare you, but Wire could trap you, in a dirge or in the deafening silence when a song just collapses. There's strange beauty in "Reuters" or "Lowdown" for all their cacophony and drone, in the descent into chaos of "Surgeon's Girl" (later revised into even louder chaos on "Too Late" from Chairs Missing) and "Pink Flag," and in the sensation of being found out and exposed on the deservedly legendary, outrageous climax "1 2 X U" -- the inverse of "Field Day for the Sundays." And yet they can also offer "Straight Line," one of the cheeriest punk songs not performed by the Ramones. At the end of it all, punk washes away along with most everything else because Pink Flag is singular, maybe even more than the band Wire itself was. It does something new with rock & roll, something new with the rock album, its structure, the interweaving relationship of the songs to one another and of the songs to the listener. It's one of the definitive LPs, one of the reasons the LP deserved to be created, and better than most of the reasons we probably thought it was created back in 1977.