THE SPRAWL
In America, all roads lead to and from Boston. So does the Sprawl. The Sprawl feeds on undeveloped space, and is powered by corporate capital, high tech computer hardware, and minds bent away from the humanities by a hyperpresent hyperfocus on engineering, technology, and mathematics, with maybe a little bit of science thrown into the mix at the regions think tanks for the military industrial template.
One of the seeds that powered the birth of the punk ethos, in its innocent and exuberant in love with modern music and the modern world, was carried through the sprawling interchanges of Route 128 by the rock and roll poet Jonathan Richman. Cyber seeds were transplanted from the area across the tangle of telephone lines when technologists made their modems sing, ringing in a cycle of communication changes courtesy of the medium of computers in a marriage with Ma Bell. Information highways and rivers of asphalt conjoined to spread psychic mold spores across the landscape of New England, and from their reach their tendrils into the heart of America.
The world of punk, with its analog aesthetic and DIY virtue worn on a gritty shirtsleeve, was married to cyberspace when the imagination of William Gibson fired up and he set his keyboard to clacking like one of the console cowboys in his novel Neuromancer. The cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction was born. In that novel he also introduced readers to the Sprawl. It was further explored in the books two sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Collectively, the Sprawl trilogy.
Like the wires and roads that lead in and out of Boston, heavy internet connectivity and Sprawl seem to go together. For the most part, the beginning of the internet was an urban affair, with its primary nodes being housed in universities, research centers and military installations. Punk music also thrived on urban existence, springing up as it did in various ways, and somewhat independently, as a kind of metropolitan spore in the cities of London, New York, San Francisco and L.A. Punk set out to rewind the dial back to the primitive impulse at the heart of rock music, and the pulsing fecund mold spores at its heart soon migrated to other cities around the world. Though there were individuals and clusters of punks in some rural areas, just as their were terminals to access the internet, but the punk scene and hackers scenes both started their development in polluted cities.
In Gibson’s books, the Sprawl is a specific cluster of interconnected cities and urban centers that have all congealed together due to unmitigated development and growth. The Sprawl starts in Boston and advances all the way down to Atlanta. It’s the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, to give its official name, or BAMA, to share the banging acronym. Rot spreads not so much through wood and brick, as it does through another block being covered in concrete, asphalt, and new building made from cheap materials, with lots of plastics inside, stretching all the way from Boston, down into dirty heart of New York, enveloping Providence and all of Rhode Islands smallness. From there the Sprawl drifts down into Philadelphia, New Jersey, continuing its slick unfurling down the east coast and swamping Atlanta and any derelict town it happens to encounter in sick and seeping slime.
America hasn’t yet reached the level of urban growth imagined by Gibson, but regional planners do use similar phrases in their descriptions of bustling interconnected cities. The Northeast Megalopolis is one. It’s no coincidince that it starts in the Boston suburbs and creeps all the way down along Route 1, Insterstate-95 and the Northeastern Corridor train line down into the swamplands of Washington D.C.
The Piedmont Atlantic megaregion is another, and flows westward from Charlotte to Atlanta, to Birmingham with spurs going up to Nashville and further west to Memphis. The cities clustered around the Great Lakes form another megaregion, as do the ones flowing up from San Francisco to Portland to Seattle to Vancouver, and so on. They become a megalopolis when little rural space is left between the clusters of cities. The cities start losing their local identity and get absorbed into the regional slop of garmonbozia when the flow of goods and people between them tends to stay intermeshed, even as the legality of the towns and cities remains distinct. In Gibson’s Sprawl, and our own, much of that mesh between the districts now tends to be fiber optical and tele-communicative links. Our empire of wires, first strung together between outposts, is now a copper knot embedded within decrepit infrastructure.
Perhaps something of the raumgeist remains in these locations, but it must be teased out by psychogeographers whose psychic senses are attuned to the spirit of place, and who don’t mind following up their intuitions with time spent in psychohistorical study in libraries and archives.
In the Sprawl, the smell of exhaust and fry grease from the fast food trucks mingles along with the cook fires drifting out of homeless camps and the summer sweat of the great unwashed. The sound of metro buses hitting pot holes and of aching trains running on tracks above is abetted by sirens, shouting, gunfire. Dandelions grow up in the concrete and asphalt cracks, and a dead fox rots beneath the overpass. Crows alight on the high tension wires sparking and humming with electricity, the juice that powers it all, dug up from the earth blood of oil, and ancient veins of coal.
Such a fictional vision, and its real world counterpart, reminds us there are many positive aspects to the limits of growth, the most positive being the limitation that there just won’t be enough resources for the Sprawl to sprawl forever. Depleted resources mean that some of the worst features of Gibson’s Sprawl will remain fiction. Some parts of his future are already distributed, even if they aren’t distributed evenly, and there are aspects of his world well worth exploring in this psychohistorical drift.
In Gibson’s vision, the Boston-Atlanta-Metropolitan-Axis is one vast cancerous rambling of, fungus that is urbanoid in its character. A massive incomplete geodesic dome in the style of Buckminster Fuller covers much of BAMA, an engineering project with unintended consequences. During the day parts of the dome get heated up, causing internal weather in the neighborhoods beneath it, strong and dangerous winds that wreak havoc. Inside the residents lack a connection to natural weather outside the dome, because the sight of the sky gets blocked by cloudy plastic. It hardly matters to most of the netizens because so many of them are constantly plugged into the matrix anyway. In other places the geodesic cells that were supposed to protect the city from acid rain are ruptured, letting in water, which first collects and then pours in buckets heavier than a rain shower. When the sun starts to come up, the dome filters the light and makes it gray and pink instead of golden.
In the second book, Count Zero, Gibson gives this description:
“The condos of Barrytown looked like some gray-white fungus, spreading to the horizon. It was nearly dark and he could make out a pink glow, beyond the last range of condo racks.
‘That’s the Sprawl over there, isn’t it? That pink.’
‘That’s right, but the closer you get, less pretty it looks. How’d you like to go there, Bobby?’”
It’s interesting that in the quote from Count Zero, he says that the Barrytown neighborhood of the Sprawl looks “gray-white fungus.” Benton MacKaye also characterized relentless and unplanned urban expansion as a kind of “metropolitan mold.”
In his introduction to MacKaye’s book The New Exploration, Lewis Mumford describes how the spread of the “uncontrolled flow of population into ever more distant areas of the conurbation results in the coalescence of ever larger and looser urbanoid masses, a thinly spread conglomeration of homes, shopping centers, and factory sites adrift in a vast sea of car parks, whose planless existence provides excuse for the constantly multiplying expressways and cloverleafs and space-eating traffic interchanges that absorb, for the exaggerated needs of transportation, the time, the energy, the money, and the human effort that go into more significant aspects of life.”
Mumford himself sometimes called our massed dwellings “urbanoid.” There is is a certain frisson between Mumford’s urbanoid dwellings, MacKaye’s mold and Gibson’s fungoid city.
The origin of the word sprawl for this unplanned, uncontrolled, in many cases unwanted growth, goes back to Earle Draper, a city planner in the southeast, who gave the word its urban spin in 1937. Draper worked hard. He had specialized in the development of upper-class residential neighborhoods, and designed hundreds of them over the south during the course of his life. In this respect he contributed to the suburban problem even as he gave us a name to describe one of the effects of suburban flight. He was also very active in creating planned communities and industrial towns in Tennessee. The town of Norris was one of these places he created. Now its part of greater Knoxville, that is, the Piedmont Atlantic Megaregion.
This sun baked geography of concrete expands into the nowhere of a television tuned to a dead channel. The flight from blight has created more blight. Now the blight spreads into the dead malls of the internet. The dead malls of the city are reflected back into those vaporwave mirrorshades. Online retail squashes mom and pop shops who reopen on Etsy; Etsy overtaken by AI bots hooked up to 3-D printers spitting out the next plastic keychain to be sold in the flea market at the empty parking lot in an abandoned strip mall on the outskirts of an economically decayed neighborhood.
When so many of us are jacked-in all the time, there is a real need to jack off, to unplug from the network effect, to put the phone on silence, and disengage from the endless doomscroll of the forever culture wars.
Yet as much as a person might want to get away from the Sprawl, out into some part of the world that is forested, that has a connection to green, it just can’t be easily done. Planes fly overhead on a hike. A group of teens bring a boom box to the lake where it could have been a refreshing swim. Noise is itself however offers an avenue of escape. It’s in the Sprawl where a person needs to wrap themselves up in the cocoon made of headphones. Blocking out the external sounds that try to get inside.
On their album Escape from Noise, The media collective Negativland asked the question, “Is there any escape from noise?” In the process of finding an answer to their probe, they created more dithering dissonance. That dissonance can be extremely enjoyable. Sometimes out is the only way in, and the thing that is part of the disease is also part of the cure.
In Gibson’s short story, Burning Chrome, the character Automatic Jack knows there is no escaping the Sprawl. “So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.”
In Gibson’s world, the youth of the Sprawl are quick to adopt new styles and fads. Subcultures like the Lo-Teks, the Big Scientists, the Gothicks and the Panther Moderns flourish, but also disappear, to be taken over by new fads and subcultures.
Such was the fate of the very real subculture around No Wave music, and New York City was a the prime node for that undulating mass organism of mold.
THE FUNGICIDE OF NO WAVE
If the smell of the Sprawl is fry grease, petroleum and evaporating rain, all cast in a pink neon glow, then its sound is the synthetic nihilism of No Wave music as it gets further refracted into the distorted frequency fuzz of noise rock, its more palatable bastard child. No Wave is often more appreciated by the musical gourmand, while noise rock can be enjoyed by those searching for a quick listen at the hot dog or Ramen stand, under the ever present rain.
No Wave is the kind of music that could only have originated in New York City during the 1970s, a decade that saw it sink into major decline, crime and social disintegration. In 1975 NYC had been driven to the edge of economic default. This had been the result of a series of dumb decisions. It led to further bad decisions, such as giving control of the city budget to a group of bankers. From there, drastic cuts to welfare, city services, and even the cities own bureaucracy sent the metropolis into further convulsions. As a place with “No Future” it was a perfect spawning ground for punk, No Wave, and noise rock. The avantgarde of the city were already sequestered in their lofts making happening arts scenes when scruffy punk kids came to town looking for cheap rent or places to squat while they made a life not cast in the suburban mold.
Goethe is often quoted as having said “architecture is frozen music.” The architecture of brutalism is mimicked in No Wave with its abrasive sonic minimalism. It has the musical texture of concrete, the repetitive rhythms of jack hammers, and massive slabs of raw noise and texture are emphasized over melody. No Wave was a wrecking ball taken to music. It shared similar aims to the Industrial music genre spawned by Throbbing Gristle and their cohorts in England. Later cross pollination from the likes of Lydia Lunch and other No Wavers with industrial musicians would further entrench these bonds like rebar into cement.
The key groups in No Wave were Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, fronted by Lydia Lunch, DNA, Mars and Contortions. Another crucial group in the mix was Theoretical Girls, formed by Glenn Branca. The key influence was the band Suicide, and the 20th centuries avantgarde luminaries in the realms of dissonance, noise and repetitive minimal gestures, along with a helping from free jazz, and the syncopated rhythms of drum machines found in disco.
Like so many others who had been lured to the Big Apple, Branca came to New York to be involved in theater. And like so many others who had started off with the intention of being involved in one form of art, he found himself doing music instead. After building a stage in a loft with his friend Jeff Lohn, he started thinking of having a “fucking band.” They already had the stage to play on. “This band is our theater group so to speak …that was Theoretical Girls,” he said in the documentary Kill Your Idols.
True to their name, the influence of Theoretical Girls is more to their reputation and the way they were able to put musical concepts into circulation, rather than being prolific recording artists or for playing a ton of shows. They only put out one 7 inch single, and only played about twenty gigs. But such is the nature of the underground, and the fringe in general, that small hinges open big doors. Some small thing that happens, and is only embraced at first by a few people, can go on to have big implications. That is the power of the fringe, lunatic or otherwise.
The song U.S. Millie on the A side was written by Lohn and has a militant marching snare drum as the central element, along with a propulsive keyboard line. The lyrics seem appropriate to the exploration of America’s psychic underbelly. Howard Johnson, one of Jonathan Richman’s favorite institutions, turns up again here, but without the innocence of a hot meal and place to rest.
“Howard Johnson, Puerto Rico / Texaco Co., Jews for Jesus / Ms. Magazine, Danon Yogurt / Scientology, East Germany / That’s Go Go Billy and U.S. Millie.”
Theoretical Girls played in the pivotal No Wave five night music fest organized by Michael Zwack and Robert Longo at the non-profit Artists Spaces gallery. Other groups that played were Rhys Chatham’s group Gynecologists, and another group fronted by Branca, Daily Life (that also featured Christine Hahn, originally from Cincinnati.) This event was the ground zero for the further repercussions from the short-lived explosion of No Wave.
It was also a bit of a battleground. Many of the hangers on in the No Wave scene were there as a refuge from the pretensions of New Yorks art scene. Their wrecking ball attitude and nihilistic stance was aimed at the institution of art just as much as it was at the commodified corpse of rock. Yet the Artist Spaces gallery was a newly ramped up art institution, its usual soirees now turned into a blitzkrieg of barbarous musical evocation. There were still ways to cash in on that, though.
Brian Eno had been in the audience at the festival during the final two days of the show. He was really blown out of the water by their reductionist take on popular and experimental sounds. He had come to New York to produce the Talking Heads album More Songs About Buildings and Food. The No Wave artists were doing something else altogether, and he thought the scene should be documented. Filmmaker and art world denizen Diego Cortez was in the scene and Eno tapped his shoulder to put together a compilation. The result was the 1978 comp No New York.
If Music for Airports was Brian Eno’s most ignorable record, the No New York album he helped curate and produce was saturated with the gnarly overtones that emitted toxic fumes against the cities own toxicity. Released on the Antilles label, it resides at an opposite pole from the relaxing minimalism of ambient. It’s a kind of music you can’t not pay attention to, and was even known to cause listener’s physical pain.
Noise music can be a shield. No Wave provided a shield for its makers and fans. According to homeopathic medical theory like cures like. Noise is a cocoon to slip into when the outside world itself becomes so abrasive and nihilist, it calms one down amidst the spasming multitudes of the city that never sleeps. What else to do on those restless nights when the agitation of modern life demanded expression, except use whatever means one had available to make noise? Strip away the rock from punk and see the exquisiteness of what lies beneath. No Wave was like a fungicide against the metropolitan mold.
It is argued how this particular grouping of bands was given the moniker No Wave. Certainly it was in reaction to the poppy growth of New Wave with its punchy melodies and cheap hooks, ready to suck a listener in and tell them how to feel. One story claims that it was Lydia Lunch who first used the term in an interview with Roy Trakin for the magazine New York Rocker. Others say it was musician and writer Chris Nelson in a piece he had written for New York Rocker. Thurston Moore claims different. He had come to the city in search of punk, and he claimed that he saw the words No Wave spray painted on the walls of CBGB before it ever appeared in the music press. Given that this is an essay about the metropolitan mold it seems fitting the term No Wave had its debut as graffiti. This is the Sprawl after all, where graffiti is gospel.
As Moore recalls, “While it was happening nobody even knew that it was called No Wave, and as soon as it started becoming called No Wave it was already in sort of a dissipation mode. The first time I saw name [the term] No Wave was not in the SoHo Weekly News when Roy Trakin was interviewing Lydia, at least I don’t remember. I remember seeing it spray-painted in front of the CBGB Second Avenue Theater, which used to be the Anderson Theater, where the Yardbirds played. Hilly and his wife had opened up the Anderson Theater, renamed it CBGB Second Avenue Theater and attempted to have a bigger space for bands. I remember going there a couple of times and seeing Blondie and Patti Smith and Richard Hell. It was fun, but you knew it was a disaster because it was a seated venue and people were just smoking pot in there and drinking, and the fire marshals had their eye on it. It just couldn’t last, and finally they closed it down after month or two. And somebody had spray-painted on the front of it, ‘No Wave.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s kind of clever.’”
In the work of Thurston Moore and the band Sonic Youth he played in, something of the DNA of the No Wave scene remained.
SONIC DETRITUS
Three souls found their way into the gritty and neglected petri dish of New York during its insolvent years of economic crisis. Thurston Moore had come to pursue a life in punk, the energy of which thrilled him to no end. Kim Gordon, who had arrived from the west coast to pursue a life in the arts, and got a gig writing for Artforum. Lee Ranaldo had been a native of the state, growing up in Long Island, and gone to art school in Binghamton, before finding his way to the crusty core of NYC.
It didn’t take long for Ranaldo to go from art student to band member, starting with the Flucts, and then finding a spot in Rhy Chatham’s Guitar Trio, before settling into a spot in Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra.
These guitar orchestras became Branca’s hallmark. In 1980 he had released Lesson No. 1, his first album under his given name, and after that he started getting very interested in creating music for ensembles of guitar players. His 1981 album The Ascension featured Ranaldo as one of his players. After these ensemble versions of his entrancing microtonal and heavy guitar music, Branca graduated to symphonies. (Industrial percussion stalwart Z’ev joined him for Symphony No. 2.) Branca had been influenced by the scientist of sound Hermann von Helmholtz, and instrument builder and composer in the American experimental tradition, Harry Partch. He was also indebted in this work to the theories of dissonance and its spiritual value that came from the astrologer, theosophist and arch-modernist, Dane Rudhyar.
Branca and his efforts would remain a foundational influence on Sonic Youth, as Thurston Moore also later played in his ensembles. Ranaldo and Moore appeared on the first three recordings of Branca’s symphonies. That other angel of noise rock, Michael Gira, was under Branca’s spell as well. He went on to form Swans, along with Dan Brau and Aglis Kizys who also played in the detuned orchestra. Swans can be considered the other helix from the DNA of No Wave whose code went into noise rock. For a time the two bands even shared a rehearsal space.
As with many other composers, conductors, writers and artists, Branca had a reputation for being a bit of an egomaniac. When the components of Sonic Youth swirled together in the early eighties, with Moore meeting Ranaldo and Bob Bert, Gordon meeting Moore, and the group coming together in sonic synergy, Ranaldo and Moore still worked with Branca. Yet they were starting to get antsy to focus with intense purpose on their own initiative. Ranaldo had to tell Branca that they were leaving his group. Sonic Youth was the thing.
Sonic Youth channeled their own darkly incipient Americana into their proceedings. They also channeled their prolific readings. At some point Kim Gordon and the other members of the band became enamored of William Gibson. The Sprawl, named after Gibson’s locale, appears as one of the center piece songs on Daydream Nation, an album that can be listened to as a version of America seen through mirrorshades.
Daydream Nation came out ten years after No New York began its infamous rotations and circulations. The year was 1988. New York City was only just starting to recover from the financial bailout it had orchestrated in the previous decade. People were starting to dream again about the possibilities inherent in the American experiment.
Sonic Youth was also hitting their stride. They’d taken elements of No Wave, and their own eclectic listening, interest in the subculture and ferocity of hardcore, and melded it with the theoretical underpinnings of the avantgarde art they loved, but infused it with a melody that reached out beyond those confines and into the hearts of the jaded American youth of urban and suburban conclaves who took their message and eloped with it on a long honeymoon.
On the opening track Moore sings, “it’s getting kind of quiet in my city head / it takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed.” The Sprawl comes alive when youth take to the streets, whether to tangle with the establishment, or to rumble with one another.
“The Sprawl” launches just after the fuse of “Silver Rocket,” finishes its distorted explosion. Gordon is singing on this one. Along with the influence of Gibson, the lyrics from the first verset were taken from the Denis Johnson novel, The Stars at Noon, a novel about an American woman stuck in Nicaragua during the Sandinista years and the time of “the stupid CIA” and their regime change operations, with corruption on all sides. This literary cross referencing is very apropos for a song inspired by Gibson, as his own novels frequently globe hop between the Sprawl, central America, Europe, and Japan.
The essential verse is when Gordon sings, “I grew up in a shotgun row / Sliding down the hill / Out front were the big machines / Still and rusty now, I guess / Out back was the river / And that big sign down the road / That’s where it all started.”
It conjures up visions of tenements, followed again by the recurring mantra, “Come on down to the store / You can buy some more, and more, and more, and more,” here a bodega where aside from the regular products on the shelf, all kinds of black market goods might be available.
The song “Hey Joni” written and sung by Ranaldo is as much a tribute to Joni Mitchell and the rock standard “Hey Joe” as it is another tip of the hat to Gibson when he sings, “In this broken town, can you still jack in / And know what to do?”
Rock music about the road is nothing new in the genre. Noise rock music about The Sprawl is something else all together.
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Read the other parts of the American Psychogeography series:
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Loved this one, man. Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy was pretty formative for me, and nearly all my friends were Sonic Youth fans. Among my friends, I find that I still try to explain how I feel about where we live and the kind of world we inhabit by referencing Gibson's nomenclature. I used to find it fascinating how close to realized Gibson's world was becoming. I don't find it fascinating anymore. I'm Team Lo Tek from here on out.
I first saw The Sprawl in 1968. I was visiting my sister in Los Gatos, California. The next time I noticed it was in Tempe, Arizona in 1979. One day I was walking between the Sky Harbor airport and Tempe. I noticed a sign for an industrial park being developed by Cabot, Cabot, and Forbes. I hadn't seen that name since the early sixties, when route 128 was lined with new industrial parks, all of them being developed by Cabot, Cabot, and Forbes.