Various Artists : New York Noise: Dance Music From the New York Underground 1978-1982
Soul Jazz
2003

Postmodernism” may have become accepted as critical shorthand for the blending of boundaries and genres that characterizes much of the late 20th century. But I’ve always felt the term betrayed a certain clinical aridity — an ivory tower iciness, if you will — that does a disservice to the gleefully plunderous spirit that divines the best so-called “po-mo” art.

Which is why I’ve always preferred the idea of ‘cross-pollination’ — the transfer of pollen from the anther of one plant to the flowers of a different plant — as a descriptive term for the multi-genre mash-up. It conveys more of the vitality, and the inter-connectedness, involved in the cross-disciplinary artistic pursuit. And, moreover, it neatly implies the idea of art as an eco-system, one in which each part co-exists in an interdependent web, one prone to sudden flourishes, odd detours, and the occasional strange evolutionary dead-ends.

Why all the pontificating? It’s just a line of thought that’s been wandering ’round my brain since I started listening to Soul Jazz’s new release New York Noise: Dance Music From the New York Underground 1978-1982. A collection of tracks ranging from the classic, (Liquid Liquid and Glenn Branca), to the utterly obscure (The Dance, Lizzy Mercier Lescloux), New York Noise is one of those rare compilations that actually conveys the sense of a viable community, one in which the sharing and development of ideas takes precedent over trivial things, like, y’know, getting a major label contract or something.

Each band sounds like one part of a larger puzzle, a continuation and combination of lines of escape threaded through the early Eighties New York scene.

And, more importantly still, each and every band sounds damn good — and surprisingly current, given that the latest of these tracks is over 20 years old. Take Liquid Liquid, made famous by their sampled usage in Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines: Don’t Do it” and by the Grand Royal reissue in 1997, whose lead-off track “Optimo” cleverly layers minimalist rhythmic patterns over a one-note bass-line and repetitive vocals to create an effect that still sounds refreshingly futuristic, the kind of dance music to which the futureworld denizens of Slava Tsukerman’s “Liquid Sky” might get their groove on. Or the Contortions’ “Contort Yourself,” which plies a punk beat against dirt-cheap guitars and wayward sax lines to create the erratic backdrop for James Chance’s growling blues vocals.

Drawing at once from early James Brown, free jazz, and the early hip-hop inclination towards ultra-simple basslines, the Contortions manage to avoid straight pastiche, instead combining elements with an open-mindedness and a righteous sense of abandon. The end result melds together a slew of genres to offer a mutant hybrid that stills sounds like a musical avenue well worth future exploration.

Of course, perhaps the freshness of the material shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, eighties punk-funk is the buzzword of the day for a new generation of indie-rockers. But whereas much of the current crop of white boy punk-funkateers sounds disappointingly like, well, white boy punk funkateers, New York Noise sounds truly and openly multi-ethnic, the kind of strangely natural/unnatural blending that could only take place in the crucible of ethnicities and musical trends of a place like early eighties NYC. The most successful tracks refigure the cliches of early eighties dance and hip-hop with the weirdoid sensibilities of underground music.

The Dance, who supply perhaps the best track with “Do Dada”, take as a starting point the kind of new wave that would make Blondie famous, but cut it up with strange drum/violin breakdown and a whooping babel of vocals that undercut the funk with a vertiginous sense of schizophrenia. Rahmelzee vs K. Rob’s “Beat Bop” cruises a prime piece of slo-mo hip-hop rhythm overlaid with funk guitar, but then fuck things up with a random swirl of percussion that flies from speaker to speaker while occasionally plying the stoned rhymes with massive amounts of reverb for a genuinely spooked-out collision of party and paranoia. And that’s not even mentioning the slyly straightforward robofunk of Dinosaur L, the haughty iciness of the Bush Tetras, or the proto-surf guitar of Lizzy Mercier Descloux.

But don’t get hung up on individual achievements: after all, this is a document of a community, not just a random collection of early punk-funk explorers. And indeed, played start-to-finish, New York Noise begins to cohere into a joyously multi-hued mass, where hip-hop is a natural cousin of atonal noise, where minimalism becomes the perfect complement to funk, and where not even the skronked-out mess of DNA or the melodramatic ultra-seriousness of Glenn Branca can get in the way of a good party. New York Noise? Sounds like heaven to me.