When describing hardcore punk music, Lester Bangs wrote that “hardcore is the womb.”
The intense, focused sound of a structured three-chord, hardcore punk attack provided the listener with an immersion. In that immersion was a comfort and safety; a place where kids who felt alienated and bored could be distracted, connect with a community and feel protected from outsiders who didn’t “get it.”
The band Suicide is the anti-womb. Vocalist Alan Vega and instrumentalist Marty Rev provided an immersion all right, but they gave us nothing to provide any sort of comfort.
Nothing.
Whether deliberately or not, Vega and Rev confronted every convention of the late ’60s and early ’70s popular music in order to deliver their powerful art form. They are generally credited with giving rise to the “No Wave” movement that rejected all norms.
In a world of four-piece rock bands, they were a duo. In a sea of guitars and drums, they were a singer and synthesizer. When there was a need for pretty songs of rebellion in standard verse/chorus format, they gave us no discernible beats or hooks. Every show was different: Even Suicide didn’t know what Suicide was going to do next.
By stripping away convention, Suicide confronted listeners with what they feared most; namely, themselves. When people went to Vega and Rev for more standard or predictable versions of entertainment, they were forced to marinate in the very states of being that they most feared — emptiness, loneliness, confusion. By not providing the conventions on which their audience so desperately depended, Suicide caused anger, panic and revulsion.
Like children who grow up to appreciate parents who gave us what we needed, but not what we wanted at the time, the world is now coming around and recognizing that Suicide was indeed a groundbreaking and incendiary band with profound artistic influence. The Pitchfork staff picked Suicide’s eponymous first album as one of the top 100 of the ’70s. Similarly, Rolling Stone now labels Suicide’s first album as one of the 500 best albums of all time, and Vega and Rev as one of the top 20 songwriting duos of all time.
We can now see that Suicide has been inviting us to take a “No Wave” approach in our own lives.
If we can learn not only to accept the parts of ourselves that we fear, but also challenge the arbitrary rules by which we live, we can break ourselves down — commit a metaphorical suicide — and build ourselves back up, emerging with our own “beautiful randomness.”
Existential philosophers have posited that the essence of human existence is about recognizing that there is no universal truth. Each person has his or her own meaning by which we make decisions. Existential anxiety is the fear of living in a world where there is no single rationality. Understanding and recognizing this and searching for one’s own meaning, in theory, creates an authentic and healthy life.
There is evidence that acceptance-based therapies that help people understand these feelings through unconditional acceptance and exploration of one’s experience can be efficacious in managing a range of mental health issues, including depression and substance-abuse disorders.
To understand Suicide’s artistic process, it is important to consider both the artistic and social context of the time. Vega and Rev were playing music in the late ’60s and early ’70s in New York City, surrounded by the energy of protest against the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration, as well as by the proto-punk music of bands, such as the Stooges and the Velvet Underground.
Rev described his influences, which included among other things, Stravinsky, Picasso and rock ’n’ roll: “When I was growing up on rock ’n’ roll, it was imprinting various messages inside of me — what I saw, what I heard, what I loved. I think I innately went to that very essential something; how it was striking me,” Rev said. “If there is a rejection, an impossibility to accept certain things aesthetically, artistically; it could very well mirror an impossibility or a total disenchantment with the social or political thought around you at the same time. Everyone has a sense of alienation to an extent. I think it goes beyond that, when it comes to art.”
Vega, who was originally and continues to be a visual artist, told me, “The times were different. We had the war going on. I was so anti-war. All things were happening at the same time. And for some reason I would pick it all up. Everything from everything.”
“I like everything. Or I hate everything. I never know.”
Suicide chose early on not to be bound by convention because it limited artistic expression. “As soon as you have an institution, you have certain generalities,” Rev explained. “You have knowledge coming down from a more central base. So, it’s really always the individual’s ability and decision to take what they’re telling you and go beyond.”
Moreover, there was less room to create something new in the context of existing norms. “As soon as you put together a group at that point in time — say, guitar, bass, drums — you’re not going to go that radically far in a restructuring of the music. Because the group itself at that point was to some extent defining what the music was going to be. As soon as you put together a symphony orchestra today, you can make a very profound, good piece, but is it going to have the effect of say Wagner’s symphony orchestra? Or even Mahler’s, Debussy, certainly, Stravinsky, Schoenberg’s?”
“You’re storming the Bastille, and the Bastille is down. So it’s not like you’re storming it every day, because you already did.”
So this meant stripping away the expectations and norms to get to the core of what they wanted to express. “You need to do that to hear something really innately intense from what’s inside you. A simplistic dynamism of what the music always meant to you,” Rev said.
Vega agreed. “People would have a box with strings. And they would make a gem off of a guitar. A lousy guitar and a pickup. That’s it. That’s the kind of music I want,” he said.
And so before a single note was played, or a single word was sung, the very core of Suicide’s artistic process was to accept their experience as meaningful and their artistic experience, despite being unorthodox, as valid.
“I didn’t set out to play something that people did not feel comfortable in, or play something that they never heard. I just projected essentially what I hear, based on what is the only place I can go — where I aspire to musically, and what I aspire to hear,” Rev said.
“I need to do what I hear, because it works for me.”
Vega agreed. “It didn’t matter. We didn’t give a shit. We played. We listened to ourselves.
I took care of my business, which was bizarre. And Marty took care of his business. And for some reason it worked,” he explained.
To be sure, one of the keys to Suicide’s revolutionary sound was that they were immersed in their own experience, rather than deliberately making an artistic or political statement. At the core of the confrontation was how entirely not self-conscious it was. In fact, it almost needed to be as such in order to work, because once you are revolting against something you are defined by it.
“It wasn’t a confrontation, in the sense that the refusal came from something internal. The refusal came from the fact that it didn’t sound right to me. It didn’t sound like what was going to work for me,” Rev explained. “So, initially, it wasn’t like I’m not going to do this because this is what’s going on now. My artistic development up to that time had me searching apparently for something fresh and that really moved me. That being the case, everything that was built into it, in terms of my inner and outer expression of intensity, seems to have created the kind of vibe that seemed at the time certainly and outwardly, overtly confrontational.”
“It’s like my fingerprint.”
Besides, standard songwriting simply wouldn’t work for Suicide. “If I didn’t do something with verse chorus, it was because I could hear something on the radio and go, ‘That’s a great song from that more-standard approach,’” Rev explained. “But when I did it, it wasn’t right. It didn’t express something in me that needed to be, that I needed to go to. It’s like a painter that puts colors on a canvas. Get six painters, and they’re going to arrange those colors possibly in six different ways.”
Vega still felt that Suicide had a popular sound. “I thought everything we did was commercial,” he said.
And while Suicide’s music was a total shift from music at that time, their live shows were perhaps even more confrontational. One reason why this was jarring was because of people’s purpose in seeing live music; namely, to be entertained. The very social context and unease that informed Suicide’s work was what many people were hoping to avoid, or at least have a clear path to protest.
Elizabeth Lemere, Vega’s wife and manager for the past 30 years, told me, “People would come off the streets expecting to be entertained. And that was never what it was about. And so their whole ethos was like, ‘We’re not here to entertain you. This is not an escape. We’re throwing what’s happening in the world right back at you, and you have to deal with it. And if you can’t deal with it, you have to leave’ — almost that Theatre of the Absurd or Theatre of Cruelty. I’m going to push you out of your complacency by confronting you.”
Rev recognized the implicit expectation. “People going out to any kind of music, and especially high-energy music, rock — it’s always been, since its inception, a place where people not only let off energy, but kind of felt this kind of womb situation, where they are all together, and they’re dancing it out and dancing with each other,” he said.
Vega described rejecting the fundamental premise of entertainment as part of Suicide’s art from the beginning. “I’d kill myself if I’d have to do the same songs over and over again, because it’s what the people want,” he said. “It’s always been, ‘I’m the artist, and I’m creating what I’m creating in the moment.’”
But at the same time, Vega did care, which may have fueled the tension he experienced when performing. “I never really planned on doing anything in music or being on stage. It’s scary as shit to me. I was the front guy. I cared, although it didn’t appear that way. I was the front guy, and I was worried about everybody else that was at our gig.”
Vega described the methods he used to address the mixed feelings — to put it delicately — that people often had at Suicide shows. “We had all kinds of confrontations; police, club owners. We had all kinds of problems. ‘Hands up!’ That was our introduction.”
Vega often employed a technique previously championed by Iggy Pop; namely, self-injury. “I never hurt anybody. But I’d hit myself with a chain, cut myself with razors,” Vega said. “I was trying to shock them. Or wake them up. Or anything. Anything I could use. I used to scream at them illegibly. I screamed like crazy.”
Vega described going to extraordinary lengths to make sure people stayed at the show. “There was one door. I locked the door. Refused to let anybody out,” Vega said. “Everybody was pounding. They were crazy. I said, ‘Fuck you. You’re stuck with me.’ And people freaked.”
“I was crazier than they were. That’s one way of quieting them down.”
But it was always the interplay between Rev and Vega that produced the most exciting and unpredictable dynamic. Vega recalled a particular show where their styles clashed. “He does things a little bit slowly, and I’m hyper. But that’s OK,” he explained. “We did a big gig in Boston. I warned Marty, ‘Let’s not do a long song, a ballad. Do a short thing, and get on with it. Sure enough, he drones on and on and on. And I finally left. I walked out. And then people followed me backstage.”
Overall, what emerged was a revolutionary artistic statement that transcended music. Artist and journalist Neil Plotkin described the importance of Suicide in the context of the punk rock and New Wave music that was also emerging in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
“In art, we tend to confuse evolution for revolution. We think that by changing the solution to old problems things have been radically transformed. But only by altering the premises is there a real revolution. Punk rock is seen as a revolution in the history of rock ’n’ roll, rather it was actually just a progression. It was rock ’n’ roll a bit simpler and rougher than what had come before,” Plotkin said. “The band Suicide seems at first blush to have been confrontational in the way many early punk bands were. But Suicide was a much more radical band, and the challenges were much deeper. Their music conflicted with the very idea of what music could be. The audience gets mad because this isn’t the evolution that they wanted. Rather, this is a revolution.”
Plotkin feels that the closest artistic analogue to Suicide is actually more from the visual-art world than the music world. “The paintings by the Impressionists, viewed as utterly radical in their day, are now seen as a step change. It wasn’t until the Dadaists in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire and Marcel Duchamp that the premises of what art could be was truly challenged,” he explained. “The Dadaists created work using found images and glued things together to create new meanings. These artists skipped the questioning of the conclusions and instead questioned the premises of what art could be. In the same way, Suicide broke down what people can expect from music.”
Rev reflected on this comparison. “Certain things stand out. Impressionism was considered the most savage, barbaric movement in art at the time. Anything that’s not the status quo will have something against it from the powers that be. Mozart … he went to a pauper’s burial.”
Vega sees the connection. “Dadaists — they were, like, crazy,” he said.
But less crazy is the evidence that art can be a great form of coping. For example, research demonstrates that listening to or playing music can improve symptoms of depression, anxiety and chronic pain. In addition, expressing emotions through activities such as writing can improve mood and reduce unhealthy stress responses.
The particular power of Suicide’s art is that on the other side of the disturbance, of the confrontation, is the potential to approach one’s life with the same openness and acceptance with which Vega and Rev approach their art. Vega explained that by looking at the truth that surrounds us, one can find beauty and horror — but that’s OK. To illustrate this point, Vega talked about their song “Frankie Teardrop,” which is about a young father driven to murder of his family and suicide. “Because that’s the truth of it. Frankie Teardrop was real. The most beautiful thing in the world or the most horrific thing in the world is real,” he said.
Because art encompasses such extremes of beauty and horror, Vega seeks out rather than avoids what is uncomfortable. He recalls that for him, not being nervous meant he wasn’t pushing himself creatively. “Once, for a year, I stopped giving a shit,” Vega said. “Elvis Presley always was nervous. So was I. I imagine so was everybody else. And then all of a sudden, I wasn’t nervous any more. So I thought, ‘OK, it must be the end of the line. I don’t give a shit. So why am I doing it?”
Suicide’s emotional impact on their fans has spanned tremendous range as well. “We’ve seen breakdowns as a result of gigs that we did. On the other end, we’ve seen unhealthy people come out of a whole thing and say, ‘You brought me back to health. You saved my life.’ Complete breakdowns to complete health. It works both ways,” Vega said.
Rev added, “Art can give you wisdom, I believe, in the long run. The Apollonic view [is] you can fulfill yourself totally through art through seeking Parnassus. But it’s maybe growth through wisdom in the long run. It takes a life. But the art itself is totally healthy.”
“We have to feel these things — joy, pain, loss. It’s just like a game. The longer you play it, the more you get to know it. And you learn how to play it better. Innovation always causes a certain disruption. And then people can eventually look at it and say, ‘It’s OK. I’m not threatened by this.’”
What can emerge then is a peace, one in which we are enough “us” to be open. Rev saw this with early supporters such as David Johansen of the New York Dolls. “A certain confidence … an inner sense of this not being a threat because you don’t feel that you’re going to lose something,” he said. “People are threatened by change, discomfort, what does it represent about the future. To some, they don’t give a shit. Maybe that was David.
“People who are really creative are not threatened.”
And that confidence in their art translates into a certain comfort for Vega and Rev in how they now approach their lives. Rev said, “That’s the great thing about doing art for your life. You learn to reflect on what’s happened before, and you learn how to absorb it more. At least make peace with yourself on what you decide.”
Vega concurs. “See, what’s interesting now is that I’m near the end of the line. And I could drop dead now. And I don’t give a shit. I could do anything I want,” he said.
“I need a place to die already.”
And as time has gone on, more people see what Johansen saw decades ago. Suicide’s influence is everywhere. It can be seen in any form of electronic music from Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails to groups such as Primal Scream and Neon Indian. And both Rev and Vega are as active as ever individually, and as Suicide, as they continue their path towards beautiful randomness.
“I love Marty. That’s the truth in a way — a beautiful randomness. That’s Marty and me,” Vega said. “There’s no reason for anything. And that’s good about it. We’re actually doing more stuff now than we did before. We stopped giving a shit. Who gives a shit? Do what you want. I’ll do what I want and the hell with it. And it turns out, for some reason, it’s more beautiful than ever. It’s more together than ever.”
One might ask: What’s left for Suicide?
According to Vega, “Well, everything else.”
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Psychology Today on July 18, 2016.
