JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

© 2007

Studio Noise as Folk Authenticity in Punk Rock Albums

Up all night hammering out a paper based on a Dead Kennedys album—yep, I was back in college again for sure.

For the record, I was in the first generation to write punk rock papers for college, part of that great tidal wave that went on to make punk praise de rigueur in music criticism, provided economic incentive for the travesty of punk band reunions, whored sardonics out to the meaningless world of corporate commercials and somehow wound up with the Warped Tour. I quit while I was ahead.

Anyhow, whereas my collegiate punk of yore was essentially enthusiastic fanzines delivered to amused profs, this version actually explores a territory I didn’t know much about, but whose appeal was never totally obvious to me, even though I succumb to it easily. This was an attempt to flog punk while also meditating on my own urges. I also like to think that the fawning references to earlier coursework and the course’s diversity policy are seamlessly integrated.

This piece was written for a UMass Boston course called “Universe of Music.”

Have your eyes stopped rolling enough to read again? Yeah, well, it was indeed a survey course, and frankly I expected it to be a breeze, the sort of thing my coach would sign me up for if I was on a football scholarship. But for such an elementary topic, the course was brilliantly arranged and endlessly surprising and engaging. I would never have guessed that it would begin with John Cage and make informative detours into talking drums, Norwegian fiddles, the love affair of the Schumanns and the protest songs of the Shona. That’ll teach me.

“Hold It! It’s Too Slow”: Studio Noise as Folk Authenticity in Punk Rock Albums

A tape of two bootleg recordings of live concerts by the seminal American punk rock band the Misfits spins in the stereo deck.¹ The instruments keep dropping out, and are severely out of tune when they don’t. The rhythm is sometimes off. The singer misses cues and moves so energetically he often can’t be heard. Audience members scream into the microphone. The band spends more time fruitlessly trying to tune its guitars than it does playing.

In short, it sounds wonderful.

While incredibly amateurish, it’s also passionate and authentic. Those aesthetics are the core of punk music, and led it to become a type of folk music revival—at least in style, if only rarely in substance.

Early punk (starting in 1976) had all the earmarks of folk music: amateur and participatory to the extreme; sometimes hostile to profit motives; rooted in the working classes (or slumming bohemia) of London and New York City.² Like the 1960s folk music subgenre of popular music, punk had to negotiate this aesthetic around the modern music industry. Adding a bit of Misfits-style live-show chaos to the studio was one tactic.

The first official punk acts, the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, deliberately created music that was “low-budget and easily accessible…simple and fast,” in response to the hyper-professional, stadium-concert aesthetic that was dominating rock music.³ The “Second Wave” of punk that followed them, maturing from about 1979 to 1982, turned the music into an international do-it-yourself art movement.⁴

Punk lived best as a subculture of live performances. But it obviously couldn’t avoid the commercial model of making albums. At the same time, many bands rejected the clean, highly produced sound associated with studio recordings, both by ideology and by necessity. Many influential bands—such as the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and Crass—rejected the corporate world and started their own record labels, despite having little or no experience, money or even equipment.⁵

Ill-mixed, unprofessional recordings thus became part of punk’s authenticity and unconventional excitement. In an early example, a professional music critic in 1979 praised the Dead Kennedys single “California Über Alles” for sounding “as dirty as a bear’s bum in production.”⁶

One tactic that appears on some seminal “Second Wave” recordings is the retention on the finished album of studio noise—banter between musicians, instrument tuning and technical comments by the production engineer—that would be edited out of any mainstream commercial recording.

An early example is the Misfits song “Teenagers from Mars.”⁷ The track begins with a mechanical beep, then the obviously unrehearsed voice of an engineer saying, “We’re rolling. This is take one. ‘Teenagers from Mars’ and ‘Children in Heat.’” As he speaks, there’s also the sound of someone tapping on a live microphone. The actual music then begins.

This studio artifact is treated as integral part of the song, remaining attached on two later compilation albums.⁸

Studio noise is also retained on an influential album by the British anarchist band the Subhumans.⁹ “Til the Pigs Come Round” begins with the sound of the band warming up, playing aimlessly, while the singer shouts for them to quiet “all the stupid noises.” There is a rough edit and some more banter, including someone shouting, “Are you ready?” and the singer responding, “Go!” and cursing as the music actually begins.

These artifacts may seem laughably sloppy and crude. However, they appear to fit punk ideals of anti-professionalism, demystification, shock and erasing boundaries between performer and audience.¹⁰ They combine the now-separate worlds of “live” and “recorded” music. They sound like recordings anyone could make—which is punk’s ethos in a nutshell.

However, it is unknown exactly why these, or any, bands left such studio noise in place. Early punk recording techniques were hardly the subject of serious analysis. And part of the spirit of punk is being deliberately anti-archival and creating new works rather than dwelling on and analyzing earlier ones.¹¹ I was unable to find anything more than casual references to them in musical literature.

However, video footage exists of the recording session for a major album that uses the technique pervasively: the Dead Kennedys’ “In God We Trust, Inc.,” a milestone of hardcore (i.e., hyper-fast/political) punk rock.¹² The footage reveals that its studio noise is authentic, not rehearsed.¹³ But it also shows that the band used it deliberately as part of the album’s overall attack on music industry aesthetics and politics.

The raggedly produced album races through eight songs in 15 minutes. Four of them begin with studio artifacts, all voiced by lead singer Jello Biafra (a.k.a. Eric Boucher).

On “Hyperactive Child,” Biafra begins with a burbling sound as if he is recovering from a slip of the tongue. He then says the song’s title and “Take four.”

After “Dog Bite” begins, Biafra shouts out, “Hold it! It’s too slow.” The band stops, then starts again at a faster pace.

“Nazi Punks Fuck Off” begins with Biafra’s voice cut off awkwardly: “‘…s Fuck Off,’ overproduced by Martin Hannett, take four.”

Finally, a cover of the theme from the TV show “Rawhide” begins with Biafra speaking in the faux cowboy accent with which he sings the song: “Goddamn, well, let’s do a tune called ‘Rawhide,’ OK? Goddamn tape’s rolling, let’s go.” The volume varies as Biafra apparently walks around the microphone.

The video footage shows that Biafra indeed would announce the song title and take each time. (The full band was recording live, playing songs over and over until they got one right.) He also indeed shouted, “Hold it!” every time he thought something went wrong. And he was certainly prone to attention-getting banter of all kinds.

But the artifacts are selectively retained and used. In fact, the “Hyperactive Child” intro appears to be edited in from the album’s first recording session, which was almost entirely unusable due to faulty 8-track tape.¹⁴ So some effort was applied.

Laying bare its own makings fits the album’s attitude toward any professional or traditional music. Other songs on the album parody church choirs and lite-jazz lounge music.

The Martin Hannett mentioned by Biafra was not really the album’s producer; he actually produced albums for better-known bands such as Joy Division.¹⁵ His “overproduced” comment is an antithetical joke.

Even the packaging of the cassette version of the album was dedicated to a direct assault on the music industry. Side Two had no songs on it. Instead, it instructed listeners, “Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help.” The tape-recording of albums was the Napster controversy of its day.

Like the Misfits and the Subhumans, the Dead Kennedys opposed the music industry not merely artistically, but politically—the two topics being indivisible in early punk. The vitriolic lyrics on “In God We Trust, Inc.” include tongue-lashings of organized religion; support for women’s abortion rights and gay rights; and the advice to religious fundamentalists that “God must be dead if you’re alive.” If it’s hard to imagine a major record label putting out something that sounds like “In God We Trust, Inc.,” it’s impossible, even today, to imagine one releasing something that talks like it.

The use of studio noise reflects a freedom from musical restrictions, which in turn reflects a freedom from sociopolitical restrictions. That freedom runs throughout the bewilderingly varied world of punk, a musical domain unusually open to the likes of all-women feminist bands, gay pride bands, even nationalist bands that sung exclusively in the Welsh language.¹⁶ Well-known is punk’s political/aesthetic influence on rap, which took the use of extraneous sound of all kinds to whole new realms.¹⁷

Accompanied by the raging speed of the music, the studio bits give the Dead Kennedys album an extraordinary immediacy and liveliness. It sounds like a rabid version of a folk song field recording.¹⁸

In this sense, studio noise is as much a part of the punk “sound” as the familiar bass, drums and guitar.

And in the context of the album’s other musical references, it can be seen as part of an avant-garde attack on commercial music and an assertion that the band is offering something more authentic. It wears its amateurism as a badge of honor.

¹ “If You Don’t Know This Song…What the Fuck Are You Doing Here?” (no label, 1981) and “ Live Night of the Living Dead!” (no label, 1982).

² “Folk Song” entry, Knowledgerush encyclopedia page, http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Folk_song. [This type of source was considered valid for inclusion as it appeared in our coursework.]

³ “Break All Rules! Punk Rock and the Making of a Style” by Tricia Henry.

⁴ “England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, And Beyond” by Jon Savage.

⁵ Dead Kennedys site, http://deadkennedys.com; Wikipedia entry on Black Flag’s SST Records, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SST_Records; Crass’s Southern Records site, http://www.southern.com/southern/label/CRC/.

⁶ “Dead Kennedys: The Unauthorized Version” by f-Stop Fitzgerald and Marian Kester.

⁷ “Horror Business” (Plan 9, 1979).

I debated including the Ramones’ famous use of audible “1-2-3-4” beat count-offs by the drummer in this paper/column, but rejected them since they aren’t studio noise per se. But I think they are relevant and in a similar vein: an importation of a studio or live show bit of amateurish beat-counting into official songs. The aesthetic is exactly the same as retaining studio noise.

⁸ “Beware,” (Armageddon/Spartan/Plan 9, 1980) and “Misfits” (Caroline, 1986).

Demos, or lower-quality test recordings distributed by bands seeking a recording contract or concert gigs, may be another source for the aesthetic of keeping studio-engineer comments on official recordings. A prominent example is a c. 1981 demo compilation by the California hardcore band Wasted Youth for what later became their “Reagan’s In” album. The demos pervasively preserve studio engineer intros.

⁹ “ The Day the Country Died” (Bluurg, 1982).

¹⁰ Henry, op cit.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Released on Alternative Tentacles Records, 1981.

Another highly significant punk recording featuring a band’s in-studio, pre-song talk is “Double Dare Ya,” a track on Bikini Kill’s self-titled 1992 EP that was a landmark of the riot grrrl subgenre. Tying in to the demo aesthetic, the song was first put out on 1991 self-recorded amateur tape.

¹³ “In God We Trust, Inc.—The Lost Tapes” (Music Video Distributors, 2003).

¹⁴ Ibid. Interestingly, Biafra later performed a similar, but apparently artificial, studio introduction to the track “The Great and the Good” on the 2005 album “The Code Is Red…Long Live the Code” by the grindcore band Napalm Death. “Napalm Death, ‘The Great and the Good,” take 23, maximum distortion,” Biafra says in a comedic manner. (He also guest-sings on part of the song.) This may well be a deliberate nod to “In God We Trust, Inc.”; Napalm Death had previously recorded a cover of “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” sans any introduction.

¹⁵ The Martin Hannett Biography Project, http://www.martinhannett.co.uk.

¹⁶ Savage, op cit.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ The album’s studio banter mistakes are an interesting comparisons to some of the false starts and coughs in the Max Hunter Folk Song Collection versions of the folk song “Barbara Allen,” at http://www.missouristate.edu/folksong/MaxHunter/0492/index.html. The Dead Kennedys album can be sampled, with the “Hyperactive Child” mistake especially prominent, on Amazon.com, at http://www.amazon.com/Plastic-Surgery-Disasters-Trust-Inc/dp/B00005NT4G/sr=8-1/qid=1169612583/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-3580909-0664725?ie=UTF8&s=music.

Posted Feb. 1, 2007. Updated June 29, 2007 and Sept. 19 and 20 and Oct. 25, 2009.

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