It took me three years to understand Sonic Youth. The music itself made sense to me, as I'd come to the Youth through the avant-garde, through people like John Zorn, Morton Feldman, and Iannis Xenakis. What I didn't understand were the lyrics and their inflection. I had a background in the Beats, I liked lots of pop music, but there was something that came across as goofy and insincere in the lyrics. But I was younger then; I didn't realize that music could be both tongue-in-cheek and completely honest.
By the time I went back and looked into Patti Smith and some of the other recommended SY materials (especially Richard Kern's films), it started to make much more sense. It was so brutally and unabashedly direct, so highly prone to personality and personal flaws, proclivities, and romanticism-- the reason I didn't understand it earlier was because I'd never been exposed to much academic music without the looming figure of a larger-than-life Grand Artist having been responsible for its creation. Either that, or that a lot of the music I was listening to didn't really say very much orally, anyway, and up until Washing Machine, you couldn't accuse SY of focusing solely on the musical aspect of their work.
So, while I was digging around 1970s New York, I eventually ran into Suicide. Those doo-wop elements that defined Patti Smith, the New York-themed lyrical topics, that romantic love of decadence and sleaze all made their way into Suicide's equation. There was a fundamental difference, though... those fucking synthesizers.
See, since I was an angry young person who grew up a bit later than SY, I heard stuff like The Minutemen and the Dead Kennedys before I heard The Ramones or Richard Hell. What I was expecting from all of the hype regarding "early punk" and what it actually sounded like were two very different things. All of that brutality and dirt was there, but it wasn't as apparent to me immediately. It just sounded like good 70s rock music at first. Suicide, however, were coming from somewhere different, and they caught me off guard.
It's difficult to describe the work of Martin Rev and Alan Vega. The indie press seems to deem them the harmonious combination between Phil Glass and Elvis. Vega uses lots of reverb on his voice, there's some of that rockabilly sleaze in the lyrics and execution, but Elvis he's not. As for Martin Rev, well, the repetitive synthesizer figures do have basis in academic music, but the application in Suicide makes those sorts of comparisons immaterial. It's essentially some bizarre mutation, built from the same strange spores of New York as their peers, yet abstracted through the instrumentation.
American Supreme is the first new Suicide album in over a decade. At its best, it's the equivalent of mainlining those god-awful HBO late-night b-movies. The lyrics still have that embarrassingly sincere, yet caricatured tone, and they're still terminally obsessed with topics of decadence, creepy America, bohemian lifestyles, and violence-- all things that Sonic Youth finally left behind on Murray Street. Musically, however, Suicide has started to build something a little more suitable.
Rev and Vega's stated intention has always been to reflect their culture and environment, and rather than return to their still potent and compelling formula from 30 years ago, Suicide have opted to remain focused on their goal. What results is a collection of bastardized house and hip-hop beats, interspersed by the occasionally indulgent necessary noise, not even remotely resembling the golden-age bubblegum aspirations of their first two albums.
The song structure, however, is the same. Rev has an idea or two, loops it for a five-minute duration, Vega sets into action his trademarked ravings, the song ends. This is probably the least effective end of Suicide's objectives. To convey that empty, vapid wasteland of Pop, it seems fitting that the songs would drag out, emphasize the same ideas over and over again, and leave an unpleasant taste in the listener's mouth. American Supreme, even at its most unlistenable and monotonous, still makes its point.
Suicide have updated their formula since their most-lauded work. When you listen to their Ocasek-produced second album, you can hardly imagine such enjoyable music inciting riots and heckling. With all of those synthesizers and blaring house presets mimicking the most commercial aspects of life, this album will not get many repeated listens. Yet, American Supreme takes chances, falls on its face and spits in yours, sincere and ironic, waving its negative-print, nihilistic flag high.
