Masters — No Wave

Author: Marc Masters
Title: No Wave
Year: 2007
Type: Book (Black Dog Publishing)

No Wave is a history of the late-1970s New York scene by the music journalist Marc Masters, published by Black Dog Publishing in 2007. Its publisher presents no wave as an anti-movement made by artists and poets who had not trained as musicians, and the book as a survey that reaches from early figures such as Suicide and Richard Hell, through bands since forgotten such as Red Transistor and Bush Tetras, to heirs such as ESG and Sonic Youth. At its center are the four bands on No New York and the groups around them, each interviewed anew for the book. Thurston Moore, whose own history of the scene with Byron Coley appeared the next year, said that Masters took “sort of a different tack,” following the scene through its records. Kris Needs, in Record Collector, praised Masters’s writing and the chapters on television and film but found the later dance-floor groups passed over quickly.

Masters, a music journalist, has written for the Washington Post, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, NPR Music and Rolling Stone, and later wrote High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).¹ Black Dog published No Wave in 2007, in 205 pages.²

The publisher’s description says the book “charts all the cracks and crevices of a surprisingly diverse movement.” It names Suicide and Richard Hell among the pioneers, Red Transistor and Bush Tetras among the “forgotten treasures,” and ESG and Sonic Youth among the descendants, and it calls no wave “the ultimate anti-movement,” whose players came from art and poetry with no musical training.² Kris Needs, reviewing the book in Record Collector in March 2008, wrote that it centers on the four bands Brian Eno recorded for No New York in 1978, Lydia Lunch’s Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance’s Contortions, Mars and DNA, and on peers who were left off the record, such as Glenn Branca’s Theoretical Girls, all of them interviewed anew. In his account Sonic Youth and Swans “loom large,” and there are chapters on the scene’s public-access television and its filmmakers.³

Thurston Moore and Byron Coley published their own No Wave with Abrams in 2008, and Moore said they kept its parameters tight: “we cut it off as soon as anybody plays any semblance of rock ‘n’ roll.”⁴ He described Masters’s book as one “which takes sort of a different tack,” with interviews that overlap theirs: “he basically takes the tack of following how the recordings document the scene.”⁴

Needs’s review was favorable with reservations. He wrote that the book’s “invaluable photos and flyers” and its chapters on television and film make it “a graphic, gutter-level alternative” to an earlier Soul Jazz book, with Masters’s “engaging turn of phrase adding much to this little-told story.” He found ESG and the other later groups that shaped the dance floor handled “rather swiftly,” and Certain General left out altogether.³

Key contributions

• No wave as a diverse movement, running from its pioneers through forgotten bands to its descendants.
• The four No New York bands set among peers left off the record, such as Theoretical Girls.
• Public-access television and film treated as part of the scene alongside its music.

See also

• CBGB scene — the New York scene no wave formed beside
• Mutant disco — the dance-floor music some no wave players moved toward