When i conceived this year’s Lent Series, it didn’t take long to realise which album had to come first. US duo Suicide, comprising vocalist Alan Vega and Martin Rev on electronics, brought out their eponymous debut album at the very end of 1977.
Even now, nearly half a century since it was released, it takes time to adjust to Suicide’s unique modus operandi. The relationship between the duo could not be more straightforward, with Rev providing the motoric context for Vega’s voice. That context is for the most part sparse, stark, almost utilitarian, driven by drum machine beats with a modicum of bass and maybe, sometimes, one or two optional extras. Their music, on a first impression, may seem repetitious, circling, stuck in a rut, and while all of that is true, it’s also the catalyst that gives Suicide’s music its power. Kraftwerk had by this time established a paradigm of cool neutrality, Ralf Hütter delivering his vocals with a detached indifference that often seemed curiously at odds with the implied emotive charge in the lyrics and lively warmth in the arrangements. Suicide took that ambiguity and polarised it, such that Rev serves as the cool, background motor, his beats like a coordinate system for Vega, the hot, emotionally-charged focal point roaming free, untethered.
The result is repetition that’s become weaponised. The album’s opening track ‘Ghost Rider’ seems initially frivolous, a locked bassline groove below some kind of homage to a rather absurd comic-book character. Yet two stanzas in and Vega sings that “America is killin’ its youth”. The music reacts with a harsh echo on his voice, the first difference since the start, and also the the first time lyrics are reiterated, tilting the song from ostensibly trivial into something more serious. ‘Rocket USA’, again mentioning America, feels like a literal continuation, though now it’s a “TV star riding around” while the “Whole country is doin’ a fix”. Again the harsh echo – “It’s doomsday” – and we’re caught in the same mix of lightness and catastrophe. There’s a palpable sense that the musical language is partly the product of numbness (at the world) and a blinkered single-mindedness (enjoyment at all costs; what’s to lose?). The words turn dangerous, disastrous – “Gonna crash / Gonna die”, again the echo, like a portent of doom – and the combination of speed and stasis makes the track (as in ‘Ghost Rider’) feel like it’s both extremely fast yet also like a single, terrible moment impossibly slowed-down.
Is ‘Cheree’ an interlude? It certainly feels like one: Rev reduces the beats to light, chugging momentum, while a simple major chord progression – harmonies! coming as something of a shock after those first two tracks – loops round while high organ notes (throughout, Rev uses a distorted and processed Farfisa organ) glisten on top. Vega sings a simple love song, unaffected and unadorned, and while the tone seems rather different, the essence is the same: unchanging, cyclic, repetitive, obsessive (plus the reference to Cheree as “My comic book fantasy” connects back to the literary source of the opening track). It’s one of three tracks on Suicide that engage with everyday people, though in very different ways. ‘Johnny’, which follows, is another, and it takes us back to the nocturnal driving of ‘Ghost Rider’ and ‘Rocket USA’, impelled by the same motivation as ‘Cheree’: “He’s cruising the night looking for love”. Blues harmonies play out over convulsive beats – all downbeats, no subdivisions – while Vega’s voice is split in two, panned left and right, like separate minds articulating the same overlapping sentiments, anticipating and echoing each other, sometimes coinciding. Again the absolute fixation: for its 2-minute duration, Johnny is all that exists, in a miniature portrait or pure reverence, that’s both a thumbnail sketch and an icon.
The lyrical limitations are taken further in ‘Girl’, reduced to what is essentially little more than expressions of sexual excitement. The beats chug at a languid pace, over a basic three-note bassline with occasional organ riffs above. The emotional aspect of Vega’s vocals is ramped up, breathy, moaning, Rev’s accompaniment getting gradually louder as the track progresses. Three quarters through, and the organ chords become sustained, everything feels heightened, and they stop sounding light and cheery and become a more unsettling buzzy, burning presence.
The third track related to everyday people is ‘Frankie Teardrop’, which is not only the highlight of the album, but one of the most powerful songs ever written. Rev radically polarises the percussion, reduced to just high and low pulses, and the bass when it appears is similarly reduced, oscillating between just two notes. Over this (or perhaps, within it), for 10½ minutes, Vega, halting and breathless, recounts the story of Frankie. We’re back to that sense of profound despair in the opening tracks, caused here by personal circumstances: “Frankie can’t make it / ‘Cause things are just too hard”. Turning more and more bleak as it progresses, Vega’s regular disappearances make the accompaniment feel like some kind of relentless machine drilling into our skulls (like those organ chords in ‘Girl’). Frankie’s world collapses, he turns murderous, and Vega starts to scream, a hitherto unknown sound on the album that, when its first occurs, comes as a horrifying rupture, lending the recurring lines “Let’s hear it for Frankie” a very different quality, ironic and black.
Through all this, Rev’s neutral backdrop continues relentlessly. It’s here that the weaponisation of repetition is at its most formidable and affecting. The grid-like underscore is a hypnotic stasis of implacable, sharply-defined points and pulses, upon which Vega’s vocals arrive as increasingly volatile splashes and spatters. After Frankie’s violence turns on himself – the band’s name, and the album’s title, almost seem like a tribute – Vega vanishes and Rev cranks things up. The two-note bassline has become something a searing buzz, like a tattooist’s needle, while noise starts to swell (at times suggesting the sound of a large crowd). “Frankie’s lyin’ in hell” – Vega screams, captured in a huge echo, and by now the track itself seems to be plummeting into the same place. A new organ note pulses through the centre, Vega continues to scream, and the song finally reflects back at us, expanding to include all of humanity.
In the wake of this overwhelming onslaught, final track ‘Che’ acts like a conflicted synthesis of everything that’s come before. A funereal, descending bassline cycles round and round, while the polarised beats from ‘Frankie Teardrop’ lurk at a distance, recreating that dual impression (in ‘Rocket USA’) of superfast and superslow simultaneously. The song exists somewhere in between, in an eye of the storm-like place of tension, punctuated by sharp, hard-edged organ notes. Where the everyday people on Suicide, Cheree, Johnny and Frankie, are responded to sympathetically (in Frankie’s case, in a more complex way), the treatment of Che (Guevara) is contrastingly iconoclastic: “And when he died / The whole world lied / They said he was a saint / But I know he ain’t”. Having receded far away during this, the beats slowly return, and the song, and the album, ends as it began, and as it’s been more or less throughout: the beats powering on ad infinitum, organ chords suggesting rhythmic cheerfulness, yet caught in a mesmeric blur of loops and obsessive repetition, definitely circling, possibly spiralling.
Suicide’s debut release is a staggering achievement, one that i can honestly claim that, for me, was life-changing. From a contemporary perspective, it’s all the more intriguing due to its mix of being so overtly intense, borderline aggressive, yet so (ostensibly) musically restrained, almost minimal. But it’s clearly aiming to communicate in a very different way, rooting the songs in simple repetitive textures, bass figures, hooks and riffs that drive them not so much along as round and round, while the vocals are a complete contrast, moving freely above. It’s a beautifully, powerfully effective double act.
It’s also fascinating how the duo draws on rudimentary allusions to earlier music, including blues and rock and roll, while the chugging beats and glistening organ notes (pseudo-synths!) in ‘Cheree’ openly invoke the then contemporary Kraftwerk. All of this, improbably yet unbelievably effectively, working toward conveying a heightened emotional state, which in ‘Frankie Teardrop’ is pushed to an almost unbearable extreme.
The duo’s live album 21½ Minutes in Berlin / 23 Minutes in Brussels (1978) is revealing both in terms of how muscular and punchy Suicide were on stage – mirroring the studio effect and perhaps expanding it – but also, in the notorious Brussels sequence, of the extent to which the audience simply cannot get on board with what’s going on. Vega’s angry reaction – things break down (how could they not?) during ‘Frankie Teardrop’ – says everything about the emotional importance and authenticity of Suicide’s music.
And while for me it doesn’t trump Suicide, their 1980 studio album Alan Vega and Martin Rev – always such literal, (self-)referential titles – subjects their approach to some interesting stylistic developments and further allusions. Sometimes, as in ‘Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne’, there’s a faintly melancholic quality, perhaps emanating from the stasis as it’s otherwise upbeat; ‘Mr. Ray’ has strong suggestions of Cabaret Voltaire in both its vocal delivery and cyclical repetition, while ‘Sweetheart’ brings to mind Lynch and Badalamenti’s more gentle Twin Peaks music, simultaneously light and heavy, with a subtle throwback to doo-wop. ‘Harlem’ is the equivalent of ‘Frankie Teardrop’ on that album, almost transcending tempo, impossibly fast but also very slow, ending up kind of floating, both and neither – another form of stasis – while Vega’s vocals suggest Ian Curtis.
Repetition has always been, and continues to be, a thorny topic for me. An obscene amount of low- to no-quality stuff has been churned out in the name of – or more accurately at the mercy of – repetition: an empty engine driving pointlessly, endlessly, nowhere. A few years before the period i’m focusing on here – 1977–81 – there was Neu!, in whose mindless, monotonous output repetition never becomes transparent, still less transcendent. It’s opaque, heavy, dull, stupid, the musical equivalent of those pre-Wright brothers flying machine fuck-ups: endless flapping, but absolutely no liftoff, inane, idiotic and utterly earthbound. And once synths and drum machines were involved things arguably got worse. Spend more than a few minutes with Absolute Body Control’s 1982 album Numbers and you’d be forgiven for thinking that synth technology was at that time still in its earliest stage of development, when in fact it’s just the musicians themselves who are in their earliest stage of development (to be fair, the lack of vocals is the key problem there; their eponymous 1981 debut works better).
And yet, spend a lot more than a few minutes with Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft’s Alles ist Gut (1981), and you’ll hear, in a different, even more pared-back way than Suicide, how repetition can engineer claustrophobic worlds without beginning or end, and where the same neutral-emotional polarity proves stunningly effective. So while i always tend to say that i hate repetition, i’m always conscious of the fact that this feeling is in part the by-product of music like Suicide, who demonstrate something entirely other: repetition that is omnipresent yet transcendent, the vehicle for an entirely opposite, and immense, form of electrifying, emotionally-direct expression.
