Wire's Pink Flag (33 1/3)
by Wilson Neate
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Book Summary Information
Author: Wilson NeateEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-02-19
ISBN: 0826429149
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group
Book Reviews of Wire's Pink Flag (33 1/3)
Book Review: In Depth to the Point of Glorious Madness
Summary: 5 Stars
This book will save rock and roll. We've reached an era where music is cheaper than water. An album is recorded, thrown on the internet, blogged about, reviewed, hyped, backlashed and forgotten within a month. The era where people spend time obsessing over and mythologizing artists, albums, recording sessions, and event concerts seems to be behind us now.
I find it wonderfully refreshing to see that there are still people in our world who aren't afraid to open up a rock album, climb inside and live in the vinyl grooves for a year or two. Neate proves to be the perfect vessel for an season long plunge into the wonderful and strange world that is *Pink Flag*. These two artists--Neate and Wire--deserve each other. For example, it seems crazy that Neate would spend four pages talking about the 28 second "Field Day for the Sundays". Surely, one would imagine that if he dug below the surface of that one, he'd hit rock in one stroke. Instead, Neate and the gentlemen from Wire--Lewis, Gilbert and Newman--riff on this tune with no regard for the length of the song they discuss. It works.
As Neate spins stories surrounding the creation of this album, each of which is heavily supported by quotes from the band members, it becomes more and more clear how different *Pink Flag* was from its neighbors in the early punk scene. When so many bands where pumping out animalistic, emotional blasts of hormonal dissent, Wire clearly were spending some time thinking and making artistic decisions. I found these in depth histories of Wire's beginnings in the punk scene to be especially fascinating; their perpendicular stance to the scene that spawned them was a bit of surprise to me.
Either way you slice it, the detailed madness of this book, in conjunction with the detailed madness of its subject, is exactly the type of rocknroll intellectualism that is sorely missing from the scene nowadays. Lately, most records don't even come with liner notes. Suddenly, this one comes with a book. Or inversely, this book comes with a great record.
Read it book and relearn how to appreciate music.
On a side note, I was a little surprised by the review that claims this book is revisionist history. I feel this reviewer was missing the entire point of the 33 1/3 series. It strikes me that Neate wasn't too interested in framing the significance of *Pink Flag* in Wire's catalog. The story that Wire "becomes overly pretentious, becomes ashamed of their early work" could very well be true, but that story doesn't have any bearing on what what into this record. This is a book about *Pink Flag*, not about keeping it real.
Summary of Wire's Pink Flag (33 1/3)
In contrast with many of their punk peers, Wire were enigmatic and cerebral, always keeping a distance from the crowd. Although Pink Flag appeared before the end of 1977, it was already a meta-commentary on the punk scene and was far more revolutionary musically than the rest of the competition. Few punk bands moved beyond pared-down rock 'n' roll and garage rock, football-terrace sing-alongs or shambolic pub rock and, if we're honest, only a handful of punk records hold up today as anything other than increasingly quaint period pieces. While the majority of their peers flogged one idea to death and paid only lip service to punk's Year Zero credo, Wire took a genuinely radical approach, deconstructing song conventions, exploring new possibilities and consistently reinventing their sound. THIS IS A CHORD. THIS IS ANOTHER. THIS IS A THIRD. NOW FORM A BAND, proclaimed the caption to the famous diagram in a UK fanzine in 1976 and countless punk acts embodied that do-it-yourself spirit. Wire, however, showed more interesting ways of doing it once you'd formed that band and they found more compelling uses for those three mythical chords.History & Criticism Books
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