A Celebration of Middle Fingers

There is a reason I listen to noise. And it’s not pretentious. People, all the time, give me shit for listening to noise. Why just the other month one of my cohorts at my college radio station said, "Chris and Colin had a show and they would just blast obnoxious harsh noise." She’s a nice girl so I just nodded my head accordingly. But it seems to me that noise enthusiasts and noise musicians, which I still fancy myself, get a lot of shit for being into a genre of music that is generally disregarded as untalented and useless. My friend Colin played a noise set last year at our school coffehouse’s open mic and was laughed at by some faggy guitar-wannabe who fancies himself a guitar hero. At work I get a lot of the same responses. "You listen to noise?" "Oh sorry we can’t be pretentious and intellectual like you, listening to noise." And my personal favorite, "what the fuck is that shit we are listening to? It sounds like Hitler is on the radio! (In response to a Whitehouse song I was playing)."

It has continued over the recent weeks with other employees expressing their dismay at any type of noise-affiliated music I will play, whether it is ambient or drone, which to me sounds like the soundtrack to the mindless industrious tedium that is working. In response, I have ceased playing my ipod whenever someone is working with me in the back so as to not inconveience them and allow them the pleasure of lisetning to their own music, which I assure is SO MUCH better. I have also heard things from people saying that I am trying to impress people, which to be completely honest couldn’t be further from the truth. I really don’t give a shit what people think of my music taste, because as past history trends show IT IS OBVIOUS the type of person you are is determined by the kind of music you listen to. Right? Nonetheless I feel I have the need to defend my music and the reason I choose to listen to this particular type of music. Why? Because it means that much to me.

My freshman year in college I felt so ostracized. It was the first time I realized that I was an outcast and that people generally regarded me as weird. I would walk into my room, blast some harsh noise and veg-out while people walked by my room and scream to mock the music I listened to. I started listening to noise towards the end of high school. It seems that ever since my "emo-phase" at the beginning of high school, I had wanted to listen to music that harsher and harsher to overcompensate. I was also an extremely angry adolescent that needed loud and angry music to piss off everyone who came near me and get me eager to break stuff. It wasn’t until my senior year that I started listening to Wolf Eyes and getting angrier and more reclusive, even more so than usual. The first thing I did when I heard my first Wolf Eyes song was throw my calculator through my window and scream. That was what this music made me want to do: destroy my house, destroy my peers and destroy everything they ever believed in.

After graduation I went straight to D.C to attend my summer program for incoming minority students. At the time I was so angry and so devoid of so many emotions. I would blast Wolf Eyes from my room and people would walk by and just look at me like I was the most abnormal thing they've ever seen. I can remember one time a girl said the sounds coming from my room were scaring the fuck out of her because there was a thunder storm outside, which I was oblivious to being that I was blasting the Wolf dudes so loudly. That summer I also happened to run into a friend I had known from the L.A music scene that as it turns out, played harsh noise. I had gone to a show to see a band called Wives, a noisy post-punk outfit from my hometown of Los Angeles. I had to support L.A. My friend Jeff found me and we started talking about L.A and what had been going on since I left. He excused himself for a second and left. He came back in with a huge stack (amplifier) and immediately proceeded to blast out 5 minutes of pure destruction. It was the first time I had witnessed a harsh noise set and I was hooked. Afterward I told him I had no idea he did that or that anyone could do that, with sound. He just smiled and we continued to talk about L.A bands.

After the program ended, I went back to L.A for two weeks. While I was there I went to my local record store, where I used to work and found my friend Adrian, who was the brother of my high school friend and junior year English teacher Bobby Montes. I started talking to him about Bobby’s wedding and the music I was listening to. He asked me what I was playing right now and I told him that I was really digging the new Wolf Eyes as well as my friend Jeff, whose performance name was Impregnable. He was astonished and then let me in on a secret. He showed me some noise cdr’s that he had purchased and then pointed me into a direction of the store that I rarely went, which was the RPM section. There I found a Dead Machines major recording (Futures) and a recording from another noise band I recognized, Black Dice. I purchased these records, went home and that was it. It was over. I was a full blown noise addict. From here on out, I dedicated my life to finding the noisiest, thrashiest music I could possibly get my grubby little fingers on.

That year in college, my first year, I proceeded to listen to new bands such as Yellow Swans, Oscillating Innards, The Cherry Point and my personal favorite Prurient. I saw Yellow Swans high out of my fucking mind, which made them that much more enjoyable and when I saw Prurient, it was like my whole world was expanded. Since then I have dedicated every waking moment to finding new bands and new artists that sound like I feel: fucked up, disjointed, angry, aggressive, loud, abrasive, destructive and generally— as if the world is ending every time I take a breath.

So why do I listen to noise? Is it because of the confrontational aesthetic that accompanies its subculture? Is it because music has progressed so far that, the only place it has to go now is in the complete opposite direction? Is it because, as a media savvy society, our lives are bombarded with images of commercialism that beckon our every movement and response and noise is the epiphany to the eradication of this promotion? Is it because music has become such a squalid wasteland of pop stars and repetitive dance beats, where every gyrating poster-child is immediately given credit as an "artist" and this needs to be stopped with anti-art, which in turn is radicalized as "new art"? Is it because I’m sooo intellectual that structuralized harmony and rhythm has found its discord with me and I want to aurally and artistically challenge myself with a series of abrasive sounds that confront my very notion of what it means to be conventional? Is it any of these things?

Not really. Kind of. Maybe. I mean to a certain extent all these things are true. But these are general statements that are more obvious than the sky. I’m not treading water that hasn’t been boated through before. We’ve all seen that cover of Black Flag’s "Damaged" with the kid standing in front of a broken mirror. For many kids that was their "moment". I used to be a hardcore/thrash kid and I used to fuck a lot of shit up. I guess I just naturally progressed from one type of fucking up to another. To a certain extent, noise is over-intellectualized and I’m sure I’m guilty of this as well. But to be completely honest it is, as noise musician John Olson put it simply, " celebration of middle fingers". Kids come together. They go insane. They break things, and at they end thank the artists for meaning so much to them. So when people ask my why I like noise music, I don’t respond with any of the aforementioned reasons like they might expect. I usually just respond, "cause it makes me want to fuck shit up." Truer words are never spoken.

-C