The Rage May Surface: An Op-Ed Piece

Original text by Alan Abramowitz, 1978
Introduction by Robert Barry Francos, 2011

This opinion piece was originally published in FFanzeen No. 3, dated Winter / Spring 1978-79, which was the first newsprint version of the ‘zine. Art Editor of the issue Alan Abramowitz discussed the then-current state of music and the cultural milieu in which it existed. During the 1980s, Alan would go on to create the music and arts-centered cable access show Videowave, which is not only still on the air in the tri-state area, but new shows are in the process of being created.

Some further commentary from me follows the piece. – RBF, 2011

“Oh, get off!” you cry. “You don’t think music; you just listen to it.” I scream back, “Oh! The poor little angel. Thinking burns up too many calories.” That’s right, don’t try to reason out the lyrics, just enjoy it. Just because you spent hours spinning records backwards… “Paul is dead… Paul is dead… Paul is…” Wouldn’t it be nice for once to think about where you’re going? Radio is about as interesting as sidewalk cracks. Most of those kids out there are most lost than the Pepsi generation.

This is the age of diversity. There is southern rock, acid rock, punk, d***o, jazz, MOR, pop, R&B, new wave, and so on. Not only is the music scene fragmented, but the fragments are fragmented. And most groups or soloists stick to more than one style. What is the trend for the next decade? Will music continue as it is or merge like the Beatle era?

Sixties music dominates the airwaves, along with d***o, pop, and ‘50s revival music. Listeners still look at the last decade trying to recapture that lost sense of purpose. We in the ‘70s are dissatisfied. The nostalgia we admire not only includes periods 20 or 30 years ago, but recent times such as the early ‘70s. Something in modern music is missing so we look to the past. Oldies sell like hotcakes. Frozen into a trend since 1969, music begs for a revolution; but people have to change their attitudes first. The issues of the war years have changed – for the worse. Alienation and dehumanization are still here. Your draft number doesn’t bother you but your Social Security number does. The revolutionary tirades of the hippie age have become the complacent tunes of the ‘70s. Crosby, Stills & Nash sing of “Dark Star’; gone are “Nixon’s soldiers.” Music only appears to be rebellious when really it’s as conformist as you can get. People tend to forget the shock of the flower people, long hair, the Beatles, the Mod look, miniskirts, protest marches and living together – the counter-culture. Today’s sound reflects that. Gone is the controversy. No more daring on the airwaves. Just complacency.

Look at the past. That’s where the future lies. Every 20 years a new generation must face new truths and tear up old lies. Like a snake, we shed our skins of old values. Occasionally the skin sticks and we have to rip it off with a vengeance. A fit of rage. It’s the kids who see it first. They view the world from a vantage point. In the ‘20s, they broke from the past with the Charleston, the fast cars and flappers. Most of their parents still lived in 1896, mentally and morally. People changed and the music changed. In the ‘40s, the war kept the kids preoccupied; nevertheless, in the ‘50s, their culture, such as the “Fonz’s,” like rock’n’roll, existed mostly in the cities. This rock’n’roll was an omen for the ‘60s. It said being involved was like torture. It said your parents are a hassle. It said, look around you; isn’t it all stupid? Then it all broke open on the Ed Sullivan Show. And there was turbulence. But like before, it was absorbed. When the Beatles arrived in America, reports mentioned how long their hair was. It covered the tops of their ears! By 1972, Lyndon Baines Johnson had hair down to his shoulders. And again, the omen has arisen. It is the new wave. Since 1967 is still fresh in our minds, the next explosion will resemble the last.

Music… rock needed some earthiness. Blacks were then welcomed into the pop scene. Their music dealt with the reality of day-to-day life (until then, they had mostly been left out of the mainstream). It was called soul music for a reason. But now, look around you. Is there any soul in d****o? The music creates money – the money creates music. No meaning; the turbulence is gone.

Vietnam made all our standards obsolete. The rat race was just what it described: people reduced to a groveling state, not a description told at cocktail parties. Mr. Businessman was a square. All we were taught wasn’t true. Nothing else made sense anymore. War wasn’t glory. Suburbia wasn’t living. College wasn’t an education. Frank Sinatra wasn’t music. Sgt. Pepper’s heralded the total experience. Rock metamorphosed from jukebox tunes into a view of life – the “trip.” Other movements long in the sidelines moved into the forefront. Elvis came in with rockabilly, Joan Baez with folk, and the Supremes with R&B. Violence, sex, love, frustration, alienation, were now part of the art. The art was alive. To those on our side of the generation gap it was “the living are dead and only the dead are truly living.”

Music always changes. We must deal with confusion, compassion, rejection, and reflection. That is the way music appeals to us. Unconscious emotions play in the sound and the lyrics confirm it. What we’re thinking becomes popular music. You live the sound. You like it because you think, “Hey!... that’s part of me!” But a culture can be forced down your throat through radio, television, records, and elevator Muzak(t). That is the mellow sound. That is imposed music. ‘Sixties-ish rock has lost much meaning in the last few years. Issues and talents are ignored. The roots of pop rock have been forsaken for the derivative R&B.

As rock’n’roll outraged the generation of Ozzie & Harriet, new wave upsets the modern Archie Bunkers. It seeks publicity and seeks to astound. Absurd realities that are accepted as fact of life because all they are is old, worn-thin ideas. Like rock’n’roll, new wave reveals the dumb.

Corporate America has taken over. Imposed culture means stable, predictable profits. Rock once protested big business; now it is big business. Hype creates the event. Hype creates the group. Talent becomes an insignificant part of the formula. Groups like KISS rely on mystery, action and gossip, but little originality. “Record companies are run by accountants and lawyers,” David Crosby* admits. Being profit seekers, they have little contact with the artists. They control radio, TV, magazines, etc. Radio, as a medium of expression, is incredibly conservative. The trend has gone from Top Forty stations to Top Ten. What upsets people’s preconceived notions of music simply is not aired. The real meat is sacrificed for dough. What makes money is what reaches the most people. The gold record, which was a rarity, is now a common thing. The music of the ‘60s was incorporated into Muzak(t). When you hear “She Loves You” by Percy Faith, you wonder how long it will be before there is “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” by the Ray Coniff Singers. The creative artist is at the mercy of administrators who think in terms of feeding the machine. The machine is shocked by the Ramones, Television, Blondie, Dead Boys, Iggy Pop and the Adverts. The machine loves only $$$.

Sex is money to the corporations. If it appeals, it can be exploited, is their motto. What is Donna Summers Selling? Music? Talent? No, it’s sex youtube.com/watch?v=UPXizlnS7go]. “Move it in / Move it out” (that well played d****o single [“Disco Lady” by Johnny Taylor: youtube.com/watch?v=-3JkEoQ0Cz8]) isn’t about dancing. It manipulates your emotions. Is there any soul in Barry White’s moaning? You become programmed to like what you hear. If you don’t believe the sex part, just pick up a popular album and look at the cover.

Do you notice how big stars are touted? Not to say they have no talent, but you can tell by the push behind those concert tours. Hype pushes it and talent is used up. It pushes the Wings, Elton John, the Stones, Fleetwood Mac and Barry Manilow. They push the groups who’ve lost their glory, like Led Zeppelin. They are illusions of the past. “He who is first, he will be last / The times they are a-changing.”

And what does this add up to? Violence, turbulence, and change are building up. Rock and roll led to “1-2-3-4 / We don’t want your fuckin’ war.” Music isn’t answering the questions of life anymore. New wave does. What will this new wave lead to? How dynamic it is depends on the resistance to change. Kids are angry, unemployed and pissed off. They see dad work for 50 years only to get laid off. Is England 1978 an omen for American 1984? Will this anger lash out? The music reflects the times. And the frustration is overwhelming.

If there is turbulence, rock’n’roll will take in elements of new wave, jazz, reggae, punk and folk. Like pre-Beatle America, today’s music is in pieces. From cause, it became a taste or preference. Turbulence would merge elements of all music. D****o will be revealed as a fad. In social upheaval, it would be tossed aside as “not relevant.” Country will - and is - becoming institutionalized Muzak(t), MOR and pop. A new wave comes in hard times (i.e., U.S. –> Vietnam, England –> depression).

Jane Fonda once said, “It is the age of nothingness. Even with the problems of the “60s, there was this moral issue that got kids off their feet. Below the layer of apathy, in today’s young people, is a tremendous amount of rage.”

The rage may surface…


While I don’t agree with everything Alan said (e.g., sex always sold rock’n’roll, which itself is named for a blues term for sex), his argument is pretty solid, and only proven to be more so in retrospect. There have been other commentaries about much of what he brought up back then, such as the commercialization of music; check out The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce by Fred Goodman, for example. As for “hype creates the event,” I recommend reading Daniel J. Boorstin’s 1962 book The Image: A guide to Pseudo-events in America.

At the same time saying it’s the “age of diversity” of style and about the stagnation in experimentation sound like opposites, it is actually an oxymoron, in that it’s opposites that work. While the genres are splintered, there is also a dummying down and overlapping that make event the difference minimal, despite the shards. Country is more pop than bluegrass these days; rock by groups like Slipknot, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Kid Rock have incorporated rap into its sound. And don’t get me started with the auto-tune making it all a lie on top of a lie. It seems all the shards of genres have pretty much the same sharp point, but no edge. To add to when Alan said, “What we’re thinking becomes popular music,” now in the 21st Century, popular music becomes what we’re thinking.

That is why independent music is more important now than ever. What used to take a whole studio of equipment to produce can now be done on a laptop. What took factories to make a physical product can be done with a disk copying program (if hard copies are needed at all).

Every type of music has been co-opted at some point. The scary Elvis, Chuck and Little R. are turned into Pat Boone, Frankie Avalon and Fabian. The Beatles resurrected it with the Mersey Beat, which became muddled in its own use of technology, causing it to cease with Sgt. Pepper’s. The Last Poets and Public Enemy turn into Lady Caca and Christina Arugula. The Byrds and the Yardbirds lead into hair bands like Poison. The Ramones and Television get bought out by the disco (aka d****o) of Blondie. Sadly, in many cases, the compromised get a larger market share than the originals, because unlike the indie groups that started it, there is more control, therefore more money in the homogenization.

Someone once said to me after I had commented about how much better the Heartbreakers from New York were compared to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Oh yeah, then how come Tom Petty outsold that other group by so much?” My response was, simply, “Look how many people voted for Nixon.” Just because something sells more, does not mean it is better. I’m still waiting for that rage to surface, all these years later.

* In the original piece, this quote was attributed to Elton John, but an Internet search reveals it to be David Crosby.

The New Wave of Horror: Punk Music and Horror Films

Text by Matt Ruderman, introduction by Robert Barry Francos
© 1981, FFanzeen; introductory comments © RBF, 2010
Images from the Internet

The following article on the use of horror in the emergent music scene was originally published in FFanzeen magazine, issue #7, in 1981. It was written by Matt Ruderman.

I really don’t know what happened to Matt Ruderman. We worked for a while at a Fortune 500 company where I was a proofreader and typeset my fanzine on the side. Matt was really into horror films, as was / am I, so we got along well. When I left there shortly after the issue this article appeared came out, I lost touch, as these work-friendships seem to often end. Love to hear from ya if you’re out there, Matt.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything Matt is saying below, such as rock’n’roll not being a collective experience; this has become especially so since the days of hardcore, which was starting around the time this article was written. As for a fascinating study of gender and what is now commonly known as slasher films, I recommend Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) – RBF

When I think of the ‘50’s youth culture, rock’n’roll’s original generation, the first image that comes to my mind is that of teenagers at the local high school dance being attacted by Michael Landon in werewolf makeup and jeans. This is one of my basic impressions of the generation into which I was born. Likewise, there are similar impressions (“nostalgia” would be an inappropriate word) of the relatively placid ‘50s era within our ‘80s generation of rock’n’rollers (i.e., punks, or New Wavers), of which I am a peripheral part, who are in the throes of a scary movie mania, the likes which has not been seen since the Eisenhower years.

Some New Wave clubs in Manhattan have been screening horror films, many of the campy type, and the cinemas are packing crowds of kids who can be lured by a clever ad campaign to see absolutely any promising schlock horror film. Most of these are bitterly disappointing, and yet nobody learns from experience, including myself. There is an undeniable compulsion to witness the terrorization of innocents, mutilation, monsters and psychopaths, and to experience the ultimate cheap thrill of fear. This compulsion demands at least a cursory comparison of the inherent qualities of basic rock’n’roll and horror films, and what makes them so sympathetic.

Rock’n’roll as a culture, specifically in the microcosm of New Wave, appears to be bound to horror as a sibling, rather than as a mate. Yet, they are too closely related to be considered symbiotic. The major distinction is that rock’n’roll draws its strength from communion. It is a medium of mass generation and interaction, not just between artist and listener, but among the listeners, as well.

Horror is inherently personal and depends upon claustrophobia and anxiety. Even in the horror of the multitudes, such as The Blob and Jaws, which portrays crowds in peril, the threat is ultimately to the individual – is IT going to get ME? In the rock’n’roll society, the individual plays the tightrope game of ego expression (something not desirable in horror, as it has the urge to hide), and losing one’s self in an aura of crowd enthusiasm.

The entire nature of rock’n’roll changes when you take away from the crowds. Listen to rock’n’roll in solitude provides thoughtfulness. When listening with a friend, perhaps while turning the friend on to the song or group, it causes a controlled enthusiasm. But rarely does one experience the gale of emotions that erupts in a crowd.

The presence of the audience at horror films serves a number of complex functions. We sense the nervousness of people around us. We subconsciously detect feverous coughing and people shift in their chairs. Their screams during shock climaxes are akin to the laughtrack of television sit-coms, which serves to intensify our reaction to the stimulus. But at the same time, the presence of the crowd is vastly reassuring.

Horror is rarely thoughtful and when it is, it either loses its power or becomes science fiction. The whole point of it is to hand over your logic and invite irrational fear into your subconscious. Here we arrive at the first important point of similarity between rock’n’roll and horror: they tend to appeal to our base, crude, and often cruel, anti-intellectual instincts; the urge to close our minds from sophistication, and expose ourselves to manipulation. And who among us doesn’t cater, in some degree, to the side of our personalities that most desperately wants to vegetate and masturbate until the sun comes up? The trick is to know how much gratification is healthy, and how much is degenerative and self-defeating.

I am able to view a phenomenal amount of horror films, depending on how inventive they are, before succumbing to utter boredom (this applies to my tolerance for basic three-chord rock’n’roll, as well). After a while, though, I can’t help but wonder why women are brutalized in such a manner and to such a degree. When it becomes fully clear that the terrorization of women is a manifestation of a pervasive misogynic attitude in myself and society, in toto, it somewhat affects my ability to fully appreciate the Mise-en-scène, or craftsmanship, of the filmmaker.

The formula remains unchanged from film to film: men are punished for not being the hero. This means that they are invariably faceless. If they are characters with a bit of dimension, then they are expendable villains, creeps, alcoholics, or sidekicks (whose main function is to create pathos in the viewer when he is butchered). At the same time, we can appreciate their destruction and be glad that we aren’t in his place.

Women are punished for being female, and rarely have any real personality or concerns, which makes it easier for men to appreciate their terror and possible subsequent death. The heroines are a bit more distinguished because they are tailored so that men want them to survive after a respectable amount of brutalization. It would be a shame to have the monster eat them because men would experience an emotionally painful, romantic sense of loss, and would miss out on a great fuck, as well.

The sparseness of intellectual themes in horror is reflected in rock’n’roll, in one way, by the “Baby we’re breaking up” / “Let’s get married” lyrics that have redundantly infested pop since Rock Year One. It is the equivalent of an earlier generation’s “Moon in June” / “Let’s make whoopee.” In effect, it is a sexual tradition for maintaining a childish idealization of relationships. Rock romanticism is, at the opposite end of the spectrum, as much a simplistic fabrication as horror misanthropy, perhaps not quite so vulgar.

One may wonder what it is that pop lovers derive from horror, as opposed to adventure flicks. Every generation has its mindless correlates, but there are some peculiar qualities that attract rock’n’rollers to horror, in particular. One quality is that there is no binding form of prescribed behavior in a situation, such as the macho behavior of men in westerns. Another quality is immediacy and humor of horror. The cheap shock of a throwaway horror film like Maniac might be more amusing and entertaining than a Hitchcock suspense film, or a psychological thriller like Polanski’s The Tenant, which has a sociological and introspective pretext, respectively. Therefore, the most popular rock’n’roll horror films are those what have the greatest potential for being camp classics.

In identifying rock-horror as predominantly camp, I refer to what was written earlier, that rock and horror interact as siblings. They cannot co-exist and remain untainted. Once horror has lost its immediacy, it no longer has the ability to scare, but only to make us laugh; all the more degrading for the film, because it was obviously intended only to scare us.

When The Exorcist was first released, I found it to be genuinely effective, and I am a hard-case with regards to being scared. This was before all the gimmicks and surprises in the film were revealed by word-of-mouth and the media, so that many who went to see the film knew what they were going to see in advance. When I saw the film a second time, I couldn’t keep from laughing, seeing through Friedkin’s manipulations, and refusing to put into practice the necessary suspension of disbelief. So when laughter is eternal, horror is fleeting and can only survive as camp.

[The club] Hurrah’s, which doesn’t normally show horror films, unlike Club 57 and Privates, had on their video bands a tape of a fifth-rate Japanese Godzilla-type film, New Wave music replaced the soundtrack, which could only be an improvement, and the crowd apparently enjoyed the film.

Horror, in the form of camp, becomes communal in its humor; it becomes participatory. In any given film that fails to captivate and scare the audience, we notice that people start cat-calling. Campy horror doesn’t necessarily demand shouting at the screen to be a community event. It only has to allow the freedom to talk to a friend next to you, to laugh at the wrong moments, to turn off the sound of your television or car speaker at drive-ins, or to walk to the candy stand for popcorn and wind up trying to make time with the candy girl, missing the rest of the movie. There is no need to detail the well-known phenomenon of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where crowd participation (to the point where audiences recite dialog with the screen actors and add their own, dress in costume, light candles and toss around rice) is the main attraction, or the American-International B-flicks where participation takes place from the back seat of a car.

Rock’n’roll horror-as-camp retains its horror in the form of the outré, the weird Rocky Horror groups like the Cramps, the Corpse Grinders, etc., assorted sex deviates, rock’n’roll Nazis, and various left-fielders contribute to the creepy ambience that rock’n’roll often generates these days.

Rock-horror loses it’s campy, lightweight quality in the proportion that it corresponds to real life. Sid Vicious’ rendition of “My Way” in a clip from Mondo Video, which he finishes by randomly pumping bullets into his audience, is a hilariously demented example of campy horror. It isn’t so funny when we consider the bizarre circumstances of his life and sub sequent drug death. Yet, this aspect of pop is as fascinating to rock’n'rollers as the “Hollywood Babylon” syndrome that has traditionally appealed to middle-America.

There is currently a relatively ambitions horror film making the rounds called Fear No Evil, which advertises a soundtrack that includes music by the Sex Pistols, the Boomtown Rats, Richard Hell, and Talking Heads, among others. Never having seen a horror flick that uses pop successfully as an integral part of the soundtrack (as far as memory serves), I was most anxious to see how effective a pop score would be. It was hardly a surprise to discover that rock’n’roll had little to do with the mood of the film. The music was used in the high school scenes, apparently to draw a rock’n’roll audience. Any music that hinted of a contemporary sound would have served just as well. The true background music during the scary scenes was, of course, traditionally orchestrated. The fact is that pop dissipates terror.

Some things never change, and this goes double for use of music in horror films. The orchestrated arrangements provide mainly incidental music, and it is only in the rare case of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho, and possibly It’s Alive! and Goldsmith’s The Omen, where the music has a fife apart from the film and still does not work against the mood. There are very few horror soundtrack records available, and the ones that are released are often tremendously boring, swamped with variations of one recurring theme.

It seems that horror films and rock’n’roll both recycle their gimmicks more often than anything else these days. But when a catch or variation is used effectively, people will always come back for more. Unlike science fiction and free jazz, they work on the principal that you have to invoke the familiar, the expected, in order to shock and delight people; in horror, by revealing the bizarre thing which lies behind the masks of sanity and normalcy, and in pop by devising a new twist to an old formula.

Pop comes closest to being incorporated in the horror background in the form of the transcendental electronic music that is now the standard, thanks to John Carpenter and Mike Oldfield / Billy Friedkin. A simple piece of music is repeated over and over, with variations added at intervals. This has the effect of evoking the claustrophobic mood that is complimentary by the action on the screen. In the Philip Glass tradition, the synthesized music puts your nervous system on a constant wave or plateau by using this droning theme. The wave is shaken by the subtle addition of new instruments, voices, and rhythms. Halloween, The Exorcist, Phantasm, and The Omen (which uses chants to this effect), have all showcased this method of film composing. The transcendental effect is also common in rock’n’roll, although as used in horror films, it is neither frivolous nor electrifying, and main characteristic of rock’n’roll.

Repetition and simplicity is the key to both scary film music and rock’n’roll. Interest is maintained through the gimmicks and cleverness of variations on a theme. The recent horror films that can be classified as ambitious are those that have made the most of what has been done a million times before. The writers generally come up with a gimmick that is sensational and distinguished and knit the rest of the narrative with hackneyed stories and predictable characters and events. Maniac has a subway bathroom centerpiece, some gory special effect, and little else; Blood Beach has fancy soft-focus photography and laid-back narrative, but the gimmick of a creature sucking people into the sand is a blatant rip-off of Invaders From Mars and The Outer Limits’ sand-shark; Scanners is the most inventive, but owes a great debt to Stephen King; Fear No Evil has a great passion play stigmata sequence, but resorts to laughably worn-out “living dead” scenes and Carrie plotting.

In the final analysis, the obvious appeal of terror to the rock’n’roller must ultimately be the anarchy prevalent in the claustrophobic world of terror. Just as importantly the hero often survives the ordeal and assumes some sort of control – the stake through the vampire’s heart, the superiority of White (Christian) Magic over Black, etc. The traditionally anarchic supernatural elements suggest an affinity with the rock’n’roller’s alienated background and lifestyle.

Within their apolitical society they have power – they are special. Carrie isn’t part of the hierarchy, just a destructive loner who is doomed. But the Scanners are a full-fledged society of tormented outcasts and ostracized loners who eventually realize the potential to manipulate and destroy the world. What could appeal more to a rock'n’roller?