She’s always whispering to herself in Babel tongue. The tiny flies roam freely around her moist eye membranes; tattooed and fluttering in a dervish flirtation waltz, mysterious grids, they telegraph a ruinous promise for all those who dare look into them. The scent of hyacinth drifts from underneath a faraway stall. She recalls breaking up with her last lover--a smile. Reaching behind, she pushes down the handle off the toilet flush, wipes herself, gets up, straightens her sheer black T-shirt, rearranges her gold-plated barbed-wire choke collar and goes back into the bar. The place is busy this night, all the insects are grinning. She has a few more drinks and things get street hazy and alien; she looks around and begins her search for a diplomat of danger, someone to make her mean. Over the sound system, loud and shapeless guitar moans, raspy vocal susurrations, and the pounding bass cling of a stamping plant worm their way into her head and groin. Stunned, she looks at the speakers and slurs, “What the hell is this?” Over in the corner someone faceless laughs and says, “It’s the VoidOids, honey. Ain’t they nasty?” She smiles...
Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the VoidOids is a primer for the intellectuality of the new punk. No longer can destruction and ignorance be the bywords of the blank generation. No longer can the English vision of the ennui-wars be tolerated. Punk as an attitude, as a force, is American, so essentially American that its definition has been sublimated to such a point that we had to look to the land of fish’n’chips for a definition to begin with, and the definition given us by the British is false and profit-oriented.
Punk (American Style) is born out of affluence, not poverty, because affluence breeds the attitudes of fear and cowardice that couple with the spirit of affordable boredom, which in turn creates the mulch outta which true “punk” philosophy and living is given sentience.
That is why Blank Generation is important, because this record is smart, a lot smarter than everyone wants it to be, a lot smarter than perhaps it was intended to be, but nevertheless smart as hell. Hell is a poet executioner of street cling and lamplight ’n’ gutter jive. His images abound with the dandruff of the new white nigger and the insolence of early rock’n’roll. Yet he doesn’t fall into the beatnik trap like Patti Smith does, simply because he’s younger than Patti and more attuned to the realities of youth. Like Max Frost in “Wild in the Streets,” if you’re over 25, who cares, you simply don’t matter anymore.
Augmenting this crazed lyrical vision of Hell’s are the VoidOids, whose white-hot, sweet-sounding musical cavatinas blend the early ferocity and other-ness of Beefheart’s Magic Band with rhythms of the Seventies. The VoidOids come on especially effective on the lengthy “Another World,” a number dedicated to a different dimension and a parallel world.
This album is just off the wall enough to let it cross-over into the realms of true punkoid pursang. The hit should be “Blank Generation” and the favorite will probably be “Love Comes In Spurts.” Richard Hell and the VoidOids are the only real punk band to hit the scene since the demise of the Electric Prunes. Buy the album for your children today. It will prepare them for tomorrow.
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