Wire “Change Becomes Us”
When I went away to college, I had this idea that I would study physics. Aside from the “A” that I received high school, I’m still a bit perplexed by the notion. The truth is, I had no idea what a physicist actually did for a living. But it sounded impressive in my head. Unfortunately for me, my college specialized in “theoretical” physics rather than “applied” physics. This meant that the Math, which I could stomach, was much more speculative, which I could not stomach. If I was going to do all that hard work, only to end up with “possibly” for a conclusion, I figured I might as well head over to art department, where facts and figures did not matter.
And so, that’s precisely what I did. Midway through my freshman year, I made the hard turn into an art department that was steeped in conceptual art post-structuralist theory. This was very fortunate for me, who had no formal training in the drawing or painting, but was enamored by the high minded, if vague, doctrines. For four years, I got lost in the studios, the materials and the critiques. And, by the time graduation arrived, I had a body of work that, if you squinted and were stoned, looked like naive Agnes Martin paintings, but with the heavy hand of an amateur. To be clear, these paintings were not a fraction as inspired as the last sentence might sound. But I liked them. As an illustrator, lines and grids were about all I could muster. And as a painter, layers of crudely applied oils was what my body was capable of.
All that was required for my paintings to be considered “Art,” was for me to call them by that name. But to call them “Conceptual” or “Post-Modern” or any of the things I would eventually do in front of my professors and in defense of my thesis defense, was mostly a fabrication. I produced a combination of what I was adept at (very little) alongside a childlike imitation of what I admired in the work of genuine masters. Mostly arrogant and a little ignorant, I said that my work was commenting on the previous work with some twist of logic and change of context. I suggested that I was adding to a meta-text. And then I went so far as to pretend that I fully understood what my commentary meant.
I still have a few of those paintings. Even now, they remind me of the simple pleasure of making things. But my thesis and its accompanying commentary was, perhaps like postmodernism itself, partial nonsense. The rather simple aesthetic pleasure of the work, when paired with acrobatic logic in its defense, though, was more than enough to convince the jury of professors. I graduated, with honors. I won the highest prize the department bestowed on an undergrad. I got a check for one thousand dollars and an exhibition at a local gallery. I spent two hundred dollars of the prize money playing NBA Jam at a local arcade.
Because of my significant limitations, I was only able to shoehorn the theory into the artwork after I made it. I approached the work with some parameters and some sense of an outcome, but the academic component was largely adornment. This question of what comes first -- the work of art or its conceptual significance -- is one that has stuck with me. Many years after I left college, I became enamored with the work of Matthew Brannon, who composed beautiful, graphic silkscreen pieces accompanied by provocative headlines and subtexts. For example, one piece might include a rendering of a Roxy Music album cover, alongside an Umberto Eco book, rendered in a cool, 1950s advertising palette. Below the images would be words like “Teachers Fuck Students” or “More Autopsy Than Diagesis.” And below the provocative headline would be an overheard conversation or anecdote that sounded abstract and misanthropic.
Those Matthew Brannon pieces were the inverse of my own. To state the obvious, they were far more accomplished visually than anything I could fathom. But, moreover, they were born out of theory and ideas. The meta-text wasn’t tacked on as a defense. The text was the meta-text. The images followed the ideas. The images were the decoration. And though I loved, even coveted, some of those paintings, their knowingness still felt a little showy to me.
For most of history, art has functioned as the subject of theory -- the thing that ideas are applied onto after the fact. However, in contemporary art, the theory is often the subject and the work is the object that is tacked on to the idea. Both versions can be great or terrible. But I have often wondered about the middle ground -- wherein the text and the meta-text are conjoined. Wherein the artwork implicitly contemplates the ascribed ideas and wherein the ideas are directly born out of the work itself. Wherein the artist didn’t have to suggest or postulate to prove a point and wherein critics did not need to ascribe meaning that wasn’t already evident in the work itself.
In spite of my time at college, I don’t know enough about art or art theory to begin to plot work on the “thing first” or “idea first” axis. But, in thinking of Matthew Brannon’s work — its minimalism and its penchant for including albums and album covers — I thought of Wire. More than any other band of their generation, perhaps more than any other in history, Wire blurred the artistic lines between things and ideas. Their first two albums, “Pink Flag,” and “Chairs Missing,” are widely and rightfully considered among the greatest albums of their era. And their third album, “154” is breathlessly namechecked among fans of New Order, Human League and the darker corners of New Wave. The covers for each of those albums, with their pastels and their spare, meticulous, composition, do bear some minor resemblance to the Brannon’s silkscreens. Moreover, those covers are undeniably the work of artists. Unlike most album covers, they are not slapdash paintings or fancy typefaces or sci-fi illustrations or high end portraits. Wire’s covers are works of contemporary art. I did not have to hear a single note of any of those albums to know that Colin Newman, Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert all attended art school. I could hear Sol Lewitt and Brian Eno and French New Wave and Roland Barthes just from the covers.
Auteur theory, which has been a defining character of film criticism since the 1950s, made its way into Rock and Roll by the mid-60s. Bob Dylan was, perhaps the first singer songwriter to be widely considered an artist as much as a pop star. And, by the end of the decade, David Geffen had industrialized the canonization of Rock bands as artists. Neil Young’s status as an outsider, folk artist almost made sense. But Geffen’s greatness was convincing a generation that Stephen Stills and Janis Ian were the equivalents of Jackson Pollack and Judy Chicago. To be clear, I think Rock and Roll is obviously art. And it would follow that songwriters and musicians are, therefore, artists. That is a given. The distinction I am making is between “art,” wherein the medium is the message, and “conceptual art,” wherein there is a presumption of additional, usually academic, suppositions.
Over time, the notion of Rock and Roll as conceptual art shapeshifted. There was the aforementioned “songwriter as genius” phase. Then there was Glam and the notion that Rock and Roll was theater, steeped in artifice. Simultaneously, there was Progressive Rock, which aspired to reconnect the popular form back to a more classical and theoretical bedrock. And, by the mid to late 1970s, the world of contemporary art and underground music converged in a glorious run that included The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, The Contortions, The Talking Heads and literally dozens of other bands that made mostly accessible music with the aesthetic bearings of something more studious. And none of this, of course, is to mention, the performance art or contemporary classical music that was being made in lofts and universities around the world. Even if we limit the conversation just to the intersection of Rock music and conceptual art, the path is winding, but crowded.
Within that crowd, however, Wire stood out. Part of this was on account of their schooling. Unlike David Johansen or Patti Smith or Joey Ramone, the founding members of Wire were formally trained in both the arts and the concepts. Singer and guitarist, Colin Newman, fluent as he was with critical theory and semiotics, approached music as sounds to be consumed. And while Newman undoubtedly had more heady ideas than most writers in approaching his songs, he has been quick to admit that the work comes first and that the meaning is something discussed and questioned later. Guitarist Bruce Gilbert, on the other hand, conceived of Wire as a “living sculpture.” Gilbert was much less interested in the form or in the aesthetic pleasure and profoundly interested in the meaning of it all.
This push and pull between Newman, the scholarly art rocker, and Gilbert, the conceptual artist who played guitar, is a major part of the tension that worked for Wire in their first run, from 1976 through 1980. Thy were certainly interested in Punk as an idea -- in cutting Arena Rock and Pop Music down to their studs with a combination of fury and minimalism. But the speed and anger and politics of early English Punk, while highly contemporary, was perhaps too literal for Wire. The Sex Pistols played mostly major, power chords. The Clash were real world agitators. Meanwhile, Wire, from the outset, used minor chords to make unmistakably pretty songs (“Fragile”). And when they got fast and furious (“Mr. Suit”) it sounded as though they were parodying the cliche of Punk. “Pink Flag” is undeniably a Punk album. But it is not an album obsessed with Margaret Thatcher or Emerson Lake and Palmer. It’s an album that is prodding at a larger malaise, some global opiate that they find to be both sad and hysterical. It is by no means the first Rock album to be informed by or to function as Modern Art. But it may well be the point of transition from “Modern” to “Contemporary” or “Postmodern.” Everything about “Pink Flag” -- it’s bare and inorganic still life cover, its breakneck pace and its dense lyrics -- demand professorial consideration. And yet, because of that balance between Colin Newman’s music, Graham Lewis’ words and Bruce Gilbert’s ideas -- the album succeeds equally as music, art and conceptual art.
As profound as “Pink Flag” is, it is also immediate. The meaning and energy are right there for you to take, on the surface, in the open air. You can hear the conversation going on between the band and their peers, their predecessors and their teachers. “Chairs Missing,” however, is more subterranean. There is far less oxygen. The people, their relationships and their thoughts feel suffocating. The songs are generally slower, more varied and unnerving. Although it arrived only a year or so after their debut, “Chairs Missing” sounds like a band that is more musically accomplished and intellectually studied. To call “Chairs Missing” a “Punk album” would be like calling “Sticky Fingers” a “Blues album” or “Astral Weeks” a “Folk album.” It would be true. But it would also only tell a fraction of the story.
“Chairs Missing,” with its artful cover and willful antagonism, is the album where Newman’s hold on the product gets jarred slightly loose. The grip is further relaxed on “154,” as the band goes deeper into soundscapes and drones. By 1979, the fury has fully subsumed itself. The vocals are more dispassionate. Guitars and drums are increasingly replaced with synthesizers. The cover is Bauhaus and entirely graphic. Not only is there no human on the cover. There is no object to be seen. While many of the songs on “154” still amaze and while you can hear its influence running through Post-Punk and Goth all the way to LCD Soundsystem, by 1979, it sounds like the heady ideas were defining WIre’s music and not the other way around. Three albums in, they resembled Gilbert’s “living sculpture” more than they did The Clash or The Buzzcocks or, even, Joy Division.
After “154,” Wire disbanded for the first of two extended breaks. They returned in the mid-eighties for a run of increasingly electronic, increasingly conceptual albums. And then, following a longer hiatus in the 1990s, they reappeared at the end of the century. Since 2003, the band has been remarkably consistent and almost universally admired. They are, relative to their success and influence, perhaps the most beloved “reunion” story in all of Rock music. Their legend grew in their absence and, when they returned, their albums were considered great additions to their original oeuvre.
In spite of this, until very recently, I had not listened to a single Wire album released after “154.” This is peculiar for a couple of reasons. For one, I completely adore the first two Wire albums. “Chairs Missing,” in particular, left a deep and enduring mark on me. Of all the great albums that came out between 1977 and 1979 -- Television, Talking Heads, The Ramones -- it was “Chairs Missing” that I most felt above the neck. To this day, I cannot describe the way it delights and terrifies, without ever resorting to horror.
But, moreover, I am fascinated by comeback stories. Even the ones that fail terrifically -- and that is most of them -- tend to fascinate me. I love reconvening with my favorite bands years after their original peak, when they are both oddly comfortable and desperate. I love the narrative. I love the fanfare. I love catching a glimpse of that original magic that I frequently missed the first time around.
Yet, Wire were unique. They were not like Television, who I followed until 1992, through a series of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd solo albums, praying for the comeback. They were not The Feelies, whose various side projects kept me believing that, one day, they would play a secret show on Christmas in Hoboken as soon as Bill Million could take a holiday from his job at Disney. They were not like The Replacements or The Pixies, who I was excited to see and hear even though I knew their motives were purely commercial. No -- Wire was one of one. They had more than a handful of albums between “154” and their third, more permanent, wave. And some of those albums are beloved by fans and critics. But not to me. I decided to never buy them. To never press play on those songs from Spotify. I never checked out the solo albums, which I have no doubt are interesting, if not better. When I quit, I quit cold turkey. To me, Wire ended in 1980.
All I can say in defense of this coldheartedness is that it is not dissimilar from how I think about “fine artists.” I am not a completeist when it comes to my favorite painters -- Agnes Martin or Willem de Kooning or Antoni Tapies. I know their works and their phases that call to me. But, beyond that, I know almost nothing. In fact, outside of the most basic facts, I don’t carry any biographical information about those artists with me. I find some of their paintings transcendent. I am interested in how they participate in the conversation about Modern Art. And that’s really about it. The more I think about it, the more I realize that Wire sits perched in my mind closer to Agnes Martin than to The Sex Pistols.
During our separation, Wire released nearly fifteen studio albums, a bunch of EPs and a few archival compilations. Additionally, Colin Newman, Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert made at least two dozen non-Wire albums during that span. Aside from offering an inner “thumbs up” to the Pitchforks’s 8.0 reviews, I knew nothing about this music. Nevertheless, I made assumptions. I assumed that the Newman/Gilbert scale had tipped in Gilbert’s favor, towards conceptual art and electronic music. And I sensed that while I didn’t follow, many others did. Goth kids. Club kids. Loyalists from Nordic countries. And weirdos who watched “Silence of the Lambs” too many times. With little evidence, I concluded that this music -- to the extent that it was not conceptual art -- was not made for me.
Finally -- and I am not proud to admit this -- but I began to doubt whether Wire could still be “contemporary.” Colin Newman considered “Pink Flag” to be the antithesis of Rock music in 1977. If you believe its founders, Wire was specifically founded to argue against the prevailing zeitgeist. Anti-Rock. Anti-New Wave. Anti-Electronic. The alternative to Alternative. Wire functioned as a funhouse mirror to prevailing trends, reflecting and distorting their sadness. In this way, Wire were always a present band. They were not futuristic, like Sun Ra or Television or Prince. They were rooted in their time. And, perhaps as much as anything, they hated nostalgia. They did not revel in their myth. In fact, Wire so avoided their legendary past that, for some time, they hired a Wire cover band called Ex-Lion Tamers to open for them in concert so they could offer fans “Pink Flag” without actually having to perform the songs.
In this way, Wire was pastless. They were always present and always stepping forward. But what happens when the present fragments and shatters? When there are no dominant norms? When the funhouse mirror becomes a hall of mirrors? When meaning is not simply relative and deferred, but irrelevant? Can you still operate like the fly in the ointment when the ointment has dissolved into thin air? When people stop buying albums? When Punk fills the malls of America? Colin Newman was evidently wondering about this at the very beginning of this millennium. Curious about how the internet, in general, and digital music consumption, in particular, would change everything, he started an online music project called “Posteverything” Part shop, part gallery, part theory, Posteverything fizzled out quickly. It also answered the semi-rhetorical question: what comes after everything? The answer, too obviously, was nothing.
Impossibly, Newman and Wire persevered. In fact, the early 2000s marked the beginning of the band’s great and unlikely third act. During their absence, the myth of Wire grew. Along with Gang of Four, they had seeped into the musical waters of Brooklyn and London. Wire were the Art Punk archetype. They were canon. And, among critics, they were unassailable. Between 2000 and 2002, there were three EPs, decoded and worshipped by aging semioticians and young, jaded bloggers. Then came “Send,” their first album of new material in twelve years. And then the albums kept coming. As the members entered their fifties, they looked less like bilious art school kids and more like aging product designers who wrote serial killer fiction or dark spy novels on the side.
Wire has now been back for over twenty years -- more than the sum of their first two phases. They’ve released eight albums during this period, all of which I ignored. In 2004, with Colin Newman taking on all of the musical composition and most of mixing and engineering, Bruce Gilbert left the band to focus on solo work and assorted side projects. I’m not proud to say that I wasn’t even aware of this fact until many years later. In 2010, the band filled Gilbert’s seat with fan and touring guitarist Matthew Simms, who was decades younger than the rest of the members. The reconstituted four piece toured the world and headlined small festivals. With every tour and album, the reverence followed. But I paid no mind. Wire was middle-aged and only looking forward. I, on the other hand, was stuck in 1978 on “Chairs Missing.” In this way, there was no chance that posteverything Wire would catch my gaze.
In 2013, however, Wire did the unthinkable. They looked back. Specifically, they announced that they would be making a new album from the sketches of material that they retired in 1981. Some of these songs were updates on ideas that were worked out in 1981s live album, “Document and Eyewitness,” but most of them never saw the light of day. This archival effort sounded unusually sentimental to me -- at least by Wire’s standards. I was curious as to why Colin Newman and Graham Lewis finally turned towards their past. I wondered if the culture that devalued thesis and meaning had finally gotten the better of the wise, subversive punks. Perhaps, I thought, the only idea that was still a viable target for Wire, was Wire itself.
The answer would possibly be found on “Change Becomes Us,” the album that resulted from the conversation between middle-aged Wire and their younger, moribound material. And while several critically adored albums had recently preceded it and several more would follow, this was the one that most intrigued me. This was the one that was not like the others. This was the one where Wire blinked. Writers and fans adored it. Stubbornly, I still ignored it.
It would be another eight years before I built up the nerve to face the band that I worshipped but had forsaken. Meanwhile, Wire had become workmanlike -- thinking, toiling, writing, recording, mixing, mastering, touring. And repeat. It took me far too long to do the math, but, about a year ago, I figured it out: Wire were fully a band. They were always a band. They were not a conceptual art collective. Bruce Gilbert, the member obsessed with meaning over melody, had left the band. Wire was not a living sculpture. Maybe they never really were. Maybe they still kind of were. In truth, I was less sure of my conclusion. But I was thrilled by my change in perspective.
With this mental shift, I was able to think about Wire in the same way I thought about stalwart corporations like The Rolling Stones or elusive pop-ups like The Feelies. No matter how highfalutin or artful their early albums were, they were, first and foremost, a set of songs and commercial products. And so, I took “Pink Flag” and “Chairs Missing” out of the gallery and off of the pedestal and placed them, lovingly, into my record bag along with Wire’s fifteen other studio albums. It had been nearly twenty five years since I’d earnestly considered listening to anything after “154.” I was a little overwhelmed but I knew precisely where to begin. I found the red photo that adorned “Change Becomes Us.” I unwrapped the album, hurried it over to the turntable, and set the needle down.
More than I even expected, in 2013 Wire sounded like a darker, but more subdued, relative of the band that made “Chairs Missing” and “154.” There are only the briefest of moments that could fairly be considered “Hardcore” or “Punk.” In that way, it is a long way from “Pink Flag.” But, on the whole, “Change Becomes Us,” is experimental, dispassionate and suffocating -- adjectives that have always applied to Wire. There is no “1 2 X U” or “Three Girl Rhumba” or “I Am the Fly” here. Colin Newman never shrieks or squeals. In fact, he talks and ponders as much as he “sings.” And the band that was once famous for its radical brevity, averages over three minutes per song here. One track even eclipses six minutes. Wire is in no rush to prove a point. To the contrary, they spend an entire album wondering if anything matters.
“Change Becomes Us” opens with “Doubles and Trebles,” an update of "Ally in Exile" from 1980. Like “Practice Makes Perfect,” which kicks off “Chairs Missing,” the opener lathers up a hard, foreboding acoustic guitar. And like its ancestor, it is an effective scene setter. Newman sings Lewis’ words about a compromised special agent like he’s reading the last fax or morse code he will ever send. It’s plain spoken to the point of being robotic. But it’s also terrifying. From its very first notes, the song signals that something terrible might happen.
True to its promise, most of “Change Becomes Us” is eerie and plodding, calling to mind PIL and their subterranean angst. Instead of PILs heavy bass and derisive whine, however, we get dissonant guitars and emotionless narration. “Time Lock Fog” typifies the vibe. Each sentence feels like an eternity. The tapping of glass to the beat confirms that something sinister is happening.
“Magic Bullet” is slightly faster but equally doomed. I might call it “Dark Wave “if I was sure what that actually implied. It sounds like something Radiohead would make if Thom Yorke had a better sense of humor. For most of the song, Newman drones: “Out of my depth, over my head.”
As much as they paint in grey tones, however, Wire does have a lighter, pastel side. “Re-Invent Your Second Wheel” is a downright pretty, full of chime and buzz and a cipher for a chorus:
VBFC HOQP, TMNY JUXD
UASU RYLI, VBFC HOQP
Yes -- that is the chorus. Newman gently sings all of the letters in the alphabet, randomly rearranged. He claims that he and Lewis wanted to make their version of The Jackson Five’s “ABC.” As if to prove that his tenderness is sincere, Newman tries out Lewis’ version of intimacy and communication.
Your outer skin, it will not peel.
Give me a hint of how you feel.
Between the heavy storms and the moody drizzle, Wire squeezes in a short minute burst of Punk. “Stealth of a Stork” has two chords (maybe three) and recalls “Sand in My Joints” if the singer was less an agitator and more a programmer. The hook is bent and stretched like wire, which should be unnerving but has an almost opposite effect. It’s hypnotic. I don’t know a thing about music theory, but I suspect it has something to do with the math of the chords -- that they are either too similar or too different. But, placed beside each other, the distance feels weirdly magical. For two minutes they reassure us of something you already hear and feel. Newman repeats “feel the strain but hard to look away.” And then it ends.
The biggest surprises on “Change Becomes Us” may be the sporadic appearance of Classic Rock power chords. First on “Adore Your Island” and then on "Attractive Space," Wire briefly references The Who or The Kinks or The Sex Pistols or any number of other English bands that put the Rock before the Art. These moments are too brief and too earnest to not mean something. In interviews from the time, Newman said that he plots Wire along a long line of English Psychedelic Rock bands, next to The Beatles and Pink Floyd and King Crimson and PIL and Oasis and Radiohead. If I hadn’t heard “Adore Your Island” and “Attractive Space” from “Change Becomes Us,” I would have assumed he was being glib.
While I only half buy Newman’s comparison, it does help me reimagine Wire as a band, in a line of bands. Whereas The Beatles defined modern music, Wire defined postmodern music. Eventually The Beatles expanded abstractions, but the gist of their meaning still largely resided in their songs and images. They were full of meaning. Wire, on the other hand, is all about absences. Short, incomplete songs. Lack of technical prowess. Inanimate still life photos for covers. Chairs missing. Extended breaks. Outside of the zeitgeist, peering in. The Beatles were textual while Wire is meta-textual. The Beatles were artful while Wire is conceptual. The Beatles were thrilling while Wire is riveting.
There are universes in those absences. To the teen who first heard them decades ago, they signaled great, but unthinkable, possibilities. They pointed to a route that was shorter and smarter. They pointed to something beyond the end of everything else. Once upon a time, it made more sense for me to organize these ideas within theory and away from Rock music. But, many albums later, I accept that Wire has more in common with the Fab Four than they do with Agnes Martin or Andy Warhol or Banksy. Or maybe they reside where the line becomes a circle. And maybe that’s posteverything.