The Wire 300: The Dead C’s Bruce Russell Searches For New Sonic Hybrids In The Rubble Of Modernism

Experience is the product of story-telling, and shared experiences are what we use to constitute cultural traditions. It is in the light of this fundamental social truth that I consider The Wire on the occasion of its 300th issue. What has been the fate of our shared traditions of experience in music and sound since The Wire first rolled off the press in 1982? In a word – decay. And as traditions decay, what do they leave us with? Ruins. And what do we do with these ruins? We build. If this seems unduly pessimistic, this is not my intention at all.

Human history is the province of change as one thing replaces another, musical traditions included, as noted by Tony Herrington in his editorial in The Wire 300. And modernity, the most recent era for which we have an agreed name, may be defined as the final dissolution of a set of pre-capitalist traditions which were inherited from the feudal period - like putting a body into weak acid. Simultaneously new traditions were given rise by the conditions of modern life: for instance, the novel, photography and film, jazz and rock music. These new traditions themselves began to break down as modernity itself began to decay, driven by the gradual post-war change from a society organised for production, to one organised for consumption – a Spectacle, to use the technical term. The essential mark of this process is of course the internet.

Since, as I said, traditions are maintained by the story-telling that builds common experience within a group, this is a process that The Wire has participated in to some degree on a global scale. In 1982, when I was discovering many of the artists who were to become touchstones of my later career, such as The Fall, we had no reliable sources of information other than record covers and hearsay. We told each other these stories, in order to make connections between records and genres that seemed significant to us. This process occurred in many tiny communities of shared cultural practice around the world: so it was strong, and built traditions that seemed permanent, from Dunedin to Havana. We knew, or thought we knew, that Stockhausen wasn’t doing the same thing as Cabaret Voltaire, or Suicide, or Lee Perry. Yet even then, the separation of traditions was to some degree an illusion.

In a way, the career and posthumous adventures of Joy Division exemplified some of these emerging cultural trends at their outset. The original group expressed the most perfect realisation imaginable of rock as the soundtrack to modernity. The lyrical debts of Ian Curtis to writers from Kafka and Conrad to Ballard and Burroughs reinforced this, while Martin Hannett’s unprecedented yet glacially prescient production virtually assured their ascent to the pantheon on the untimely termination of their career. And what happened next? New Order became the first rock group to cross over to the then new electronic dance music which was starting to develop in the underground clubs of New York and Chicago. And off the back of this audacious generic miscegenation they became massively successful. Given that House music itself grew from a trans-Atlantic hybridising impulse of breathtaking improbability, all bets were off from the time of this magazine’s inception that music would for long remain tidily Bantustan-ised.

In fact, the advance of Spectacular society - with its ubiquitous cyber-media, the replacement of social solidarity as the glue of society with tradeable commodities, and the near-universal conversion of time into money - has made the ongoing maintenance of traditions increasingly untenable. And the differences between them seem less palpable, as the big guns of the commodity economy (in Marx’s famous phrase) batter down all Chinese walls.