1976
Great reggae’d punk shiv of a riff, stab and scratch. Discord arpeggio strings nailed dirty uncoiling into super-compressed worm of a counterpoint-riff. Like that. Bass lags a beat. The low-grade grating of an ambient theramin hum building up underneath, onomatotechnopoetic big-string-rib-pick-drags thru vacuum tubes & charcoal gray paperboard cones (twin Wright R‑2600 radials on a B‑25 Mitchell). It’s a claustrophobic space, collapsing into itself to explode, closing range & BLAST! the romance of bomber pilots or turret gunners. Art punks draw line straight through from Doolittle to Hiroshima: “Toy city streets crawling through my sights/Sprouting clumps of mushrooms like a world surreal” (greatest gen war hero, but where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?) sealed in a B‑25 or B‑52 with the same retro-prophetic pretzeled time as Pynchon’s Gottfried sealed within his V‑2 S‑Gerät: “Flew off early in the haze of dawn/In a metal dragon locked in time” passing into the long arc of history as ordnance-delivery mechanism, the moment before release of which the poison “dream won’t ever seem to end / And time seems like it’ll never begin” from above, and below “No place to run/No place to hide/No turning back on a suicide ride/Toy city streets crawling through my sights, Sprouting clumps of mushrooms…” (Reread Ballard’s Empire of the Sun recently and think the Fat Man’s sun rising from Nagasaki in Jamie Graham’s flight-obsessed bombed-out eyes). That, and bicentennial Cold War MAD breaking-punk dread (FFWD 1 yr hear R. Voidoid in Hell’s “Blank Generation”?) Boyhood charms of plastic planes. FFWD USAF to good ol’ now-drones. Proper paranoia, UBU PROPAGANDA! Event horizons.
