Lesson No. 1 for the New Artist
Art made by Sylvester_Prince
The No Wave movement was an avant-garde music and visual art scene that sprouted out in the late 70s in the decaying Downtown of New York City. This scene, despite its short life span, was the birthplace of many influential bands and artists such as Swans, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, and DNA.
The scene was categorized by its abrasive nature and distaste for modern conventions, giving a massive 'fuck you' to what is acceptable as art, and what art should be. It's noisy, ugly, sloppy, and, worst of all, honest.
Most notably, this is the birthplace of the phrase Are We Cool Yet?
What is this?
No Wave is a series based around a re-imagining of the GoI "Are We Cool Yet?". While they normally act as antagonists, using their art as weapons of terrorism, No Wave focuses instead on humanizing the group: instead being about a group of queers, punks, and goths expressing themselves however they see fit.
The articles in this series, as the name implies, are based around music and art within the No Wave scene. This, initially, is set in the decaying corpse of late 70s New York. The Vietnam war just ended, Nixon has resigned as president, and the slums are a birthplace of art made out of anger. Are We Cool Yet?, like many other art groups, were born out of the vitriol of the people stuck in the city, those that can only express themselves through the medium of art, because those damned pigs won't listen to your desperate pleas to make the city nicer.
This setting isn't exclusive to artists in the scene itself, but general experimental, avant-garde and punk music. All articles in this series are influenced after bands, albums, and songs borne out of anger at how things have been and how things are, or to push the boundaries of what's acceptable.
