STRAIGHT TO HELL

text by Marta Benvenuto, illustration by Freddy Ventriglia 

TED always suggests “ideas worth spreading”. Among them, you can’t miss the chat of the “talking head” David Byrne about the connection between music and space.

If it’s true that Nature is Measure, from her we know that also birds modulate their voices fitting to the physical place they are into: in the thick wood foliage, in the boundless space of a Sahara. So, in our species, at the end of the light-hearted Seventies, some loose living kids took a look around and built Punk. So that is not singular to think that the filthy walls that hosted them were like thick foliage that forced their sound in a fast notes cage.

Just think about the CBGB in Manhattan and then about the “Fast Four” Ramones, they had to be fast whether they like it or not to make the notes suddenly rebound on that twisted walls. Or the Cavern Club in Liverpool, with that brick arched ceiling on man level that not even in the Tube, The Clash were seriously landed straight to hell and they had to push the rhythm out of that circular prison.

Let’s take a look to the Whiskey a go-go, in the great L.A. sun, it’s a sort of container, a red parallelepiped made of screws and sheet iron, the sound remains all inside because it cannot reach the windows for how high they are and to knock out the wall of people crowded there, only works hardcore, played at 180 bpm, no more fear.

This clubs are like sanctuaries gone wrong, they love earth and there is no God there, the light doesn’t pass through in this sort of cellars, the short notes they do theirs duty, they stick like chewing gum on the irregular walls soaked in spit and sweat, in vomit and alcohol. The sounds hit like punches that have to be much strong as possible if they want to have a chance to beat on the real fights. You have to shout over the others and do it well, like a hyena, because fast bass lines are elbowing to pass the right angles, like rats in a sewer or in the basement. But they play like there isn’t future in the guerrilla’s holes, the sound generates there and there it stays, but the message that the shrill voice repeats like a refrain, rises above the graffiti walls and spreads itself above the thick wood foliage, shaking the respectable awake: “don’t know what I want but I know how to get it, I wanna destroy”!