What a great song! I’m the most inhibited dancer in the world and the last person that should be jury to what and what isn’t danceable, but even from my wallflower locale i know this is beyond funky. Pat Place on guitar! So simple and so amazing. That could be an aphorism for post-punk as a whole.
This song conjures up the scary, lost New York of After Hours, Times Square, Liquid Sky, etc. (yes, everything i know is from movies). The dirty, ever-night, crime-ridden, Bernhard Goetz, don’t wander the streets out late, tough New York of old. Now it doesn’t seem to have that complexion at all. Whether through actual systemic and social change or through the use of an entirely separate palette to paint the city experience today, New York seems harmless. I have no actual experience of the city, only an impression, so i am probably seeing the same city fixed with different viewpoints for different periods. New York in the eighties was also Sesame Street, Hannah and Her Sisters, Desperately Seeking Susan, and Central Park was there then as it is now. So… it is a huge city, with the whole range of socio-economic standings, as it always has been. Still, it seems different.
Greenwich Village seems different. Art created in New York seems different. Through gentrification on an already gentrified area, the whole class of people who can afford rent on those loft apartments has cultured a whole other hipster and a whole other hip, more parasitic than creative. It has always been like this, though. But it seems bred now in a pacified, regurgitative, affluent, harmless environment, not the vanquished fear-inspiring, admonishing New York. To be a band in New York now it is impossible to be spat out of that or have that image defaulted to you on geography. If ever it is projected, it is only ever pretense. The New York of the Bush Tetras is gone. I should research into this more. It is apparent to me. In Katoomba, NSW, Australia, 2780.
Adding Machine 