I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Album # 412
Album Title: Pink FlagArtist: Wire
Genre: Punk Rock, Post Punk, Art Punk
Recorded: Advision Studios, London, UK
Released: November, 1977
My age at release: 12
How familiar was I with it before this week: Not at all
Song I am putting on my Spotify Mix: Three Girl Rhumba
"I feel like I am building an airplane...while flying it."
Doing something on the fly, as the quote suggests, is an apt way of describing how the education community approached the unprecedented task of continuing to teach during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Around the world and throughout entire work forces, industries and institutions were compelled to adapt to new ways of doing things -- from reshaping their floor plans to maintaining social distancing to working from home via the internet.
Euphemistically, it's not the first time flying a plane while building it has worked. For as another adage suggests, "necessity is the mother of invention." And we did muddle through.
Looking back, it's only a handful of months since our world unravelled. One day, I'm communicating, collaborating, creating and critically thinking (The four Cs of education) with 28 Grade 7 students in a conventional brick and mortar classroom. Three weeks later, I was socially-isolated with my wife and cats, sitting at a kitchen table and developing distance-learning lessons and activities.
Meanwhile, our school's administrative team frantically disinfected and distributed Chromebooks and iPads to families already dealing with the economic and mental health stress that accompanies a global pandemic. Time seemed to move, simultaneously, slowly and quickly.It was a contradictory experience.
For about a week, there was a flurry of phone calls, emails and online meetings, followed by glitches, lost passwords, missed connections and technological hiccups. However, there were also little triumphs. The online education community began sharing tips, lessons, activities and techy-tricks. It was at this moment, about mid-April, that the idiom came into focus:
"We were building an airplane while flying it".
I thought about this expression again recently as I investigated the band Wire and their 1977 debut album Pink Flag. There were similarities, however, to understand it, we need to revisit the United Kingdom of the mid-seventies. It was a gloomy time, sandwiched between Prime MInister Harold Wilson's swinging sixties and PM Maggie Thatcher's divisive eighties, when an angry, youthful rebellion called punk rock was born.
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| A London Police Officer guards National Front Anti-Immigration protesters |
There has always been debate about the origins of punk rock, but 1976 is generally considered to be Year Zero for the British scene. Consequently, while preparing to write about Pink Flag, I was struck by the description of this record as Post Punk.
How could an album released during the first wave of British punk possibly be influenced by the genre it was helping create?
It did. In fact, Johnny Marr of the post punk band The Smiths once remarked on their influence by stating: "Wire wasn't a late arriving punk band, they were an early arriving post punk band".
Wire was a punk rock band who bent the genre while continuing to create within it. In 1977, such bands were almost in competition to play louder, faster and angrier. Wire's guitarist and singer Colin Newman wanted to move his newly formed band in a different direction. He chose to incorporate a genre of music with which I was previously unfamiliar: pub rock.
Pub rock was a short-lived, back-to-basics movement which developed as a reaction to expensively recorded and highly produced stadium rock bands of the early 70s. Pub-rockers, much like punk-rockers, embraced small, intimate venues and developed a "Do-It-Yourself" approach to recording and performing. However, unlike their punk counterparts, they were more informed by the sounds of Rhythm and Blues and early Rock and Roll.
However, pub rock was not the only inspiration for Wire. Newman also borrowed from mid-sixties psychedelic pop and the art rock experimentations of David Bowie and Brian Eno. Consequently, they chose to embrace a style that would come to be known as Art Punk. This choice was a contradiction of the edicts established by pub-rock. In many ways, Wire were deconstructing a movement (punk rock)...while also being part of it.
Strangely, much of this was possible because the band members were not particularly skilled musicians. Yet this deficit, combined with their fearless sense of creativity, was a crucible for something special. They were willing to take chances because they didn't know any better. In 1978, Village Voice writer Robert Christgau lauded the album Pink Flag for its "simultaneous rawness and detachment...returning rock and roll irony to the native land of Mick Jagger, where it belongs."
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| Wire in 1978 |
Wire continued to develop its sound on subsequent records, venturing into the world of experimental rock and electronic music. Three of the four original members are still part of the band who released their 18th record just last month.
In a 2017 article, Rolling Stone Magazine called Wire "The Ultimate Cult Band". Wire is to post punk what Big Star is to rock. They are the band that your favourite post punk band is listening to, be that The Smiths, The Cure, Minutemen, Guided by Voices, Franz Ferdinand or REM.
True to their origin, Wire remain a dichotomy -- both widely unknown and wildly influential.
So, much like my contemporaries in education during the sudden arrival of distance-learning during a global pandemic, they...
- Were not entirely sure what they were doing
- Were informed by and deconstructed previous methods
- Paid attention to the creativity going on around them
- Approached the opportunity with fearless bravado
- Overcame the challenges and
- Ultimately enjoyed some small, quiet, triumphs.
Wire were bending a genre while creating within it or, as the idiom goes, "they were building an airplane while flying it."
Coming Up: 461 Ocean Boulevard by Eric Clapton
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