David Thomas and the terminal vision of America

David Thomas was not just a singer or the leader of one of the most interesting and crucial bands of that season, that feeling, that “spirit of time” that more or less rightly we call post punk. It was a broken transmitter that intercepted the background noise of a collapse America. The frontman of the Ubu pears, who disappeared the day before yesterday at the age of 71, crossed music as an anomalous entity, impossible to classify: too cultured for punk, too disturbed for the new wave, too visionary for rock. His song – a kind of robotic complaint, a scream of anguish amplified by rusty pipes – was the distorted echo of an industrial civilization that did not want to surrender to oblivion but that he had already lost.

Thomas was Cleveland. Not that of sports or bonary midwest, but Cleveland as post -industrial ruin, as a low budget science fiction scenario. A city-macrine that has lost the oil, but continues to toss signs. In the Cleveland of Pere Ubu there is no mythology from Working Class Hero, no Springsteenian nostalgia. There are empty roads, semi -disclosed advertising billboards, the neon broke out of a diner at 3 in the morning. It is an Lynchian Cleveland: a Twin Peaks without mountains, only anxiety peaks and radio loops.

When Ubu pears publish their masterpiece, The Modern Dancein 1978, they are not simply playing alternative music. They are building an anti-American mythology. That disc, like the subsequent ones Dub Housing, New Picnic Time And the rest of their production of the late 70s is a sort of soundtrack for a film that does not exist: an American dystopia shot between abandoned sheds, cowholmal park and implicated suburbs. Thomas, with his mutant voice and his wounded poet body, transforms the decline into a signal. There is no nostalgia, nor irony – distinctive trait of postmodern. Only survival.

This is why Ubu pears have never really been part of a scene. They weren't New Yorkers, they weren't London, they weren't even exactly punk. They were a gang of sound scientists: people raised by listening to the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra, the radiodramas of the American public radio, i Field Recordings of factories. Their era punk of the nuclear era. Music for when technology collapses and leaves room for ghosts. A music that seems to have come out of a forgotten TV on in an empty house.

The same name Pere Ubu denotes the origin from an elsewhere. The quote is by Alfred Jarry, author of theUbu roia fundamental text of the theater of the absurd of the early twentieth century: an absurd, anarchist, proto-adoist work. The whole career of David Thomas can be read as an American transposition of the Assurro Theater. But instead of the ridiculous kings and the Parisian farces, here are rusty cars, empty shopping centers, cold war paranoia, suburban alienation.

Thomas moved in this universe as a delusional witness. In his texts we speak of interrupted transmissions, of shadows that stretch on the deserted roads, of suburbs that seem to be lunar craters. It is a poetics of the decay: distortion as a form of truth. A world where evil does not come from outside, but insinuates itself under the kitchen tiles. As in David Lynch's films, there is no need for monsters: the smell of burnt plastic is enough, the metal sound of a fork that falls, a neon light that flakes too long.

Thomas was one of those singers of silent evil that lurks in the American province. Like Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas or the mysterious man of Lost Highwayhe always seemed to come from another dimension, but he knew everything about the one in which he was. It was a spectrum of the system, a postmodern noir figure: mental trench coat, scars in the voice, an inner map drawn with noises.

Live with Ubu Pere in 1978. Photo: Marcus Portee

One of David Thomas' great intuitions was not to trust the song form. Where the pop structure tends to reassure, to close the circle, the Ubu pears open fractures, accumulate noises, right -handed. The sound equivalent of a dismantled house by piece, live. Analog synths behave like broken sirens, guitars seem to drill the asphalt. Is it rock? Yes, but only if rock can be exorcism.

This overcoming the form, coming from distrust, becomes political. It is the opposite of radio. It is a declaration of sound independence: making music that is useless, if not to map the void. If Springsteen sings for those who go to work, Thomas has been singing for those who have lost their jobs for ten years and wanders among the parking lots of the closed malls. Each piece is an act of resistance against Bel Canto, against entertainment. It is music for those who want to listen to demons in the cables.

Thomas' influence is profound even if invisible. It acts in the basement, in the margins. She too an American “blue road”-those roads that for William Least Heat-Moon represent the authentic American veins outside the official cartographies-which emerges here and there. It is in the margins. In Sonic Youth, in the most disturbed Pixies, in the Radiohead. But also in certain moments of the Liars, in the suicide, in certain beloved beats of Oneohtrix Point Never. It is in groups that think music as a form of psychic geography. It is the idea that rock without groove can be made, without poses, without beauty. A rock from chronic sick people. From crazy scientists. As Americans who did not make it.

In his work there is a primitive form of hauntology Ante litteram. There is the sense of a modernity that is crumbling under the feet. An eternal shattered. The discs of the Ubu pears do not tell a time, but its blur.

David Thomas was, after all, a chronicler of the decay of reality. A reporter sent to tell a world that was finishing even before starting. A traveler in the time blocked between two eras – that of the great American dream and that of its evaporation. His body, often fragile, cumbersome, suffering, was part of his poetics. A kind of human antenna, capable of capturing irrelevance.

Thomas' work has never tried to be current. He only tried to record the sound of entropy. Like an old audio technician who remained closed in an underground radio station, convinced that there is still someone there is still listening, transmitting signals from a future that has never arrived.