The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 03/05/12
The Wipers - "Youth Of America" (1981)
Is it just a middle-aged curmudgeon's imagination, or did we - from the mid-60s through to the early 80s - have the best of it, musically speaking?
So little of what I have the misfortune to overhear from radios and other people's infernal .mp3 players/iPods/what-'ave-yew seems to have anything of the skill, the passion, the integrity of what I heard when I was growing up.
And that's just the stuff I already knew about.
Until about an hour ago, I had never heard this track; hell, I'm not even sure I remember ever hearing the band's name before, although Kurt Cobain cited them as an influence.
The Wipers were from Portland, Oregon and what follows is the title track from their second LP (remember when they were called that, boys and girls?), released in 1981. In contrast to their first album, Youth Of America stretched things out beyond the eight-songs-in-nine-minutes cliché of punk, and the title track is the fitting epitome of this approach, clocking in at over ten minutes.
There's nothing self-indulgent here, though: from a standard-sounding New Wave opening, it pans out into a buzzing mass of sound which at the same time harked back to Hawkwind in full wig-out mode and prefigured such later noiseniks as Mudhoney and, yes, Nirvana, before going back to the opening style.
Enough theorising. Enjoy!
(Tip of the wig - not for the first time - to BoingBoing)
