Red Star Digital Music - The Sound of the Future Now!

"New York-London-Paris-Munich, everybody's talking about pop music", sang Robin Scott's M in the 1979 global smash "Pop Muzik". In just a handful of years, since the visceral, traditional rock 'n' roll charge of punk had flattened the barricades, a new and anodyne form was erasing the collective music memory. Punk had not tidied up its mess, leaving a legion of second-rate bands picking over the bones of the best that punk had to offer. Technology was co-opting creativity and the end was near. Or had it just begun?

Flash-forward: Early in the 21st century, Bruce Springsteen, the last living pioneer son of the Old Ways, is boosting a barrel organ version of a song by a relatively obscure New York "punk" duo - for which read electronic pioneers Suicide - changing back their future into a theoretical folk past: Why?

To understand how, in thirty years, the future became the past and the punks became the godfathers you have to go to a time and place that, although not so far away in time and space, might as well be on a proverbial other planet.

It's New York City, the year is about 1972 and, in the Alphabet City streets worthy of David Bowie’s imminent concept sub-masterwork 'Diamond Dogs', a nascent duo already doing what he often talked about were making, well, not "music" exactly, more like pain with a chorus. Suicide, punk's soon-to-be ugliest sisters, was being born. Real punks with real ideas, Suicide lit a fuse that blew up just about everybody in the end, even Father Bruce (who tipped his hand on this as early as 'Nebraska' where he hijacked the duo's ouvre as acoustic ballads): How?

Punk rock, when it was still any good, had plenty of heart; it was hedonistic, at its best passionate, and genuine at its worst. It was rock 'n' roll cut loose to drift at mach speed, trying to reach escape velocity. And into the midst of this melee and hand-to-hand combat was the patient Marty Thau and his new Red Star Records, which entity he dropped a substantial music industry career to create, trading mainstream certainty for the musical mania of a movement with the likely lifespan of a dragonfly: Who?

On corporate music letterheads Thau's defection must have been puzzling. He had worked with some of rock's heftiest artists, scouted and groomed stars, and promoted smash hit pop. In the music Mafia this man was already made. So what could make him jump? That bastard the future, again, proved the seductress: the New York Dolls and his other central discovery, Suicide, both suggested, embodied and somehow managed to sound like the past and future simultaneously, tearing up the present with songs so modern they broke the radio sound barrier and took us somewhere else, to a Red Star far away, a parallel universe of perverted pop paradoxically pure and clear. There were few like them, with the spontaneous vision and intelligence to make the music others couldn’t even dream of, and they paid the usual price: It would be years before many, many people appreciated them - before all their admirers came clean and cashed them in.

There it is: Marty Thau and Red Star, the Dolls, with their Hall of Mirrors 'Trash' show biz aesthetic, spawning a thousand bands and Suicide, with their apparently simpleton keyboard riffs yet the parallel 'Pop Muzik' prophets of the electronic music millennia. All the world is a stage, and Thau and Red Star set some of it, perceived by the herd as "punk" but really much more. Times have changed. Welcome to Red Star's current incarnation - the digital sound of today.

Jeremy Samuel Gluck - Swansea, UK - February 2010

Welcome to the sound of the present: Red Star did the future in '77.