newyorker:

Loving A Band That Doesn’t Want Your Love

Wire is functional for me; I use their music at least once a week. On the critical side, I can assert that the three-album stretch that begins in 1977, with “Pink Flag,” and ends (not the band, just the period) in 1979, with “154,” is one of the most impressive and expansive runs that rock has ever seen. Those three albums include songs as short as voice mails and noisy as auto-body shops, as well as smeared, floating music as harmonically delicate as any pop recorded in the state of California. Wire made it their business to ignore the byways of every cohort they almost joined (punk, New Wave, old punk, old New Wave) and rumpus through the noisy and pretty aisles as they saw fit. If art-pop is a thing (probable) and the Beatles invented it (pretty sure), then Wire did it better and faster than anybody, the Beatles included (a stretch, but it feels true much of the time).

…

But the music of Wire has not shown up recently in commercials or T.V. shows, or as samples in Rihanna in songs. The band has a small profile in current pop culture, so credit the power of their material and the efficiency of the Internet when viewing the Wire Tribute Videos made by Sara Poirier. How else would they come to be? We asked, via e-mail.

- Sasha Frere-Jones writes about Wire and interviews Sara Poirier, the fifteen-year-old superfan who makes music videos like the one above: http://nyr.kr/AhkoiP

It makes static a pleasure.

jennilee:

erin’s radio

(by Jennilee Marigomen)