Life Without Buildings: An Ode to 'Childish' Singers, Short Lived Bands, and Hopeless Artist

The rise of the internet has fundamentally distorted how we experience music. Sure, it makes a vast archive of music's past available to us in a way it never was to previous generations. It is true that we never had to know a time when music wasn't instantaneously available. Today, the average music consumer can acquire vast collections that rival anything that the most avid record collector could put together in the '70s or '80s. We are musical time travelers now, connoisseurs of a vast musical archive. But something has been lost in the process.

As a result of experiencing a lot of music through third party hosts like Spotify, we only experience the music of bands that were a) signed, b) made records, c) found their ways to our ears through the internet's mysterious algorithms. Moreover, many of us gravitate to the most successful and longstanding bands, ones that stuck around long and put out 5 or more albums. This is sort of the music consumer's version of the old adage 'the winners write the history.' The losers though - many which never release a single LP - can have profound subterranean influence on the course of music history. Sometimes all the action is happening underground. And even as digital music has made some music more available, it has obscured the process of how bands are formed and influence one another. For many of us, we have forgotten the process of music creation. Many of us have forgotten our music history.

Bands form and dissolve with amazing rapidity. A group can exist for only a few weeks, put on a few great concerts, and dissipate in an instant. Now when looking back on music scenes of the pre-internet era, many bands only exist in the fading memories of the members or in the arcane knowledge of a few scene historians. Most bands of the punk subcultures I study were extremely short lived. Even bands of profound influence on music history like Minutemen and Mission of Burma could rarely last more than 5 years. But why?

The creative process is draining stuff, especially for artists that work in a collective form such as music. You live and work in close proximity to loved ones with temperamental personalities. Many creative types come from painful pasts with their family and upbringing, and lingering pathologies as well as persistent hierarchies often infect the group. Certain members end up left out of writing credits or the creative process altogether. Resentments abound in communal artistic endeavors. All band histories abound with tales of betrayal, cruelty, and depravity. So why bother?

Succeeding as an artist, whatever that means, requires collaboration for monetary AND creative purposes. For most, the forming a band became more than simple economic necessity. Formation of a band could be a deeply nonpolitical act through the establishment of personal autonomy in opposition to the large scale exploitation of neoliberal corporate capitalism. The band has always been an informal mutual aid society, perhaps even some form of a micro-scale socialist utopia trying to reorder social relations and abandon capitalism's exploitation. If nothing else, the band became a sort of fictive kinship. Still, the sense of community and family enabled through band life was often short lived, and all bands are inherently unstable, mercurial things.

No band embodied the contradictions between the political and commercial aspects to rock music than did MC5

In a neoliberal world of alienation from meaningful work and traditional means of support, bands became a way to do something spiritually and morally productive with your life. Yet bands rarely transcended the base iniquity of the world for more than 3 minutes. The idea was to try to transcend the past and construct an alternative world of deep significance inside the confines of an uproarious chorus or through the resonance of a poignant chord. Art and creative endeavors with like minded others have natural appeal through their power transform; for musicians you did it one song at a time. And what I have learned from being studying the history of both radicalism and art in the late 20th century is that we cannot do it alone.

In my work studying punk subcultures in Michigan in the 1970s and 1980s, I see the names of dozens of bands that barely scratched their mark into the historical record. They might have only existed for a few key shows. And most bands were lucky to make it onto a regional hardcore compilation LP. After this, the air becomes even more rarefied. Just getting your own EP was a great honor to punks who had no avenue of success through major labels as the industry saw no commercial appeal in such extreme sounding artists. If you were a woman, gay, or a persona of color, the appeal was considered even more minuscule. This is how visionaries like Detroit's black punk band Death got all but ignored. Punk subcultures endeavored to reject the cynical demographic calculus that animated the music industry. Many artists, while still desiring economic success, settled for the greater sustainability that 'the scene' could offer. It didn't really matter how well you played or how you sang, just that you dared to try. Perennial drunks and fuckups the Replacements said it best: "I Will Dare."

Today, as I celebrate and conservatives lambaste, it seems everyone wants to be an artist. The 'do it yourself' ethos that animated punks contributed to an explosion in the number of people who 'dare' to be artists since the 1970s. Punk democratized the creation of music. A floodgate had been opened. The impulse was 'you can't tell me how to play or how to sing.' Life Without Buildings, a Scottish indie rock band that existed from 1999 to 2002, performed as a band that refused to be told how to play. Epitomized by the unique vocals of frontwoman Sue Tompkins', Life Without Buildings time together was a brief, defiant shout that spoke to the inherent radicalism of the punk spirit.

Compared to earlier rock music cultures, punk was a subculture in which women, transgender peoples, and people of color fought hard to acquire a larger piece of the alternative musical pie. Punk spaces were hardly spaces where safety and autonomy were guaranteed for women. But from the beginning subaltern peoples fought for those spaces, spaces where they were all but shut out from in years prior. Music scenes continue to be contested spaces, even after all the achievements of women, LGBTQ people, and POC's in past decades.

And so, critics described Sue Tompkins singing as "childish," an attribute that would almost never be ascribed to a male singer of the same style. In fact, her "talk-sung" or "talk-shouted" style has deep roots in punk and metal music. There really is no other way to describe such criticisms other than as highly loaded, sexist remarks. In music as in most things, hierarchies are highly resistant to change and require constant vigilance to eradicate.

The most frustrating aspect of this description of Tompkins' singing style is that Tompkins singing is anything but childish. There is in fact great diversity (and maturity) to her style. She relies on plaintive cries and indignant shouts ("Let's Get Out"); coquettish whispers mixed with forlorn glissandos ("Sorrow"); percussive, rhythmic blasts of word fragments ("The Leanover"); as well as hypnotic mantras that she seems to be speaking only for her own empowerment ("Juno," "Envoys," and "14 Days"). The more you listen, the more you hear the real experience, the lived history behind her seemingly childish singing. If you listen to live versions of their songs, Tompkins' nasally voice is strained, defiantly so. Her on stage singing is simultaneously self-anxious and defiantly confident, a contradiction fitting the uncertain and contested status of women and other sub-altern people in music. Her "talk-shouts" are the struggles to be seen and heard.

Tompkins has gone onto a career in the visual arts (it was in art school in Glasgow where she met her band mates), but it's plain to see that she fought for her place on stage. And if Tompkins is still called childish by critics, it embodies a child's moral fervor and their untarnished esprit de corps that comes from the collective struggle to make socially meaningful music. Everytime I put on Life Without Buildings I feel a fierce urgency to create regardless of what critics might say. Perhaps you will too.