Its an indisputable fact that "Pink Flag" is a crucial piece of punk history, and even a crucial piece of the history of pop music in general. "Pink Flag" is an album almost any punk enthusiast should love, and one that even non-punks should be able to get into. The film-intellectuals-meet-minimal-composers-meet-Ramones-fans formula is unique (or was until half the bands in the world began showing the "Pink Flag" influence) and still thrilling. "Pink Flag" is without a doubt the spunkiest album of Wire's catalog, and an ideal starting place for recent Wire converts. I feel swell after swell of pop excitement at the openings of each of the album's better songs (which there are plenty of), and none of the tracks are anything close to dull. I imagine Wire take some criticism from the more staunchly political punk sects, because there is nothing *overtly* political here (which is not to say that "Pink Flag" is without socio-political critique), but that's never stopped me from loving this album, and I spend most of my time listening to The Ex. But enough about why "Pink Flag" is such a fantastic album. There are already enough highly intelligent discussions of Wire's virtues here, written by reviewers who know a good deal more about Wire than I do, and I will defer to them on those issues.

Mainly I want to explain why you should buy the EMI import version (available here on Amazon[.com], and not badly priced) of this flawless album instead of the Restless Retro version. First of all, the EMI import has one more bonus track than the Restless edition does, and its a really good song. But more importantly, the Restless edition plays at such a faint volume level that I found it tough to enjoy. The sound quality is fine, but its very, very, quiet. If you want to, I dunno, "rock out" at home, you hafta jack up the volume til the CD sounds distorted and fuzzy, and the music gets muddled by that white noise hum/hiss you get when you turn up stereos to high. On headphones its okay - unless you want to go outside and, oh I dunno, ride in a car or bus, or walk near traffic or in densely populated areas. It gets to be very frustrating. The EMI edition has none of these problems, sounds great, and has that enticing bonus track; put your money on this one.

Like other punk bands Wire strived to re-focus rock from it's growing excesses, but they took that aesthetic a step further. Unlike other artists Wire's aim wasn't a return to rock's roots, but minimalism. Wire didn't approach music as a rock band, but as an art experiment. On Pink Flag, Wire eliminate every extraneous element resulting pure, angular music. While not musically accomplished (in fact, the band members admit they were barely competent technically), Pink Flag contains an astounding variety and depth of creative ideas.

While other punk bands (The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, etc.) acheived notoriety with genuine angst and shock, Wire distinguished themselves through unpredictabilty and vocalist Colin Newman's sly, oft acerbic wit (while oft incomprehensible, he's always compelling). In a sense it seems Wire's limited musicianship actually works to their advantage; since they have limited tools the band is forced to rely soley on ideas and chemistry. The 21 songs on Pink Flag rarely exceed three minutes (most are 1-2 min in duration) and rarely conform to any standard notions of song structure. With titles like "Field Day for the Sundays", "Three Girl Rhumba", "Ex Lion Tamer", and "Mannequin", many understandably view the songs as minimalist paintings tranformed into music. Arty as Wire can be at times, they're anything but pretentious. Pithy and snobbish as Wire might seem, Pink Flag is remarkably entertaining; it's intense, wryly witty, and at times undeniably funny. Wire's breadth of ideas is remarkable; they cover ground which includes proto-hardcore ("106 Beats That", "Different to Me"), tweaked power-pop ("Reuters", "Champs"), power-blues ("Lowdown"), and even spare texture experiments ("Strange"). "Mr. Suit" is the only marginal track... and it's still pretty enjoyable.

Some have argued that Pink Flag's songs are only fragments, but close analysis reveals Wire's brilliance; each song serves to convey it's ideas as expediently as possible and once this objective is reached it ends immediately. In his Rollingstone review Greil Marcus remarked about the lack of personality on Pink Flag ("You hear cleverness, wit, irony, but not personality."). While this might be accurate the lack of intimacy isn't a problem in the musical context and actually coincides well with Wire's aesthetic . One of the many things that makes Pink Flag unique is it's combination of emotional intensity and vaguely arty distance (which eventually became dominant in their later work). Wire's somewhat impersonal approach also makes Pink Flag transcendent; unlike many late 70s punk bands who focused on the sociopolitical climate, Pink Flag's more esoteric themes (both musical and lyrical) make it vital and relevant 25 years after it's release. Pink Flag is proudly touted as a profound influence by artists as diverse as Big Black, Sonic Youth, The Minutemen, Elastica ...and REM (who covered a more straight-forward version of "Strange" on their album Document). Wire would later make other ambitious and noteworthy albums (most notably "Chairs Missing" and "154"), but never made another as seminal, ageless, and visionary as Pink Flag.

Greil Marcus wrote that Pink Flag owed more to Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave than to the Sex Pistols, or something like that. Cryptic though it may be, he's on the right track: Pink Flag takes Malcolm MacLaren's idea of pumping rock songs full of Situationist manifestoes the next natural step: the songs themselves play like Situationist "moments," bite-sized Impressions rather than fully-realized Ideas. I'd include it in the (always paradoxical) Punk canon because of the sense of dread that most of these songs manage to convey. Wire didn't suffer from the same kind of paranois you find on the Pistols' "Holidays in the Sun" or SLF's "Suspect Device; where tracks like those convey an Us-against-Them-but-we're-Them-too mentality, Wire relies on terse, direct songs with vague, abstract lyrics to give the sense that "There's something going on that's not quite right." And the fact that they never give you enough information to figure out exactly what that something is makes Pink Flag a creepy listen. Highlights for me include "Reuters;" "Lowdown" for its insistence on jackhammering a single riff for 2 and a half minutes; "Strange" for parodying Punk's buzzsaw guitar with a sound like the bloaded corpse of Steve Jones; and "Champs," just for rockin'.

Wire's 1977 album PINK FLAG has been unmatched since, by Wire or anyone. Short, odd, angular, sarcastic songs, 22 in all, remind the listener that punk rock can be simultaneously smart, detached, and visceral. PINK FLAG is an essential punk rock album, standing alongside THE CLASH, NEVERMIND THE BOLLOCKS, THE RAMONES, and THE UNDERTONES as the best of that era.

Note: r.e.m. covered the track "Strange" on their 1987 album Document. The original is here on Pink Flag, and it sounds great.

New to Wire? Check out Pink Flag, then Chairs Missing and 154. A compilation entitled "1985-1990: The A-list" is a good summary of that stage of their career, and it also makes a good compliment to Pink Flag.

Do you have Wire CDs already? Pink Flag is the best of their pre-1980 releases, and their best overall. Don't miss it.

ken32

Every decade sees thousands of albums released, each barely making its mark in the world. But there are those albums that are so revolutionary, filled with an urgency and a potency to shatter our preconceived notions of music, that they deserve attention. Dangerous is not Judas Priest, NWA, Slayer, or any rap album from the last fifteen years. Those artists and albums were simply selling an image. In this sense, dangerous refers to that music which punctured and tore the musical zeitgeist. And so begins our list, beginning with entry number one:

Pink Flag - Wire

1977 saw the birth of punk, and with it the death of standard rock and roll as it had been known up until that year. Seminal bands emerged and used punk as a method of shattering all the fat and excess from rock and roll, a purification of an over-sexed and commercialized sound. Thus, punk presented rock and roll in its simplest form: three chords, verse-chorus-verse.

But an English quartet would quickly and radically change punk in 1977. The band? Wire.

The songs contained within their debut album, Pink Flag, stripped punk down to its core essential. If a verse were not needed, Wire would discard it. If that additional chord did not need to be strummed, Wire would not strum it. If a song only need be twenty eight seconds long, Wire would only play the song for twenty eight seconds. Most songs clock in at under two minutes, filled with an urgency that not even the newest punk band could match. This is the sound of punk's bare bones.

With this album, Wire grabbed punk by the throat and held it at the edge of the musical precipice, threatening to destroy punk while showing all that it was and could ever be.

(nine more entries to follow)