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Destroy All Monsters: Jan Tumlir on motor city madness
ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Jan Tumlir
Motown, the Detroit-based musical empire built by Berry Gordy in imitation of the local auto works that had once employed him, was a brazen purveyor of (to borrow Theodor Adorno's dismissive epithet) "commodity music," pure pop product built from standardized parts, as on an assembly line. This was in the early '60s, when youth culture as we know it achieved critical mass. Some twenty years later, the midwestern boomtown had given way to the post-Fordist wasteland, where Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, the so-called Belleville Three (after the upscale Detroit suburb they called home), would distill the formula for techno from a dystopic vision of industrialism. As Atkins famously--if perhaps apocryphally-quipped, "Today the automobile plants use robots and computers to make their cars. I'm more interested in Ford's robots than Gordy's music."
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The sonic menu of Destroy All Monsters, another very local, very Detroit phenomenon, may not prominently feature either Gordy's soul music or Atkins's electronica, but those two pioneers nevertheless provide the group's development with a telling pair of historical bookends. Ignored in their own day, and some would say for good reason, DAM were, in their own words, an "anti-band." Apart from the occasional release on flexi-disc or homemade tape, they spent their most fertile period without a label, a manager, or any kind of distribution system. Their few public performances tended to end early, when the plug got angrily pulled, and their only press was self-generated. Conditions that most would find simply impossible were here embraced, however; they stoked DAM's nihilistic flame, enabling them to produce a body of work so utterly indifferent to prevailing standards of musical taste, so uncompromisingly underground, that it would have to wait twenty years to surface.
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The members of DAM met in the art department of the University of Michigan in 1972, right in between the best and the worst of times, between the era of full-benefit packages and the advent of Reaganomic downsizing. The original, lineup comprised Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Carey Loren, and Niagara, their protopunk front woman. Card-carrying malcontents, they were bound by a predilection for, culturally speaking, the highest highs and lowest lows, and near-total indifference to everything in between. The sound they synthesized from this radically polarized mix of reference points--which ranged from musique concrete to garage rock, auteur cinema to schlock horror (their name comes from a late-'60s Japanese B movie) and porn, Dadaist poetry to underground comix--is as "difficult" as one might expect yet also oddly consistent, at times almost tranquil. Largely unconcerned with dramatic development or logical progression, DAM abandon the listener in a soundscape or, better, a sound rut. Vibrant tone colors merge into a uniform brown sludge suggestive of rust, crap, failure. Like the squeaky wheel haunting Muzak's stimulus-progression curve, this is the sound of an economy in decline.
Easy listening, exotica, theremin-based sound tracks, sketch comedy, hi-fi experimentalism, roots rock--at a time dominated by either folk-hippie naturalism or the arty pretensions of prog rock, DAM chose to bend an ear toward the sounds preserved in bargain bins. This matched up perfectly with the band's downscale gear-K-Mart guitars, chintzy chord organs, broken-down drum machines, and the like. To bring the already Surreal promises of the '50s into woeful alignment with the present-day evidence of their bankruptcy was DAM's unspoken aim. To this end, they gathered in one another's bedrooms and basements, sometimes playing along to records or to films on TV (preferably Tokyo studio fare). Their output swerves recklessly between the sublime and the ridiculous: Play the epically haunted track "Shiver" (1975) back-to-back with the grotesque "Barnyard" (1975), which features crude emulations of a menagerie of farm animals suffering from chronic flatulence. By 1976, this chapter in the life of DAM is already complete.
"A one-to-one relationship is set up, whereby each action is answered by a growling response, like that produced by poking an animal with a stick, or crossing a threshold and setting off an alarm." Thus Mike Kelley described the DAM production process (to call it composition would be a misnomer) in the first issue of the band's fanzine. "Once in motion," he continued, "this response can go on regardless of the actions of the initiator. To produce something, like a sound, and then have it mature enough to keep going without your assistance causes a pleasant sensation-one of creation." Kelley gives the idea of music as a self-perpetuating machine a very particular spin, one that combines the Exquisite Corpse modus of Surrealism with an alienated post-industrial consciousness, finished off with a suggestion of liberating delinquency. Farther on, he half-ironically announces the band's egalitarian mission: "Destroy All Monsters is a call for a new therapeutic popular music.... Everyone should pump out Monstrous, destructive Destroy All Monsters black noise. If everyone let their aggressions voice themselves in such sound there 1) wouldn't be any need for popular entertainment of any kind, and 2) wouldn't be anything--just an existence of total comfort." (1)
