Re: what is skronk?

i'm not really sure,
but i think i heard the clash play some early genre type stuff.

please help.

In my mind it's a word sometimes used to describe purposeful guitar dissonance. Like a guitar breakdown in the the midst of a Sonic Youth concert.

I thought it refered to free-jazz horn blurts, or at least, angular free-jazz influenced music. Def. not the Clash (unless they did some collaboration with Anthony Braxton that I'm not aware of.)

Yeah, you're right--I guess my version is technically "guitar skronk" and not just "skronk."

g'day itch,
sad to report it is as dry as perth here.
fuck all, i've got a vintage 'up in smoke' paper ready to roll.
hi & dry on me birfday weekend!

I thought maybe it was something available at various Amsterdam cafes.

Fill it with skronk & many happy returns.
Today is a temp of 82 (Fahrenheit just for you) and a thunder storm in the arvo.

yeah mate,
LARGE clockwise rotating pressure systems.

i knew you would have a rain or two this summer.

good on ya down there!

Yep, this time of year means bloody hot days followed by a big wet and/or southerly buster.

I seem to recall that Robert Christgau used that word to describe atonal, noisy, "free" music — pretty much what Erik and Fab described.

However, Wikipedia defines the word differently.

According to the blog Scronk Box:

Quote

"Skronk" is a term coined by Robert Christgau (or at least Lester Bangs attributed it to him in his "A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise") to describe the music made by musicians in the late '70s art-punk movement No Wave (i.e. DNA, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, etc.), and like-minded noisy or 'difficult' pieces of music.

Not sure why, but the post got ... posted ... twice. So I've deleted the duplicate and left you all this. There's nothing to read here. You can proceed.

Hope I deleted the clone and not the original. It'd be like "Quark" all over again. Hate when that happens.



Post Edited (10-23-09 19:07)

Allowing for a moment that Christgau coined the term "skronk" (and I'm not suggesting there's an argument there) - did he also dream up the "horrible noise" tag as well?

I was at first thinking that Lester Bangs was behind both. I'm quite ready to cave on the first, but less gung-ho about the second half of all that.

Assuming that I'm wrong, what did Bangs call that sort of ... well ... horrible noise? I'm specifically thinking about "No-Wave" noise stuff like Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, James Chance (whose horn playing leaps to mind when you drop the word "skronk"), etc.

The Stooges also figure into that somewhere. When they employ a saxophone. As mentioned above and elsewhere ... the word "skronk" evokes horns. To me, anyway.

My copy of Bangs is in a box somewhere. Otherwise, I'd look it up. I refuse to Google this information. That's why the Internet invented bulletin boards and limited human interaction, after all.

I have fairly concrete memories of reading the term in Lester Bangs. I could be very wrong.

...

Since Christgau was mentioned, I'll raise a toast to his one-liner concerning Portishead:

"Sade for androids."

I love that!

Bangs did indeed attribute the term "skronk" to Christgau, and stated that he preferred the term "horrible noise" to describe such music.

It's from his piece "A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise," which appears in the book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.

I've further investigated the Christgau/skronk connection and found that Christgau penned the following in the June 1997 issue of Playboy Magazine:

Quote

Just as listenable as Luna is Arto Lindsay, the Brazilian-raised downtown New York mainstay who long ago invented the guitar-noise concept known onomatopoiecally as skronk.

So it would appear that Christgau is attributing the concept of skronk (possibly even the term "skronk") to Arto Lindsay, and this is further supported in Lindsay's Wikipedia entry:

Quote

In the late 1970s, he co-formed the seminal no wave group DNA with Ikue Mori and Robin Crutchfield, although Tim Wright of Pere Ubu fame would soon replace Crutchfield. In 1978, DNA was featured on the four-band sampler No New York (produced by Brian Eno) which brought an early taste of international notoriety to the group, and which quickly became the essential document of No Wave. The famous rock critic Lester Bangs once described the group's ritualistic vocals, and deliberately primitive, speaker-shredding guitar as “horrible noise.”

[...]

Lindsay had a cameo appearance in the Madonna vehicle Desperately Seeking Susan and can be seen playing "skronk" guitar in Downtown 81, a film about the art and music in the East Village featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat and Deborah Harry.

Arto may have invented skronk, but I'll take his Samba shit any day of the week ending in 'Y'. Mundo Civilizado 4eva!

Post Edited (01-07-10 00:06)

"WARNING!:Annoys pet cats."
Really? - I'm there after that hairball in my Calvins this morning.

STEVE is skronk!!!

except that one could never mistake STEVE's posts for horrible noise.

[www.youtube.com]

> except that one could never mistake STEVE's posts for horrible noise.

Yeah, I'd agree with that ... "horrible" is going too far.

i skronk,
therefore i am.

i shall continue to make 'near' horrible noise whether my audience likes it or not.
And many thanks to all for your squalling feedback!

And I thank you for it, STEVE.

On a related note, I got a Fuck Buttons CD from the library last week. Because I thought someone had discussed them on here, I ran a search using the term "fuck". It should surprise no one to hear that probably 80% of the search results were STEVE posts. Try it and see!

yeah but if them insurance companies keep fuckin (darn it!) with the hoip, i'd bet he could be a serious contender.

gee wizz & golly G!