Day 68: Suicide - Suicide
Album cover courtesy of Red Star
I’ve got an ever-expanding list of bands and artists on my phone that I often use for inspiration when I’m choosing an album. I don’t always remember where I got the entries from, but with this one I know exactly what happened: I was somewhere deep in the annals of music YouTube when I saw a video titled “Henry Rollins Recommends: Suicide” by The Sound of Vinyl.
I’ve been itching to listen to this one because of the passionate description by Rollins, who says it’s a game-changing mind-altering record that blew his mind so much that he waited weeks before he could listen to it again after hearing it the first time. He says the album has “the single most intense song I've ever heard in my life.”
Suicide wasn’t really on my radar before watching that video, I don’t remember hearing about them before that. They were an electronic synth punk duo formed in 1970 consisting of Alan Vega and Martin Rev, who make pulsing and minimalistic music with just a drum machine, a synth, a Farfisa organ, and Vega’s vocals.
Right off the bat, I love it. It’s as if someone designed an album that I didn’t know I wanted but that I did need. If there’s one thing that’s become clear during this project, it’s that I love organs and I love synths. That, combined with the ‘50s inspired vocals and the throbbing rhythm of the songs that just pulsates through your whole body makes for one of the strangest listening experiences I’ve had since the beginning of this project, and I mean that in a good way.
If there’s one thing that made me enjoy the experience a bit less, it’s that after I started researching the band and album, I saw that the intense song that Rollins refers to, “Frankie Teardrop”, is apparently so disturbing that a radio show used to do "The Frankie Teardrop Challenge". They challenged listeners to listen to the song alone, at night and in increasingly scary situations. I was sort of waiting to get that one over with, as I was also listening alone at night. I listened to it with just one headphone in to stop myself from getting too spooked.
Did that stop me from getting spooked though? Absolutely not. I was not happy to see I was only three minutes into a 10 minute song when he gets to “Frankie's so desperate / He's gonna kill his wife and kid”. It’s a genuinely horrible listening experience and as much as I love this album, I’ll skip this one forever. Their songs are just too visceral for me to want to hear this again. But the strength of the reaction it incites in me is, I guess, a testament to it.
Apparently the band received such a strong negative reactions that they once incited a riot in just 23 minutes. The audience were so incapable of processing what they’re hearing that they just went absolutely feral. After a member of the audience stole his microphone, Vega started singing a cappella, and when the audience started booing, he yelled “Shut the fuck up, this is about Frankie!” The band left the stage, and after the headliner Elvis Costello didn’t play an encore, the audience tore the place apart. The police came and tear gassed them.
If an album is a 10 for me, it needs to be something that I can also feel physically in my body when listening to it. It’s hard for me to explain any further what that means, I just know it when I feel it and I felt this one from the first second. Easily a 10/10. I’m a fan. Rollins said he couldn’t listen to the album for weeks after he heard it, and I think I’ll also skip this one for a good, long while. I had to listen to a bit of Earth, Wind & Fire afterwards to cleanse my palate.