Blank Generation

Blank Generation is an early punk album by Richard Hell and the Voidoids, released in 1977 on Warner Brothers' Sire Records imprint.

Related Topics:
Punk - Richard Hell - The Voidoids - 1977 - Warner Brothers - Sire Records

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The lyrics on this album, in keeping with the late 1970s punk style that Hell helped to create when he co-founded the band Television, are nihilistic and self-consciously degenerate, but they are also

Related Topics:
1970s - Nihilistic

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very strong poetically.

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The off-kilter, high-energy music is driven largely by Robert Quine's rapid, complex, angular guitar licks, in particular on the lead song "Love Comes in Spurts", in which Hell rages against the impermanence of love in the

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real world compared to the imagination of his youth (the more

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vulgar connotations being perhaps a mere bonus):

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:Cuz love comes in spurtsin dangerous flirtsand it murders your heart--They didn't tell you that part.

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There's a minor controversy about the meaning of the title track "Blank Generation." Many people adopted the song as a nihilistic anthem of the 1970s, but an off-hand remark about how Hell meant it as a comment on "generation" songs (e.g. "My Generation", etc.) produced a long standing notion that it wasn't really about being blank, it was blank in the sense of fill-in-the-blank--free choice against the determinism of social labels. It is with some mix of irony and appropriateness then that "Blank Generation" became adopted as a label for the 1970s New York scene.

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More recently, in a letter to The Wire magazine,

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Hell has pointed out that there are other obvious resonances in the lyrics, e.g. in references to blank walls, vacant lots:

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:it's fascinatin to observe what the mirror doesbut when I dine it's for the wall that I set a place

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:...

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:To hold the tv to my lips the air so packed with cashThen carry it up flights of stairs and drop it in the vacant lot

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Not to mention in some rather stark nihilistic thoughts:

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:I was sayin let me out of here before I waseven born--it's such a gamble when you get a face

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:...

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:The nurse adjusted her garters as I breathed my firstThe doctor grabbed my throat and yelled, "God's consolation prize!"

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And finally, in the ultimate resignation of the chorus:

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:I belong to the blank generationand I can take it or leave it each time

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(alternately, and illustrating the different readings: "I belong to the _____ generation/and I can take it or leave it each time")

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