![]() ![]() Suicide was perhaps the first popular band to use the phrase “punk music,” at a time when the darker connotations of that word were way out front. Unlike peers such as Kraftwerk, which used nascent electronic instruments to imagine a smooth, orderly future, or Giorgio Moroder, who used synthesizers to create a dancefloor utopia, Suicide sounded like Elvis Presley if he’d never made it into Sun Studio and instead wound up in “Taxi Driver.” But right away, Suicide’s music and presence was like something from a failed future. Suicide were already old guys when the band showed up on the New York scene in the early ‘70s – Vega, nee Alan Bermowitz, was born in 1938. ![]() But pop music – including electronic, punk, and anything else with a mean streak – is now left without one of its only true antagonists. The billing almost didn’t seem real, in part because Suicide had long become one of those bands, like the Velvet Underground, whose influence and lore far outpaced the number of people who had actually seen the act in its ‘70s prime – the shows with the swinging motorcycle chains, bloody faces and axes thrown at band members onstage.Īfter singer Alan Vega died over the weekend at 78, that show will have to go on without Suicide (Desert Daze organizers say they are plotting a tribute). The fest was going to be the NYC duo’s first L.A.-area show in 16 years. Suicide was supposed to headline the upcoming Desert Daze festival in Joshua Tree. ![]()
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