Blank Generation (album)

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Blank Generation
Blank Generation cover
Studio album by Richard Hell & the Voidoids
Released 1977
Recorded 1976 & 1977
Genre Punk rock
Length 39:44
Label Sire
Producer Richard Gottehrer
Richard Hell
Professional reviews
Richard Hell & the Voidoids chronology
Blank Generation
(1977)		 Destiny Street
(1982)
For other uses, see Blank Generation.

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

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

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 real world compared to the imagination of his youth (the more vulgar connotations being perhaps a mere bonus):

Cuz love comes in spurts
in dangerous flirts
and it murders your heart--
They didn't tell you that part.

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 (inspiring the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant"), but Hell maintained that he meant it as a comment on "generation" songs (e.g. "My Generation", etc.), saying 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.

More recently, in a letter to The Wire magazine, Hell has pointed out that there are other obvious resonances in the lyrics, e.g. in references to blank walls, vacant lots:

it's fascinating to observe what the mirror does
but when I dine it's for the wall that I set a place
...
To hold the TV to my lips the air so packed with cash
Then carry it up flights of stairs and drop it in the vacant lot

Not to mention in some rather stark nihilistic thoughts:

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

(These lyrics are taken from the titles of two poems in Hell's satiric poetry collaboration with Tom Verlaine, Wanna Go Out? The book was written under the pseudonym of Theresa Stern, supposedly a half-Puerto Rican, half-Jewish former prostitute. The book was recently reissued in a French/English bilingual limited edition as On Decolle? Wanna Go Out?.)

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

And finally the dual possibility of the chorus:

I belong to the blank generation and I can take it or leave it each time
I belong to the _____ generation, and I can take it or leave it each time

Contents

[edit] Song credits

Seven of the ten songs on the original vinyl release were written solely by Hell, while "Liars Beware" and "Betrayal Takes Two" were co-written by Hell and band guitarist Ivan Julian, and "Walking On the Water" is a Creedence Clearwater Revival song written by John Fogerty. One of the two bonus tracks (not on the original vinyl release) on the CD, "All the Way" is also a cover version (see below).

While credited to Hell, the title track has obvious similarities to "The Beat Generation", a 1959 single by Bob McFadden and Rod McKuen that parodied the then-emerging literary community of the name.

[edit] Compact disc edition

As was the case with the original issue on CD of the Velvet Underground's first LP, the 1990 CD reissue of Blank Generation differs in several ways from its original vinyl configuration. Firstly, it includes two bonus tracks: one is a version of the Frank Sinatra tune, "All the Way"; and the other is "I'm Your Man", not the Leonard Cohen song, but rather an uptempo pop tune, like "All the Way" an outtake from the album sessions. The original LP ended with the long jam, "Another World", and was quite a bit shorter than, for example, Marquee Moon, as a result. Elsewhere, "Down at the Rock & Roll Club" is a noticeably different take than that which was first issued; this version features no drumming during most of the verses, and is rather more off-kilter as a result. Finally, the album cover is totally different; the original featured Hell standing against a white wall, opening his coat to reveal a bare chest with the words "You make me _____" written across it, in reference to the title song and album title.

[edit] Track listing

All tracks by Richard Hell; except where indicated

  1. "Love Comes in Spurts"
  2. "Liars Beware" (lyrics by Ivan Julian)
  3. "New Pleasure"
  4. "Betrayal Takes Two" (Richard Hell/Ivan Julian)
  5. "Down at the Rock & Roll Club"
  6. "Who Says? (It's Good to Be Alive)"
  7. "Blank Generation"
  8. "Walking on the Water" (John Fogerty/Tom Fogerty)
  9. "The Plan"
  10. "Another World"
  11. "I'm Your Man"
  12. "All the Way" (Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen)

[edit] Personnel

  • Robert Quine - guitars, background vocals
  • Richard Hell - bass, vocals
  • Ivan Julian - guitars, background vocals
  • Marc Bell - drums