Alan Vega - Suicide - Art

Like my previous post, who today is not familiar with Suicide? It seems after Alan Vega's passing last year, the band has reached mythical cult status and every post-bear hipster is now a Suicide fan. I will admit I too was not familiar with the band nor Vega's creative output very much outside of the little he did when he collaborated with the two guys from Panasonic as VVV (Vainio / Väisänen / Vega)

When I was eposed to VVV's debut CD "Endless", I was anything but excited, waiting to be impressed. I mean first of all, I was a mega Panasonic fan and those two Finnish guys working together on just about anything could do no wrong by my ears. I had no clue who this "Alan Vega" was, although the name was familiar (it was a few years later that I discovered that years earlier he had collaborated on the Andrew Eldrich "The Sisterhood" EP project). Folks hyped him up saying stuff like "Alan Vega... Matin Rev... Suicide, man!" to which I replied I had no clue, which people couldn't believe since I pretty much knew a good amount of useless information reguarding un-commercial music in general. However, "Endless" by VVV being my first official introduction to the world of Alan Vega, I was left anything but impressed. To me he sounded like a hack of Elvis Prestley with a one trick pony of a vocal delivery (that 1,2,3 schtick: "Red Lights Down" - "Hey Hey Hey" and so on), which sounded as though he recorded months later after the Panasonic guys delivered sub-par Panasonic material. Don't get me wrong, if "Endless" had be released without Alan's vocals as some kind of Panasonic material, I would have gobbled it up. Alas, it sounded as second-rate material at best, with maybe two stand-out track from the album.

It wasn't until years later I heard cover versions of this piece called "Ghost Rider" which caught my attention to try to look into Suicide. At first I was more curious about the music rather than the myth, but was again side-tracked by another VVV release. Oh great, I thought; if they hadn't wasted my time enough with the first one, now they're doing another. However this time, "Resurrection River" was quite different. If fans felt this second offering a less "bombastic" release being slightly more "toned down", I did not see it in the same light. In my opinion, this second release felt a more cohesive group effort instead of the disjointed offering of "Endless". In fact "Resurrection River" felt more focused, denser, and yet more pure in it's composition and delivery. OK so Vega was not getting any younger but this time he sounded more into it than the first time around. It was after "Resurrection River" that I felt I could dive into the whole Suicide myth with a more open mind, ready to discover what so many shunned and ridiculed for décades.

By this time, Alan had passed away, and the sheer number of people claiming to have been influenced by his decades' worth of art and music were unfathomable. Suicide's debut album "Suicide" from 1977 was being hailed as the long lost holy grail between rockabilly and noise-industrial. I was immersing myself in Suicide as best I could, trying to grab as many CDs from the band and Vega's discography that my limited budget allowed me (as you can imagine, after Alan's passing his contributions became more expensive to acquire). But it was to be something else entirely which would place the memory of Alan Vega in my artist's heart.

As you know, Alan Vega was also a visual artist. Paintings, sketches, drawings, and "structures" made up some of his non-musical crafts, and in this I found a reverberating commonality. You see, not long prior to discovering this, I decided to take up acrylic painting myself. With no classes nor education in the domain whatsoever, I was inspired by my wife's own paintings and realised there was a whole world of visual expression to be experienced. I had a friend who did doodlings and drawings but found that the medium was flat and cold. Painting on a cotton canvas has a texture, a depth which 2-D pen on paper can not emulate. So when I discovered Alan painted (amongst other ventures), I felt a certain "connection" to the man, even though I literaly am an unknown nobody in a world of cell-phone addicted wireless streaming ADD sufferers. I'm not anyone special, and I don't have special skills, but I do "art" because it is a part of me, because I feel as though it needs to be done and it needs to come out. Some folks buy stuff, some folks shop, some folks stream Netflix and watch celebrities on media devices. I do music and paint and cook and support DIY independant artists. But again I digress.

I don't claim to being the planet's most enthusiastic appreciator of Alan Vega and Suicide, but I am a "wealthier" person for knowing about them and being open to their unique and unimitable strong-of-consciousness art. I absord anything relating to Alan Vega, in the hopes of getting some clue, some insight as to where the madman meets the artist, and how to make it "tick", make it "stick" and make it timeless and memorable. Worthwhile is another concept altogether, reserved strictly for that of the outsider looking upon, or for the masses of consumerism and disposeable fashions who claim to put value strictly on what gains popular notoriety and amasses social media points. To me, Alan Vega is about the creation of something reguardless of expectations, and letting it be as is in this world, for whatever that's worth.