By 1977, Suicide had been unleashing their grisly electronic minimalism for years, playing CBGB when it was Hilly’s on the Bowery before Ramones played their first set there and using the term ‘punk music’ in an advert in 1971.
Martin Rev’s hissing Farsifa organ and beat-up drum machines backing frontman Alan Vega’s distorted exorcism of Gene Vincent were punk before punk and foreign.
In 2016, Vega told Pitchfork, “We were talking about society’s suicide, especially American society.” Suicide vacillated between urban horror and fragile romance, absorbing the late-1960s societal turbulence and damaged American psyche and recontextualizing for ’70s New York. NYC was crumbling. The Vietnam War continued. The name Suicide told us everything.”
Suicide arrived in a dismal socioeconomic atmosphere. High crime and urban deterioration made New York City unsafe before corporate reconstruction and Times Square’s ‘Disneyfication’. Rev and Vega’s ghostly snarls of violence, alienation, and national anguish gave the impression of a country in crisis with a documentary immediacy, alternating between 1950s Americana and a nightmarish future. One tune on their debut album, among dirty classics like ‘Ghost Rider’ and ‘Cheree’, is their most uncompromising and horrifying.
Suicide’s ten-minute plunge into urban inferno is the record’s knotted innards, a visceral, auditory expulsion of shattered nerves and familicide. A 20-year-old factory worker in poverty shoots his wife and infant kid before shooting himself and writhing in torment in ‘Frankie Teardrop,’ based on a true event.
‘Frankie Teardrop’ brutally explores pessimism, patriarchal entitlement, and political indifference, showing the devastating implications of living in a society where one has no stake.
Frankie Teardrop’s relentless caustic drone festers and wriggles in the psyche, demonstrating one’s ebbing sanity like a distressing ring in the ears. Radio feedback and white noise suffocate Rev’s brittle rhythm box. Vega’s frightened narrative plunges the listener into the paranoid picture, a garbled, chaotic mess of concealed emotions and urges punctuated by some of popular music’s most terrifying screams. The tormented protagonist’s perplexity is very distressing. “Oh, what have I done?” conjures a vision of ‘head in hands’ sorrow as his loved ones freeze.
Unexpected artists have praised ‘Frankie Teardrop’ for its stark nihilism. Bruce Springsteen was so enamored by Suicide’s terse stories of a rotting America that he inspired the austere Nebraska, ‘Frankie Teardrop’s’ impact all over the record’s ‘State Trooper’. Lou Reed reportedly had wished he had written it.
Vega’s tortured wail of “We’re all Frankies” embodies ‘Frankie Teardop’s frightening timelessness, warning of the violence that can lurk in every home and fueled with the perfect social disaster.