A World In a Grain of Sand: On No "Milwaukee Sound"

My favorite/most personally important and influential Milwaukee bands off the top of my head at 4:58 PM on a Tuesday afternoon in May 2021: die kreuzen, the blowtorch, a movement, plasticland, ghostly trio, well, violent femmes, those x-cleavers, f/i, couch flambeau, voot warnings, cherry cake, ward and his troubles, atomic kroutons, mook, joker's henchmen, blue room, mcme, dummy club and bamm bamm, of course. It is striking that my relationship to these artists' music is predominantly through seeing their live shows. I never even owned music by several of these bands, but their influence and importance to me what was/is vital.

The thing that seems to unite these twenty late-80s-to-mid-90s Milwaukee bands is that none of them sounded at all like each other. In a sense, there never was a "Milwaukee sound." Marxist hard reggae/Northern Soul. Eastern Orthodox Yoko Ono vocals with rumble drums and bass. Alex Lifeson-Rush guitar voicings with soprano vocals that could crack Lake Michigan ice. Whammy bar reverb guitar with extended-technique alto sax interpreting an alternative "American songbook." Sometimes five people in the house, sometimes fifty, at Summerfest or a college show, maybe five hundred. The "Milwaukee sound" was that each artist felt free to be as idiosyncratically creative as he or she wanted to be. That was the attraction and why you would go out to see the bands. They were not mimicking and chiseling an identity to maybe "get signed," even though it was a desire. “Getting signed” was not the guiding desire, not by a long shot. Rather, the cause was urgency. Urgency of expression.

We will never precisely understand the story unspooling or know the landscape found inside the head of another person. It is mystery terrain. Perhaps that is why the art that really sticks with us through the years is that which permits the revealing of the strangeness of the person who created it. Such expression need not be limited to a local music scene. As an example, two people whose creative work, after decades, still chimes in the chambers of my soul with its unknowability are the painter Mark Rothko and Thelonious Monk. They are very well-known and were even celebrated during their lifetimes (though they both suffered enormously, financially and otherwise). What appeals to me about Monk and Rothko is similar to what was so galvanizing to me in those Milwaukee bands - a phenomenon that William Blake described as being able, "To see a World in a Grain of Sand.” By creating work that allowed for the expression of their own individual wildness and beauty, they also expressed the wildness and beauty of the world and of how living in it can make us want to scream or laugh or howl.