One thing I like to stress when I’m co-teaching music history workshops to girls is that anything can be an instrument. Furthermore, anyone can be in a band. I think band geeks in particular should be in bands. After all, your friends probably need your musical expertise. So don’t be discouraged if you can’t shred on guitar, especially if you can wail on a saxophone. And before you throw Kenny G. in my face, let’s remember that Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen clearly believe that the sax is a rock instrument.
But few people made the saxophone as punk as Lora Logic (born Susan Whitby). Have you ever listened to X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!”? Can’t call that easy listening.
When people talk about X-Ray Spex, they tend to focus on Poly Styrene, the band’s lead singer. And, to be fair, there’s a lot to talk about. Marian Said is of Somalian descent, the daughter of a diplomat, and later became a Krishna. When she fronted this band, she was a girl who still had baby fat, wore braces, and screeched songs about environmentalism, consumerism, conformity, and turning plastic and day-glo. Believe the hype.
But Logic deserves praise too. Though she wasn’t in the band for very long — she was out of the group before their debut, Germ Free Adolescents was released — she helped define their sound. Rather than shaping her instrument’s tone into lite jazz’s smooth lines, she squealed and skronked with it, breaking melodies apart with destructive glee. In my book, you can’t get more punk than turning unexpected instrumentation into something seemingly unmusical, then turning that into music.
Lora Logic and Poly Styrene; image courtesy of freewebs.com
Of course, other musicians of this period were approaching the saxophone in this manner — no wave pioneer James Chance of The Contortions chief among them. Many of these musicians were also influenced by free jazz legend Ornette Coleman, who began revolutionizing the genre during the 1950s. But there’s something distinct about Logic’s sound — reckless, bright, unpredictable, and pleasantly surprised by and content with the mess she’s making. This sensibility is evident in the work she did with Essential Logic, the group she formed with Phil Legg after leaving X-Ray Spex. It’s a sensibility I hope gets passed on to future generations of girls hoping to make a horrible, beautiful noise.
