Blank Generation

Blank Generation is a classic 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 seventies punk style that Hell helped to create, are nihilistic and self-consciously degenerate, but they are also much more poetic than much of what was later done under the "punk" banner.

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 song "Blank Generation". Many people adopted it as a nihilistic anthem of the mid 70s, but an off-hand remark about how Hell meant it as a comment on "generation" songs (e.g. "My Generation", etc) produced a long standing notion that 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 70's New York scene.

Clearly, however, this is only one of the meanings in play. More recently, in a letter in 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 fascinatin 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

...

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

And finally, in the ultimate resignation of the chorus:

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

(alternately, and illustrating the different readings: "I belong to the _____ generation/and I can take it or leave it each time")

Track listing

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