Behold The Ancient Yet Eternal Wild Skronk Of Philly No-Wave Legends The Stick Men

Birthed in the year 1980 and fated to play in and be a part of a fabled Philly arts scene that had room for everything from music to art to drama to the changeover of Old City itself, The Stick Men made a very early version of what would come to be called, for a time, “college rock.” Before indie and even before “alternative,” the dirty secret of college rock always seemed to be that it was made by people far outside of the margins of the universities whose radio stations would play their records. Stick Men played a brand of wild, chronically time-signature-shifting skronk that wouldn’t have been out of line with the likes of James Chance & The Contortions, The B-52s and Pylon. But all along, their music was insistently more challenging than that. As the video above proves, though, it was still shot through with a sense of fun.