Life & Mortality Quote by Robert Quine

Horror is doing a lot of work here, and not as cheap hyperbole. When Robert Quine says he saw Suicide in 1974 and it was “pretty horrifying,” he’s naming the specific kind of fear a certain New York sound could trigger: not haunted-house dread, but the sensation that the usual agreements between performer and audience had been revoked. Suicide wasn’t a rock band behaving badly. It was a stripped-down provocation - drum machine pulse, cheap electronics, Alan Vega’s confrontational presence - that made the room feel less like a show and more like an incident.

Quine matters as a witness because he’s not a scandalized outsider. He was a guitarist steeped in the same downtown ecosystem, someone who understood noise and attitude as aesthetic tools. So his “horrifying” reads as respect, even gratitude: the recognition that the group had found a new way to attack complacency. The offhand “pretty” is its own subtext, the musician’s understatement masking a real shock. It suggests the effect lingered past the set, as a recalibration of what live music could demand.

Context sharpens the edge. 1974 is pre-punk as brand, pre-CBGB mythology calcified into nostalgia. Suicide’s violence was partly formal: collapsing rock’s human swing into machine repetition, turning lyrics into threat and mantra. Quine’s line captures that early-moment truth: before the culture learned to file it under “influential,” it felt like danger in real time.