1 From left: Lee Ranaldo, Kim Gordon, Steve Shelley, Thurston Moore
Sonic Youth
Issue #28
An essential guide to the band celebrating its 20th release, Rather Ripped
By Beth Capper
Published: June 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
I first encountered Sonic Youth when I was 15. Someone made me a mixtape with a bunch of influential bands on it, and “Teenage Riot” was among them. I didn’t get it: Everyone three or four years older than me told me that Sonic Youth was responsible for building a thriving underground music community and inspiring hundreds of bands to create a sound subterranean to anything coming out of the mainstream. Back then, even that song — by all accounts one of their most accessible — was too intricate for my teenage sensibilities.
Years later I found myself dancing frenetically in a dingy punk rock basement to the very same song, finally understanding what people got from Sonic Youth’s archetypal swirling distortion and propulsive bass lines; heavy, foreboding drums; and thick, cloaking soundscapes. I got a hold of a copy of 1995’s Washing Machine and became obsessed with “Diamond Sea” — a 19-minute haze of feedback and distortion ambushed by Thurston Moore’s soft, endearing verses gently piercing through the din. Kim Gordon quickly became my feminine ideal and her platinum-blonde, barely dressed pin-up squarely hung above my bed.
FROM NO WAVE TO NOISE
Sonic Youth’s continual momentum is largely to do with their attention to detail. At 48 years old, Moore not only still keeps up with new music, but he also attends shows regularly. When I spoke to him on the phone from his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, in early April, he had just returned from No Fun, a three-day noise festival in Brooklyn. “Getting involved with playing music was always sort of like jumping into a stream for me,” Moore says. “It’s always there, continually moving.
“I still really enjoy going to see live music,” he continues. “I know a lot of people don’t, especially at my age — they kinda burn out on it — and there are aspects of it that I could do without, such as having to actually be there (laughs). I would be happy if people would go around videotaping shows that I wanna see and send them to me. But I still get really inspired by hearing people play music — especially people coming right out of the gate.”
Sonic Youth emerged from the debris of the New York no wave scene in 1981. The primary movers in this scene were James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, and Mars, as documented by Brian Eno on the 1978 compilation No New York. No wave started out in opposition to the commercialized new wave scene and delineated a confrontational attitude more than a particular sound. The musicians involved experimented with different styles of music in order to push the boundaries of what music had traditionally been about. People like poet, musician, and filmmaker Lydia Lunch, who was later to duet with Sonic Youth on the irascible and cacophonous “Death Valley ’69,” utilized no wave to this end. Sonic Youth played an integral role in blurring the distinction between the accessibility of punk rock and the notion of music-as-art so central to the then burgeoning noise music movement. Their self-titled first album, released on avant-garde luminary Glen Branca’s Neutral label in 1982 (and reissued by Geffen this year) combines explosive guitar lines and danceable, galvanic drumming with the shorn-off raw dissonance prevalent in noise.
“I like the noise scene because I feel that right now it has become really similar to what I liked about the no wave scene in New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s — the scene we came out of,” Moore says. “It was always very female-centric, but it was never really discussed. It was the first time there was a scene where gender wasn’t an issue. It felt like people had gone beyond that in a way, and it was a shared experience as far as gender was concerned. Punk rock was like that too — I mean, Patti Smith and Debbie Harry were so significant — but it was still related to rock history, which was really male-centric. With no wave, it was all about Lydia Lunch, the Bush Tetras, and the Contortions. The Contortions were great because they presented themselves in such a way so that the sexuality of the members was ambiguous — they really just broke it down. For us that was completely influential.
“I sort of see that going on now with the noise scene, even though there is this kinda real Midwest, macho thing to it. It’s like they are trying to explode the whole men-together thing. The No Fun noise fest in Brooklyn that just passed was interesting because there were a lot of women involved and nobody thought about it like, ‘Well, here are these women doing it, but it’s really all about these guys doing it’ — that was never the consciousness there. It’s about allowing each other the space to embrace certain stereotypes, without it being detrimental or oppressive to the other person. I don’t see that too much in other scenes.”
Bassist Kim Gordon disagrees. “I don’t think the noise scene started out that way,” she says. “I think it was initially music that evolved from boy record collectors. But because of the proliferation and depth of the movement, it did become genderless as more and more women became involved. To me a band like Wolf Eyes are just like a cartoon — they’re a parody of that whole male macho thing. I like that you have those extremes together — that a Wolf Eyes can be next to a Christina Carter.”
THE CONTRACT OF CONTRACTS
The original Sonic Youth lineup consisted of Thurston Moore (guitar, vocals), Kim Gordon (bass, vocals), Lee Renaldo (guitar), and drummer Richard Edson. Edson was soon replaced by Bob Bert, who later joined groovy noiseniks Pussy Galore, and in 1984 Sonic Youth’s lineup cemented with the addition of Steve Shelley. In 1990 — after having spent nine years on various independent labels, including Black Flag’s imprint, SST, based in L.A. and U.K. label Blast First — Sonic Youth orchestrated a deal with the major label Geffen that most independent bands at the time — and even now — would kill for. Although the amount they signed for was relatively modest in relation to today’s industry standards — and despite getting much more generous offers from the likes of Atlantic and A&M — Sonic Youth still managed to walk into a major-label deal and walk out with total artistic control.
The question is: How?
Perhaps it has something to do with the credibility that Sonic Youth had steadily built for themselves since their inception. By the time they signed to Geffen, Sonic Youth ruled the underground. As figureheads, Gordon and Moore exerted an influence like no one else. If Moore advised someone at an indie record label to sign a band, it was pretty much a done deal. Authenticity and a passion for originality is something unique to outsider art. Just as signing to a major label seemed inconceivable to most underground bands, the underground itself, and the thriving musical community within it, was once impenetrable to corporate labels. By tapping into Sonic Youth, Geffen was able to bedevil anyone who said that major labels didn’t care about the music.
Or maybe it’s less cynical than that.
“Technically I was the head of alternative radio promotion at Geffen Records,” writes Mark Kapes, in the liner notes for Geffen’s 2005 re-issue of Goo. “But I thought to myself that if I could sign any band in the world at that moment, it would be Sonic Youth.”
“I think we were really lucky with Geffen, but we were also an independent band for years before we signed with a major, so we figured we had a certain amount of clout,” Gordon says. “They obviously weren’t signing us because they thought we were going to deliver some hit song and we made sure that they didn’t have expectations that weren’t realistic. They don’t lose money on us and they don’t put a lot of money into us either, but we get a certain amount of security and money that we probably wouldn’t get otherwise.”
Moore says that at the time that Sonic Youth moved to Geffen, there was no real model for bands signing to major labels and being successful. “The only band that really did do that was R.E.M., who got involved with signing to a major fairly early on. But they were really an enigma,” he says. “We never thought we could all do that.
“We weren’t too interested in being perceived as a band that signs to a major and sinks into the major-label morass,” he continues. “When we signed, it wasn’t for that much money — there wasn’t really any standard set yet. We were one of the first bands to come in on the whole new A&R community at major labels. There was this whole thing of bands selling out by signing to a major, but it was more about the people who were working in college radio. They were the people who supported bands like us all through the ’80s, and they also had ambitions to further themselves after school by getting jobs at corporate labels. Those are the ones who came after us. It wasn’t the old-school record-industry people. It was the new-school people who were the lead-ins. At Geffen, in particular, it was Mark Kapes. I always had this political thing about it because I thought, ‘Why does music and art have to be more exclusive or elitist than any other industry?’ It’s all based on this history of musicians getting ripped off by major-label contracts. I thought that had to be rectified. I would see these scenarios laid out by people like Steve Albini, who would say that anyone who signs to a major label is gonna get totally fucked. My whole perception of that is you’re forgetting to mention one thing — the band was completely stupid to sign that kind of deal in the first place! (laughs). I wouldn’t do a deal like that.
“Of course, a couple of years later it changed because of the success of Nirvana, which created a model where independent bands could get more access to major labels. It was exciting but it was also a distorted model, because not everybody could go that distance with it. As soon as someone sells billions of records like that, it becomes the standard. And that’s a ridiculous standard.”
SONIC INFLUENCE
According to Sonic Youth’s road documentary, 1991 was the year that punk broke. It was also the year that Nirvana released Nevermind, taking alternative punk rock to the next level. The rest is history. This documentary captures the moment perfectly — Sonic Youth and Nirvana side by side, celebrating their victory for the underground — two bands that had infiltrated the major-label world and won. While the success of Nirvana far surpassed all of their contemporaries, and even those who influenced them, it is unlikely that they would have made the impact they did without the model that Sonic Youth set in motion. I’m not just referring to Sonic Youth as a musical influence — Nirvana had the Melvins for that — but rather, their influence on the whole community that built up around them since their inception. The community that continues to grow to this day.
If you don’t believe me, ask some of their friends.
“Sonic Youth is like a gateway drug,” says Wolf Eyes’ Nate Young. “I got a copy of Confusion is Sex, and after that I just wanted to hear more. I remember listening to “Teenage Riot” and thinking, ‘Fuck, I got to meet these dudes.’ Years later, I’m getting my balls busted for going to the bar and not gripping Thurston a beer. Who knows what horrible drug music I might have ended up making if I had never heard their shit?”
Andy Moor, guitarist with Dutch anarchist punk rock legends the Ex first heard Sonic Youth on John Peel’s radio show — a live recording from their gig at the ICA in London. “It was the weirdest guitar music I’d ever heard,” he says. “I listened to that cassette about a 1,000 times, and I think it’s deeply imbedded in my memory banks and probably has affected more of my musical decisions than I could ever know.
“A year later they played in Glasgow,” he continues. “I was shocked, especially when Thurston put a drumstick through his strings, and started bashing it with another drumstick. I didn’t realize you could do that with a guitar without breaking it. As soon as I got back to Amsterdam, I started putting everything I could find in the kitchen into my guitar strings: tin lids, screwdrivers, sauce pans. I would have tried the fridge but it was too heavy to lift.
“The thing that struck me most about them was that they made this great experimental cacophony but still in the frame of bloody great songs. I hadn’t come across that before. I sometimes seriously wonder what would have happened to electric guitar bands if Sonic Youth had never existed.”
Music journalist and Nirvana biographer Everett True first saw the quartet in 1983, just after they released Confusion is Sex.“Sonic Youth and me go way back,” wrote True in 2005 in his magazine Plan B. “There was a show in Woolwich where the soundman dismantled the microphones around them (he had a party he wanted to go to) but the band continued playing for another 40 minutes.
“At the start of the ’90s, they changed gear,” he continues. “Listened to now, albums like Goo and 1992’s Dirty with their bubblegum pop sensibilities don’t sound so out of line with the ones that preceded, but at the time it felt like a minor revolution was taking place. Not so much for the music, more for its source: Geffen Records. If Sonic Youth could worm their way into the heart of the beast then surely anyone could? So it proved. Before Sonic Youth signed to Geffen ‘alternative rock’ and MTV grunge didn’t exist. Check your history books.”
RATHER RIPPED
Geffen is in the process of releasing Sonic Youth’s entire back catalog and put out three reissues earlier this year: Sonic Youth’s 1983 self-titled debut, 1989’s The Whitey Album by their alter-ego band Ciccone Youth, and Thurston Moore’s solo album, Psychic Hearts.The Whitey Album is an experimental clamor of white noise-infected hip-hop that sounds like the death of the ‘80s coupled with a few slices of yuppie pop served up Sonic Youth-style, while 1995’s Psychic Hearts isolates the parts that Moore records for Sonic Youth albums in a collection of loosely sketched songs sung through an amplifier.
Seen in the context of this year’s re-issues serves to emphasize Sonic Youth’s new record — and 20th studio album — Rather Ripped as one of their most conventional releases to date. Opener “Reena” hears Gordon utilizing a melodious singing voice that most of us never knew existed, while Moore’s “Incinerate” will surely see hoards of indie kids tearing up a dank dance floor in punk clubs everywhere. With experimental musician Jim O’Rourke — who joined the band in 2002 for the album Murray Street — leaving to pursue his studies in Japan, Sonic Youth is once again a quartet.
“I think we wanted to make a record that was maybe more immediate and less dark and twisty,” Moore says. “It’s more of a straight-up rocknroll record. It comes out of the gate kinda wham bam! and is less introspective than stuff we’ve done in the recent past. The fact that all I listen to is harsh, extreme noise doesn’t exactly give credence to making a straight up rocknroll record, but I think I just wanted to do something completely different. It had been so long since we had been a four-piece that it was almost like we were a new four-piece.”
“It was actually kind of an easy record to do,” Gordon says. “Thurston brought in a bunch of songs which were pretty much all there already. It just fell together. The hardest part for me was that there were all these songs Thurston wanted me to sing on, and because I was playing the bass again, I found it hard do both at the same time. So I felt paralyzed in terms of having to come up with a lot of lyrics that I might not be able to sing live. I only ended up writing lyrics for a couple of songs, and Thurston wrote some beautiful lyrics for me. I like the idea that he can write with a woman’s voice, or write knowing me, so it kinda screws around with people’s expectations.”
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