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noise rock. I argue for discussing noise as both sounds that resist musical
ordering and as a category of sound that contravenes musical structures and
learned expectations. My examples will come from the early music of Sonic
Youth, because the band’s eventual longevity and fame make the musical
techniques they share with other noise rock bands relevant and frequently
used. Genre expectations, along with song form and acoustic material, give
musicians the tools to create and control the listener’s experience of noise.
I will not consider the separate genre of noise music (see Novak; Demers;
Atton). Rather, this article considers how Sonic Youth made 1980s noise
rock noisy, through instrumentation, song structure, genre conventions,
and other specific details of the music. Sonic Youth’s performance style
owed much to the New York punk and post-punk community of the early
1980s, and it was accompanied by a commitment to writing songs of short
duration and expressive intensity. Below, I explore Sonic Youth’s interest in
challenging the sound and idea of rock music, examining selections from
their first recordings, from the self-titled 1982 EP Sonic Youth to 1985’s Bad
Moon Rising.1 The band and their music modeled a novel way for rock to
be noisy, opening new avenues for considering the roles of noise in rock
music.
Noise is a powerful idea when applied to music, a concept
overflowing with possible meanings and sounds. Moore acknowledges as
much with his embrace and subsequent abandonment of the term. For
rock music listeners and creators, knowledge of genre and the knowledge
communicated by genre shapes the epistemological status of noise. Genre,
though, cannot be isolated in the music, but also includes the networks
formed in the minds, bodies, and locales of listeners and in the language
used to discuss these aspects (see Hesmondhalgh; Holt). “Genre is not an
abstract quality,” writes musicologist Joanna Demers, “but a quotient of
social relations and consumer decisions” (136). Once a sound marked as
noise joins order—as in the case of genre—a new complex of resistance can
rise against it. As a result, sound struggles to be noise when it becomes one
of the qualities that order music into genres. Noise and ideas of noise can
become markers not for one but for a group of musical practices, referring
to a specific group of sounds within a musical discourse. Along these
lines, Steve Waksman notes that noise “has to be continually reinvented
if it is to avoid becoming the basis for a new, restrictive musical order”
(12). The border between noise and music remains contested: As music
becomes an ever-larger category, noise has not disappeared, and as a result
this border continues to be meaningful in conversations about popular music.
Clarity and Order in Sonic Youth’s Early Noise Rock 15
The process of creating and labeling music noise rock can codify and order
sounds of resistance into genre markings, and therefore creates a quandary
for any analysis of noise as resistance to established norms and order.
Perhaps, after noise becomes a style or approach, it functions purely as
a generic marker, “noise” in name only. Or, as I argue, the potential erasure
or reassertion of noise is precisely what is at stake not only in noise rock,
but in rock music more generally.
One critical problem for a popular music scholar interested in
analyzing and discussing noise is its dual status as a category at once
inside and outside of musical systems of knowledge. The noise of noise
rock references both a collection of ideas about sound organization and a
specific category of sound. Taking account of composers’ and audiences’
shifting aesthetic and intellectual relationships to noise can provide one
productive way of understanding and interpreting music. I cannot conflate
noise with abrasive sounds that originate outside of existing conventions
of music. The acoustic specifics of these sounds are always contingent on
shifting cultural negotiations of noise and music, and in phenomenological
terms, both understandings of noise might encompass many of the same
sounds. Noise need not bear down on the listener with immense forces of
volume and dissonance for listeners to experience it as disruptive, but it
often does.
Consider electric guitar feedback, ubiquitous in Sonic Youth’s
music and present in much rock music. Repeated exposure can re-
duce a listener’s experience of such sounds as new, disruptive, or
shocking. One can imagine numerous circumstances in which feed-
back, despite originating from a musical instrument, would be dis-
ruptive, nonmusical noise—at the Mostly Mozart Festival, for ex-
ample. However, generations of electric guitarists have worked to
make feedback a standard performance technique in rock music.
Uses of feedback include multitextured washes of sound (The Jesus and
Mary Chain, “Just Like Honey”), overblown guitar timbres (The Velvet
Underground, “I Heard Her Call My Name”), and fluid variations in pitch,
volume, and duration (The Who, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”). In rock,
feedback can occur at an intentionally disruptive moment in a song, or it
can make an otherwise unremarkable moment remarkable (as in the opening
bass guitar feedback on the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine”). Feedback functions
as noise (again) when it disrupts the already established order of music,
even in a context in which it continues to reference the idea of sounding
disruption.
16 Caroline Polk O’Meara
In music shaped by the regular 4/4 of much rock, order itself comes
most often in the form of the beat. At the same time, noise announces and
challenges the existence of such orders, and bands since the 1960s—The
Velvet Underground, MC5—have been “working with the same materials
as those they challenged” (Hegarty 68). Within the frame of four-beat
bars, Sonic Youth songs contain moments of profound formal disruption,
often—but not exclusively—accomplished by bursts of loud, dissonant
guitar sounds. In other words, their music cements rock tradition at the
same time that it questions it.
A very early example of the band pushing the materials of rock
music is the song “Burning Spear” from their first album, the EP Sonic
Youth (1982).3 On the track, Sonic Youth performs within rock conventions,
from the instrumentation (two guitars, bass, and drums), to the backbeat,
to the form (intro, two short verses, outro), and its groove owes an audible
debt to African American music. Drummer Richard Edson starts with single
hits on the drum (bass drum and cymbal) followed by quiet, ringing tones
from Moore’s guitar. Then, they establish a backbeat-based beat, locked
into a regular quarter-note pattern.4 Gordon’s four-bar bass holds down the
song’s center, joining the drum groove and the chimes coming from the
guitars (Figure 1). She performs casually and leaves little space for excess
or abandon, returning to the same material over and over, along with small
cadential variations that maintain the song’s forward momentum.
Accompanying the groove are the unusual effects that Moore and
guitarist Lee Ranaldo create, bell-like tones and broad washes of white noise.
Moore plays all of “Burning Spear” with one drumstick under his guitar’s
strings, in the top third of the neck, using another drumstick to hit the strings
as well as the pinned drumstick. Ranaldo also has drumsticks stuck under
his strings, and he creates sounds in other ways: on the recording he ran an
electric drill through the amplifiers, creating a spread of raw, pinched tones
centered on G. This mix of convention, novel techniques, and new sounds
characterizes much of Sonic Youth’s early music.
In the early works under consideration here, noise most often
originates in excessive volume and in secondary sounds made possible
through amplification, subsequently framed by the rhythmic, harmonic, and
Clarity and Order in Sonic Youth’s Early Noise Rock 17
melodic features of the music, as in the case of “Burning Spear.” Bass lines,
drum beats, vocal style, and performance techniques can all ground Sonic
Youth’s songs in rock genre conventions. But these can also all be overturned.
In the album versions of songs, Sonic Youth organizes tracks with sections
of contrasting timbral density, rhythmic variety, and a balance of dissonance
and consonance created through performance techniques. “Shaking Hell,”
from Confusion Is Sex (1983), opens with whole-tone oscillations in one
guitar, with another guitar entering and exiting the texture over a driving
backbeat. The drums dissolve after about one minute into tom fills and
novel guitar timbres that focus the listener’s attention on sound. This texture
then ends abruptly right before Gordon’s vocals enter, to be replaced by a
pair of tom attacks on the downbeat and its eighth-note anacrusis. Combined
with sparser drones in the guitars, these two attacks organize and consolidate
the song’s texture; the drummer gradually introduces additional beats to fill
out the rest of the bar. We hear feedback almost all the time in this song;
but it is in the passages where the drums relinquish downbeat attacks that
“Shaking Hell” plays directly with rock order and the excesses of noise.
The band’s return to the music’s metered center reinforces a sense of order
underneath the entire song, an experience necessary for the band’s play with
sound.
The opposition between anarchy and structure—the structure of song
form rather than the harmonic series—a dialectic of frame and excess,
forms and informs Sonic Youth’s musical language. According to Ranaldo,
the band’s approach was to keep “some areas open for being really wild
and anarchistic but . . . to focus it also.” Sonic Youth, he explained, “needed
more to have the song be formed at a certain point, it had to be structured”
(Julià and Gonzalo 68). This is especially evident in live performances,
many of which are now available on YouTube. Their early music collects,
consolidates, and comments on both what they believed rock music to be and
on its future possibilities. The songs that result are never simply critiques
or detached observations of rock; rather, they become songs through the
recycling and reevaluation of the assumptions underlying their composition,
including the genre conventions of rock music broadly defined.
Sonic Youth were a resolutely New York band, and adamantly
experimental in their approach to making rock music and art more generally.
“We probably wouldn’t exist,” reflected Ranaldo later, “if we hadn’t
developed as a band in a city like New York . . . being interested in art
and being in New York at this time when all of this stuff was happening
musically and visually” (Julià and Gonzalo 52). The sounds of the city,
18 Caroline Polk O’Meara
rock’s tradition. . . . [T]he problem with isolating yourself from what’s gone
before is you lose the possibility of radicalizing it” (Julià and Gonzalo
76). Other New York bands not listed by Moore, including Swans and Live
Skull, shared Sonic Youth’s interest in exploring the most abrasive timbres
of guitars and other rock instruments.
In live performance and on album, Moore and Ranaldo used extended
performance techniques to create a wide variety of sounds. Alternative guitar
tunings first appeared on their second release Confusion Is Sex, introducing
this distinctive sound into the American post-punk aesthetic. New York’s
punk audiences, who generally valued personal expression over virtuoso
performances, welcomed the technique—the ability to retune guitar strings
requires no display of skill on stage, highlighting instead a virtuosity of
conception over execution. Since the day that The Ramones appeared on
stage in jeans and matching black leather jackets, punk rock has had a strain
of conceptual art at its heart. Branca inspired the guitarists, but they had
already been experimenting with the guitar—as evidenced by Ranaldo’s
earlier fascination with blues-derived open tunings found in the music
of Joni Mitchell and Hot Tuna (Foege 94–95). The significance of Sonic
Youth’s extended techniques is not their originality, but their combination
and deployment in the band’s songs. In one interview, Ranaldo declared
“the things we do to guitars. . . . [W]e are tied to a tradition, but at the same
time we deny it,” connecting the specifics of Sonic Youth’s performance
technique to the band’s interest in both affirming and denying rock orders
(Julià and Gonzalo 76).
Alternate guitar tunings and other preparations can radically exclude
traditional guitar performance practices. For guitarists, alternate tunings
provide access to a world of harmonies and melodies not readily available,
or sometimes conceivable, in standard tuning. Ranaldo insisted, “when you
tuned a guitar a new way, you were a beginner all over again and you could
discover all sorts of new things. It allowed us to throw out a whole broad
body of knowledge about how to play the guitar” (Azerrad 244). Each new
tuning not only creates additional sonic possibilities in the open strings’
vibrations—an effect exhaustively exploited by Branca—but it changes the
way guitarists think about and use their fret boards, altering the mapping
between left-hand fingerings and the resulting sounds. For all of these
reasons, alternate tunings can help a guitarist discover new harmonic and
melodic relationships. Many common alternate tunings place harmonies
from a particular key area in reach. But Sonic Youth’s arsenal of cheap
electric guitars furnished the band with the tools to create an altogether
20 Caroline Polk O’Meara
made off with their rental van full of all of their instruments and gear,
including the modified guitars (Ranaldo, “Urgent/SY Gear Stolen”). Even
before the theft, the band’s reliance on specific guitars for specific songs
could be a challenge for touring and for the successful live execution of their
music.
On their first full-length album Confusion Is Sex, Sonic Youth
added to the musical tools available to them for creating new sounds
and timbres, including their alternately tuned guitars. Recording engineer
Wharton Tiers’s cheaper recording equipment, basement studio, and relative
lack of experience added to the disruptive noise in the songs, challenging and
even negating the more subtle moments of sonic exploration heard on Sonic
Youth. In his ArtForum review of Confusion Is Sex, Greil Marcus proclaimed
“this music sounds like the very beginning of what it indeed refers to, the Sex
Pistols’ founding negation” (“Gulliver Speaks” 72). Marcus was postulating
a political aesthetics of punk rock based in revolution and negation, where
the Sex Pistols “denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that
everything was possible” (Lipstick Traces 2). For all their punk influences,
Sonic Youth rarely engages in absolute negation, preferring to demarcate
the space of musical meaning available in rock music while at the same time
questioning its borders and boundaries. If, as Marcus argues, Sonic Youth
perform acts of violent negation, they are there to remind the listener of the
possibility of order. The group accomplishes this by recalling, or simply by
evoking, traditionally “rock-like” themes and motives already presented in
a given song. In “Confusion Is Next,” for example, the band dives into an
extended dissonant instrumental break after the first statement of the lyrics.
They then restate the opening material at a much more rapid tempo, but
only temporarily, as the song falls apart again at the end. The effect on the
listener is one of potential return and ordering (Table 1).
22 Caroline Polk O’Meara
The drums come in almost immediately after her, with light tom rolls
alongside more destabilizing snare attacks on the fourth beat. The guitarists
continue to spin above and around her groove until Moore begins to sing
the first line of text and Ranaldo first sweeps gently between E and B-flat.
Soon, Ranaldo starts to alternate between C and G, occasionally slipping
down to B-flat. The song remains centered around this casual statement
of C7 whenever the vocals and bass guitar are present, departing only
during the sections distinctly marked as breaks from the song’s tenuous
order (see Table 2). This static harmony is largely a result of the relative
inflexibility of the guitar sound, reinforced by the band’s chosen tunings—
Moore’s GGCCA#A# and Ranaldo’s D#D#C#C#G#G#—which allow the
guitarists to dig into and attack static harmonies, but provide little flexibility
(Lawrence, “The Sonic Youth Tuning Tutorial”). The guitarists create a
sense of unease with other musical elements as well: vocal delivery, droning
feedback, distorted guitar timbres, all supported by a bass line that becomes
more ominous the longer it goes on.
Just as the songs on Bad Moon Rising flow together, careful
transitions characterize the move from one section to the next in “I Love Her
All the Time,” avoiding the jarring explosions of “Confusion Is Next.” Sonic
Youth smoothly cross-fades from loud, discordant sections into the sweeter,
melodic sections where Moore releases his guitar to sing. However, the
progress from lighter textures into moments of denser guitar manipulation
can be more abrupt. After Moore’s first statement of the lyrics, the band dips
into noise at 3:30 when Moore picks up his guitar and enters ferociously
26 Caroline Polk O’Meara
to and reconsidering the same material; these refrains and repeated lyrical
patterns organize the music for the listener, with the entrance of the singing
voice itself often signifying the presence of some sort of song form. Sonic
Youth’s songs celebrate rock’s traditions while critiquing its assumptions;
they perform punk’s larger, social disruption of rock’s premises at the level
of the song, juxtaposing anarchy and order, excess and frame. In the process,
they operate within the extremes of rock sound (as defined by the guitar),
but also insist on these sounds’ ability to create and sustain melodic and
harmonic development. From “The Burning Spear” to “I Love Her All the
Time,” Sonic Youth reveals to the listener how disruptions and an attendant
recycling and reevaluation of rock’s formal assumptions can structure and
inspire the creation of music.
Noise sounds in much music as a space for opposition: the noise
rock music that Sonic Youth celebrates has repeatedly proved its capacity
to incorporate noise into its structure. This ability exists alongside music’s
power to absorb and erase resistance, a constant push and pull between
order and disorder that provides rock with its aesthetic core. I hear in Sonic
Youth a calculated challenge to order, an order nonetheless present or at
least represented in the song structures that remain in their songs, even when
denied. Through timbral and formal experimentation within established rock
conventions, and using a variety of techniques ranging from quiet stillness
to eruptions of guitar feedback, they create music that both surpasses and
undermines our expectations. In noise rock, artists are deeply invested in
rock music’s existing musical codes and practices, and I want to remain in
precisely this genre context. Even when used to indicate a positive aspect
of rock music, the discourse surrounding noise in rock can push aside the
specifics of the band’s music, including its critique and commentary on
established rock music forms and ideas. Noise is precisely what tied noise
rock bands to rock traditions, in Robert Palmer’s words, “deliberately putting
the racket back in rock and roll.” This racket has an important position within
the genre conventions of rock, and held real musical meaning for the bands
and their listeners.
Notes
1. All of the recordings discussed in this article were recorded before
the addition of the band’s permanent drummer Steve Shelley.
2. This bass line is notated at pitch.
28 Caroline Polk O’Meara
Discography
The Beatles. “I Feel Fine.” Capitol, 1964: Single.
Jesus and Mary Chain. Psychocandy. Blanco y Negro, 1985: LP.
Madonna. Like a Virgin. Sire Records, 1984: LP.
Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth. Neutral Records, 1982: EP.
——. Confusion Is Sex. Neutral Records, 1983: LP.
——. Kill Yr Idols. Zensor, 1983: EP.
——. Bad Moon Rising. Homestead Records, 1985: LP.
——. Walls Have Ears Bootleg. Not Not1 (But2), 1986: Audiocassette.
The Velvet Underground. White Light/White Heat. Verve, 1968: LP.
The Who. “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere.” Brunswick, 1965:
Single.
Clarity and Order in Sonic Youth’s Early Noise Rock 29
Works Cited
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Journal of Popular Music Studies 23.3 (2011): 324–42. Print.
Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie
Underground 1981–1991. New York: Little, Brown, 2001. Print.
Browne, David. Goodbye 20th Century: Sonic Youth and the Rise of the Alternative
Nation. London: Piatkus, 2008. Print.
Chick, Stevie. Psychic Confusion: The Sonic Youth Story. London: Omnibus Press,
2008. Print.
Demers, Joanna. Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental
Electronic Music. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Foege, Alec. Confusion Is Next: The Sonic Youth Story. New York: St. Martin’s P,
1994. Print.
Hegarty, Paul. Noise/Music: A History. New York: Continuum, 2007. Print.
Hesmondhalgh, David. “Subcultures, Scenes, or Tribes? None of the Above.”
Journal of Youth Studies 8 (2005): 21–40. Print.
Holt, Fabian. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Print.
Julià, Ignacio, and Jaime Gonzalo. Sonic Youth, I Dreamed of Noise. Barcelona:
Ruta 66, 1994. Print.
Lawrence, Chris. “Fender Jazzmaster (Red).” Sonicyouth.com, 2 February 2012.
Web.
—— (ed.). “The Sonic Youth Tuning Tutorial.” Sonicyouth.com, 5 March 2012.
Web.
Marcus, Greil. “Gulliver Speaks.” ArtForum 72 November (1983): Print.
——. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1989. Print.
Masters, Marc. No Wave. London: Black Dog, 2007. Print.
Moore, Thurston. “Noise Fest” 1981. White Columns Gallery. Print. Reprinted on
Sonicyouth.com, 2 February 2012. Web.
——. “Letter to the Editor.” Village Voice 1 November (1983): 35. Print.
Moore, Thurston, and Byron Coley. No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York.
1976–1980. New York: Abrams, 2008. Print.
30 Caroline Polk O’Meara