Sonic Youth

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Essential Albums

  • Dirty
    Dirty
    Dirty

    By the time Dirty arrived in mid-1992, the world had at least sort-of caught up to Sonic Youth. Grunge had “broken”, Nirvana had gone platinum, and the polish and machismo that Sonic Youth had always opposed was in cultural decline—if not outright commercial retreat. “I would like to thank everybody for not going to see Guns N’ Roses tonight, and for coming to see Pavement and Sonic Youth instead,” Thurston Moore told a crowd that September. He was joking. Probably. But it was also the first and probably only time in the band’s 30-year history when it could’ve been true. Dirty marked Sonic Youth’s scuzzy, power-rock moment, as evidenced by the lust of “Sugar Kane” and the relentless attitude of “Drunken Butterfly”. The group had been hip-hop fans since the mid-1980s, but on Dirty, you can finally hear it—especially via Kim Gordon, who managed to be both the most sophisticated-sounding part of the band, as well as the most primitive and pleasurable (“Orange Rolls, Angel’s Spit”). Dirty even had a kinda-hit, thanks to “100%”, which made it to the Top 5 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart (a weird feat on its own, and even weirder when you realize it was next to Morrissey and U2—bands that, in the world of Sonic Youth, might as well also have been Guns N’ Roses). So shout it loud with the windows down: “I’ve been around the world a million times/And all you men are slime” (“100%”); “Don’t touch my breast” (“Swimsuit Issue”); “I believe Anita Hill” (“Youth Against Fascism”). Sonic Youth would never make anything as tonally unified as Nevermind, and the group would certainly never soundtrack a barbecue or a rock-block like Pearl Jam’s Ten. But in its own, oblique way, Dirty came close.

  • Goo
    Goo
    Goo

    Sonic Youth’s move to a major label in 1990 was a pivotal moment in indie rock history: Not only did the band members anticipate the erasure between “mainstream” and “alternative” music that Nirvana would finalize a year later, they demonstrated that they could be conservative when it came to business, yet still radical in their music. With the move to DGC, Sonic Youth got a bigger budget for touring and marketing, and a reliable series of checks. Don’t let the childish album title fool you: Goo was proof that the four avant-garde noisemakers in Sonic Youth were growing up. The major-label jump didn’t provoke an ethical dilemma for the band members—at least, not in the way it would for other artists in the 1990s, which saw an almost Red-Scare-style panic around the concept of “selling out”. As Thurston Moore put it in the oral history Our Band Could Be Your Life: “At the time, there was no such thing as [being] proud to be indie. Being indie was just sort of, like—there was nothing else you could be. Major labels had no interest.” As a result of their business smarts, the band members got paid—as did many of their friends—and the group held on to its creative freedom. In many ways, Goo was an extension of the same arc Sonic Youth had been on since 1986’s Evol: The riffs were bigger (“Dirty Boots”), the songs were more legible (the Chuck D-featuring “Kool Thing”) and the combination of mystery, intelligence and danger that had always made Kim Gordon magnetic got the spotlight it obviously deserved (“Tunic (Song For Karen)”). Later, Lee Ranaldo said that part of the reason the band went to a major label was because they’d meet fans in places like Montana and Wyoming who didn’t know where to buy their albums. With Goo, Sonic Youth would be on shelves next to Guns N’ Roses and Paula Abdul. The savvy was to realize that if you’re gonna confront rural teens with the idea of “[liberating] girls from male white corporate oppression” (“Kool Thing”), you probably have to adjust your approach accordingly. The interesting thing is that they almost did it. For the fans that the band had in mind—both real and imagined—Goo was evidence of a much bigger world outside.

  • Daydream Nation (2012 Remastered Version)
    Daydream Nation (2012 Remastered Version)
    Daydream Nation (2012 Remastered Version)

    In 1988, Billboard magazine started a new chart called Modern Rock Tracks. Most of the names were familiar, or at least getting there: U2, R.E.M., Sinéad O’Connor, Depeche Mode. At some point, Sonic Youth’s blistering “Teen Age Riot” showed up. It didn’t chart higher than No. 20, but it’s still weird to think of the band in the company of such mega-acts as U2 and R.E.M. By some metrics, landing on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart was about as big as Sonic Youth ever got. Still, even if Sonic Youth never achieved the arena-filling heights of some of its alt-rock peers, Daydream Nation is an album that transformed everyone who heard it. The band had been getting progressively more accessible since 1986’s Evol, but Daydream Nation represented something different: The sound is clearer than previous efforts, and the songs make more sense. Even when the band members are digressing or jamming out, there’s a shape and discipline throughout Daydream Nation—so much so, some tracks feel more like classic rock than free noise (“’Cross the Breeze”, “Total Trash”). The band members prove they could sound brief and nasty (“Silver Rocket”) while also beautiful and abstract, with feedback-heavy guitars that open up like oceans (“The Sprawl”). Mostly, Daydream Nation feels like an experiment: What if a band that had always seemed totally committed to resisting conventions decided, for once, to embrace them instead? Not that this is a highly polished album: The tunings are weird, the songs are still noisy and it’s not like Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore had decided to learn to sing. But to the extent that rock ’n’ roll was loud, beat-heavy music that captured the passionate rebellion of youth, Daydream Nation was pulling a lot more weight than Depeche Mode (all due respect). And making this a double album wasn’t just Sonic Youth’s way of poking fun of 1970s excess; the band members really did have a lot to say, even if they could come off as circuitous and detached while saying it. Thurston later said he wrote the lyrics for the surging “Teen Age Riot” after imagining an alternate reality in which Dinosaur Jr. co-founder J Mascis became president. On one hand, it was a joke: Mascis, by most accounts, was a guy too shy to be in a band, let alone hold office. But he also had the bravery to bring back big, classic-sounding guitar solos at a time when nothing in underground music could’ve been more uncool. And on Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth goes big, pairing epic American images—presidents, nations, sprawls, riots, trash—with equally epic music. “Does this sound simple?” Kim Gordon asks on “The Sprawl”. “Fuck you! Are you for sale? Does ‘fuck you’ sound simple enough?” In fact, no band had had ever made it sound so complicated.

  • Sister
    Sister
    Sister

    Released in 1987, Sonic Youth’s Sister marks the first time Sonic Youth made what regular people might call “music”. Not only can you hear the straightforwardness of punk, you can hear the radio and arena rock the group had always seemed to purposely avoid: “Catholic Block” sounds like something you could air guitar to, while “Cotton Crown” is like a slow dance at prom. Sonic Youth had spent much of the 1980s making its noise sound punishing and confrontational. Now, on its fourth album, the band members were letting that noise be beautiful—and not art-beautiful either, but beautiful like stars (“Schizophrenia”). As a result, Sister didn’t just bridge a generational gap. It merged avant-garde music with a social utility beyond the band’s tiny New York City scene. This is the album that turned Kim Gordon into a bass-bashing feminist icon, and Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo into guitar gods (at least to those who thought guitar solos were condescending and bourgeoisie). Picture it: A teenage outcast in the hinterlands of suburbia, scratching Sonic Youth into their desk with a Swiss Army knife the way their older brother or sister might’ve carved Aerosmith or Kiss 10 years earlier—and without the sexism and cultural complacency that had always felt like the price of admission to rock. By the time of Sister’s arrival, punk was dead—or, at least, it had settled into familiar routines. And at the other end of the spectrum, you had Whitesnake and Bon Jovi. In some ways, “avant-garde rock music” had always been an oxymoron, or at least an idea that always felt a little more exciting in theory than in practice—and either way, most bands wound up settling for either the “avant-garde” part, or the “rock“ part. But Sister—like the Minutemen’s Double Nickels On the Dime and Hüsker Dü’s New Day Rising a few years earlier—pointed a way forward that felt radical enough to change minds, and familiar enough to build cultural momentum. The lesson, in short: Just because you break with history doesn’t mean you have to forget it.

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About Sonic Youth

There’s a moment on an old Sonic Youth live recording where, seeing that Thurston Moore is having trouble getting his guitar into its proper, highly unconventional tuning, Lee Ranaldo says, “We promise a new tuning every night, ladies and gentlemen!” It’s a throwaway line, but there’s poetry to it: Where else, in 1987, could you see a group of ostensibly avant-garde artists not only addressing the crowd, but making fun of their own avant-garde art while doing it? For 30 years, the band shaped the outer limits of sound—noise, free improvisation, modern classical—into something like rock music, bridging the visionary impulses of experimental art with the naive zeal of punk. No other band presided over so many developments in underground music: the evolution of punk and No Wave into what we now call “indie“ (the mid-to-late ‘80s run of Evol, Sister and Daydream Nation), the alt-rock and grunge boom of the years that followed (1990’s Goo and 1992’s Dirty), the retreat into experiments (the SYR series) and final maturation into something like classic rock for ears weaned on noise (2006’s Rather Ripped and 2009’s The Eternal). They could be brutal, but they could also be pretty—a deference to tradition that, ironically, only made them seem more radical: What could be more confrontational to an art snob than a guitar anthem (“Teen Age Riot”)? And while their gender equanimity was inspiring (they had two frontpeople, Moore and his former wife, Kim Gordon), the real progress lay in how they played with it: Moore sounding sensitive and ethereal, Gordon roaring like a nightmare truckdriver; Moore, the head, Gordon, the body. No matter how far out their music got (Goodbye 20th Century), it never felt academic, a feat that brought experimental music down to earth and made rock seem more plausible and limitless than any artist since Jimi Hendrix. Reflecting on their career, Moore said the thing about those cheap thrift-store guitars is that they usually didn’t sound good in regular tunings anyway, at least until you shoved a drumstick under the strings.

ORIGIN
New York, NY, United States
FORMED
1981
GENRE
Alternative

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