Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 25, Issue 1, Pages 13–30

Clarity and Order in Sonic Youth’s Early Noise Rock

Caroline Polk O’Meara

The University of Texas at Austin

“We don’t want to be an experimental jerk-off band . . . . That can be

fun, but there’s really no use for it. We like the idea of songs.”
——Thurston Moore, New York Rocker, 1982 interview

In June 1981, Thurston Moore, guitarist of the newly formed band

Sonic Youth, organized a nine-day rock festival at the SoHo art gallery White
Columns. “Noise Fest,” as Moore dubbed it, showcased the work of local
bands still struggling to be heard in New York. In his press release, Moore
described “Noise Fest” as “a reaction to false claims made by the majority
of rock/disco club owners and the overground music press” (“Noise Fest”).
The press release quoted a SoHo Weekly interview with Robert Boykin,
in which Boykin blamed the recent failure of his club, Hurrah, on what he
heard as the disruptive, inaccessible qualities of many New York rock bands:
“a lot of music has just become noise” (“Noise Fest”). Inverting Boykin’s
insult, Moore encouraged bands—his own as well as a range of New York
musicians including Glenn Branca, Ut, and Rudolph Grey—to embrace the
term “noise” and to celebrate their music’s abrasive qualities. But only two
years later, Moore pleaded with critics to “drop this ‘noise’ tag . . . . [T]hat
title was a total joke, a pun. I should know since I’m responsible for it”
(“Letter to the Editor”). In a 1986 interview with New Musical Express,
bassist Kim Gordon continued this theme: “[T]here are some bands into
making noise, but there’s such a misuse of the term that anything dissonant
is included. It is ghettoizing so that you do not have to relate bands like us to
The Smiths.” Gordon stressed the importance of noise’s specificity beyond
the merely dissonant while at the same time objecting to the label’s power
to order their music, even in opposition (quoted in Julià and Gonzalo 77).
In this article, I consider the noise of Sonic Youth’s noise rock, a
style of rock that they were instrumental in creating in the 1980s. There
is no single sound or group of sounds that is universally noise, even in

C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
14 Caroline Polk O’Meara

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

Figure 1: Gordon’s primary “Burning Spear” bass line.2

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

according to Ranaldo, were an important “idea” for the creation of the

band’s early music and therefore the development of Sonic Youth’s musical
language (Azerrad 264). The urban soundscape is one way that its residents
experience the sounds and spaces of the city; the city contains, orders, and
releases noise. When music is persistently associated with New York City
our metaphorical understanding of music as an ordering and disordering of
space becomes powerfully concrete. The inspiration Sonic Youth found in
the city’s soundscape can be linked to the material aspects of New York’s
auditory environment—the scrapes, drones, and rasps of its streets—but
it should not be reduced to them. Although the band’s early commitment
to national and international touring, as well as recording, helped them to
step resolutely beyond the grid, the city’s social and auditory environment
marked their sound, especially in the early 1980s.
During Sonic Youth’s early years in New York City, core members
Ranaldo, Moore, and Gordon—along with a rotating cast of drummers—
explored the significance of the noise that they and others heard in con-
temporary artists’ music. They shared with their New York contemporaries
an interest in the guitar’s extreme volumes and density, while expressing
a passion for rock music’s use of melody, harmony, and song form. Sonic
Youth’s roots lie in the post-punk, No Wave music community in New York
City (see Masters; Moore and Coley). Composer and guitarist Glenn Branca
was a contemporary of Sonic Youth in the early 1980s, and both Ranaldo
and Moore can be heard on recordings of Branca’s guitar armies from the
early 1980s. The first two Sonic Youth releases were on Branca’s record
label Neutral.5 However, the band quickly tired of comparisons to Branca,
with Moore asking the Village Voice if they “really believed our intent in
starting a band was to extend Branca’s symphonic mode into rock ’n’ roll?
. . . [We] worked with Glenn because of a shared interest in a certain style and
approach to the electric guitar.” Instead of Branca-esque guitar symphonies,
Sonic Youth wrote songs, celebrating and critiquing the creative possibilities
of the rock practices already associated with the electric guitar. Moore
traced their genealogy to groups like “The Velvet Underground, Stooges,
MC5, Creedence Clearwater, Television, Patti Smith, Ramones, Germs,
Black Flag, Minutemen, Teenage Jesus, Mars, DNA, Throbbing Gristle,
SPK, etc.” (“Letter to the Editor”).6 Whereas punk was the primary source
for Sonic Youth’s experimentalism, and in particular its amateur aesthetic,
the inclusion of Creedence Clearwater Revival in this list emphasizes their
concomitant interest in rock’s more mainstream practices. Two years later,
Gordon explained that they had never endeavored to “isolate ourselves from
Clarity and Order in Sonic Youth’s Early Noise Rock 19

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

different kind of music. Rethinking the guitar’s array of pitches revealed

new compositional possibilities, challenging the band to remap the physical
and aural space of music making.
At first, Moore and Ranaldo tuned both of their guitars to the same
new set of pitches, but they soon discovered that using two different guitar
tunings simultaneously created more interesting sounds (Azerrad 244). The
band often developed a single song around a tuning or set of tunings, but they
also standardized some, which they then used across a range of songs.7 Their
choice of tuning could radically limit the number of chords and melodies
idiomatically performable on the instrument. They often relied on guitars
tuned to very close intervals and multiple unisons. Strings tuned to the
same pitch or in octaves—F#F#GGAA—will never sound precisely in tune,
especially on an inexpensive guitar whose strings slip easily under pressure.
The inevitable effect is a cluster of small intervals, a shifting, atmospheric
drone. On the other hand, harmonic centers can become more stable, since
tuning with just a few unique pitches makes some melodic contours much
easier to play and others more difficult.
Ranaldo and Moore introduced other nonstandard guitar techniques:
jamming a drumstick or screwdriver between the strings and the fret board, or
striking the strings with these objects. Moore might position one drumstick
at or around the twelfth fret and then rub a second drumstick across it,
creating distinctive, dense background washes; Ranaldo, on the other hand,
would pull a drumstick across the top of the strings, creating a muddied slide
technique. The thickness of the drumsticks requires the guitarist to loosen
the strings in order to fit the drumstick underneath, further constraining the
players’ control of intonation. The smaller diameter of the screwdriver, on
the other hand, allows it to operate more like a capo. Since the screwdriver
pushes up from under the strings (rather than pushing down from above),
it never provides the precise tuning of a true capo, but it does create the
opportunity for microtonal tuning and slide techniques. The further up on
the fret board Ranaldo inserted the screwdriver, the more it distorted the
sound. With this tool, he could create semi-controlled washes of sound, or
quickly shift (while inevitably degrading) the tuning of his guitar.
These techniques were also highly visual; audience members could
see and recognize Sonic Youth’s debt to Hendrix’s fiery feedback while also
appreciating the exceptional extremes to which Moore and Ranaldo were
willing to push their instruments. For years, Sonic Youth toured with song-
specific guitars: instruments placed semi-permanently in a tuning intended
for one or more songs. They were dealt a major blow in 1999, when thieves
Clarity and Order in Sonic Youth’s Early Noise Rock 21

Table 1: “Confusion Is Next”

0:00 Single guitar attack (Ranaldo)
0:08 Gordon enters on bass, guitar continues
0:30 Ranaldo begins C/A alternations
0:35 Moore enters on vocals (first verse)
1:15 Moore begins second verse
2:04 Vocals end, Ranaldo ramps up to bridge section (no drums or bass)
2:35 Gordon reenters on bass
2:40 Moore begins restatement of first verse
2:54 Moore begins second verse
3:13 Final collapse begins (“Tell nothing but the truth”)

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

“Confusion Is Next” begins with resonant guitar clusters over a three-

tone bass line that moves from B to C# before landing on A. The pitch A
remains the nominal tonal center throughout, modally ambiguous but stable,
thanks to Gordon’s steadfast, ostinato-like maintenance of her bass line. As
in “The Burning Spear,” her contribution grounds “Confusion Is Next”;
when her clear bass line drops out the song’s texture changes dramatically.
The song slowly emerges from and out of this patiently repeated pattern, first
performed at an almost glacial speed of quarter note = 48. Moore sings and
Ranaldo plays the song’s only guitar (tuned to DCEDAE) with a screwdriver
driven beneath the strings at the twelfth fret.
Ranaldo opens the song by attacking the lower four strings of his
guitar—open except for the interference from the screwdriver. He then
begins an eighth-note alternation between C and A. At his vocal entrance,
Moore sings in an inflected monotone oscillating between C and C# over
the bass line. He begins declaring, “I maintain that chaos is the future,
and beyond that is freedom,” delivering the first four syllables in strung-
together quarter notes before reducing the text’s note values to eighth-notes,
increasing the text’s urgency. His enunciation combined with the song’s
tempo makes the lyrics easily understandable, not a consistent feature of
the album’s songs. As Moore accelerates his delivery and begins the refrain
(“You’ve got to cultivate what you need to need, sonic tooth”) as Ranaldo
starts to attack his guitar with increased ferocity, using the screwdriver to
bend notes while introducing additional higher-pitched tones.
The possibility of negation arrives when Moore and drummer Jim
Sclavunos drop out at the end of the second verse, as Ranaldo plunges
into a guitar drone full of banging repetition. At the entrance of Moore’s
second, increasingly agitated recitation of the lyrics, the tempo doubles as
the band raises both the pitch and ferocity of their performance. Gordon’s
bass line is still present, but the new tempo eliminates much of its ability to
ground the listening experience. Here, the song’s general lack of functional
harmony or salient harmonic motion reinforces the effect of this shift in
texture—the experience of relentless forward motion creates in the listener
the expectation of eventual closure or resolution. Almost twice as fast as
the first rendition, the new tempo pushes “Confusion Is Next” towards a
fatal collapse, but instead it merely stops in a second spasm of sound over
which a voice intones “tell nothing but the truth.” In the last twenty seconds,
Ranaldo and Sclavunos both push their instruments hard: Ranaldo pummels
his guitar while Sclavunos batters his drums. At this moment, the song
finally confounds its own (unfulfilled) push towards an arrival.
Clarity and Order in Sonic Youth’s Early Noise Rock 23

The song’s dialogue with rock traditions is fundamentally episte-

mological and thus relational: it can be heard in the contrast between the
sections where Gordon’s ordering bass underlies the texture, and those where
it disappears. In its quick three minutes, “Confusion Is Next” repeats the
same lyrics two times, the second iteration much faster and more chaotic
as the band drives into the song’s eventual collapse. The tempo and affect
of the text’s second delivery was shaped by Moore’s new interest in the
speed and ferocity of hardcore music, a new influence on the group’s sound
(Browne 95). Instrumental sections frame these verses, including a muted
introduction brought together by Gordon’s bass line and a brief guitar solo as
well as the song’s final disintegration. The song contains plenty of material
noise—including the guitar and drum’s emphatic breakdown at the end—but
also a cyclical return that reinforces the experience of underlying order. Rock
conventions—including repeated verses and instrumental solos—rendered
newly supple by Sonic Youth, furnish the means for noise production,
providing the frame and the means for exceeding it. Thus, the moments when
the instrumentalists break out beyond this frame are noisy both acoustically
and epistemologically. Other tracks on this album transcend conventional
approaches altogether; for instance, “Lee Is Free,” which is full of chimes and
open-string guitar sounds reminiscent of moments in Branca’s compositions.
(As its name suggests, Ranaldo recorded “Lee Is Free” separately from the
rest of the band.) But from Ranaldo’s opening droning salvo on the guitar
to the final collapse of order, “Confusion Is Next” situates itself carefully at
the margin of order and chaos.
Sonic Youth continued to resist some expectations of rock sounds
on their next album, Bad Moon Rising (1985), while resolutely placing
themselves into the narrative of rock history. The album is named
after the Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Bad Moon Rising,” a
nationwide hit in 1969. Sonic Youth imagined the whole of Bad Moon
Rising as a single unit with the songs flowing smoothly into one
another (Chick 84). According to Moore, Sonic Youth began to “play
tapes and tune while the tapes were on—so it didn’t matter ’cause all
this noise was going on—and then breaking into a song and doing
feedback and evolving into another song” (Julià and Gonzalez 69).
This approached solved the problem of the lengthy breaks between songs
endemic to their previous live performances. The addition of taped sections
of feedback—almost always manipulated by Ranaldo—added an amorphous
background to many of the tracks on the album, as well as continuity to the
band’s concerts.
24 Caroline Polk O’Meara

Challenging what we expect of a love song, “I Love Her All the

Time” reveals Sonic Youth in the process of exploring noise as a controllable,
expressive element of their compositions. “I Love Her All the Time” speaks
of a love not understood by the participant, who admits that the unnamed
object of desire remains outside his comprehension. The intimate nature of
these lyrics is somewhat atypical for Sonic Youth at this point, especially
when heard on the album after the lacerating “Society Is a Hole.” However,
its images of conflict, lack of understanding and submission have much in
common with other Sonic Youth texts: “I don’t understand / A word she says /
She’s on my side / I love her all the time” (Bad Moon Rising). As Moore
slowly drags out the second statement of the text, an ocean of humming
feedback and distortion surrounds the calm island centered around his voice.
He sounds considerably more agitated and emotional, while behind him the
band swoons and swoops with increased urgency.
“I Love Her All the Time” spins out a disorderly collection of
loosely related musical ideas over the course of its eight minutes. On
compact disc, it begins with almost a minute of The Stooges’ “Not
Right”—looped and doctored by Ranaldo—which gently fades into the
next guitar texture.8 The two guitarists enter just as “Not Right” begins
to disappear, with one guitar playing droning intervals while another
softly fades in and out, static rumblings that connect their music to the
doctored Stooges recording. Moore plays with a drumstick jammed under
the strings at the 12th fret, creating a fuzzy, indistinct background for
Ranaldo’s clearer noodling. A minute later this texture dissolves into a
new, almost melodic center as Moore begins to sing, “she comes into
my mind, twisting through my nerves.” He delivers these lyrics softly,
carefully enunciating them, drawing out syllables through the unexpected
use of diphthongs. Moore’s melody is clear and consonant, and in much
of “I Love Her All the Time” lingers in C-major, which in combination
with the guitars creates what Demers calls “negative beauty.” She finds
this beauty in moments of consonance, functional tonality, and beautiful
melodies contained in otherwise ugly, abrasive noise music. This beauty
can “destabilize a work, making it excessive, voluptuous, and decadent.
Noise and beauty might initially seem like opposites, but in com-
bination, they dismantle the musical frame that used to maintain a
healthy distance between the artwork and the outside world” (104). The
harmonic stability that suggests this collapsing frame begins when Gordon
enters with a high bass line that gently alternates between C and E
(Figure 2).
Clarity and Order in Sonic Youth’s Early Noise Rock 25

Figure 2: “I Love Her All the Time” bass line.

Table 2: “I Love Her All the Time”

0:00 Stooges, “Not Right”
0:50 Sonic Youth guitarists begin to enter
1:55 Gordon enters on bass
2:00 Drums enter, Moore’s guitar fades out
2:07 Ranaldo begins C / G alternation
2:15 Moore enters on vocals
3:30 Vocals end, Moore back on guitar
4:00 Bass line reenters
5:30 Moore reenters on vocals
7:00 Vocals, bass, and drums exit, Moore back on guitar
8:20 Drone end transitions into next track, “Ghost Bitch”

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

on a heavily distorted E. Gordon’s bass line immediately drops away. What

might be a surplus of ideas in a formally simpler “rock song” becomes an
atmospheric unfolding in time as Moore and Ranaldo begin to dialogue on
their guitars.
This first outbreak lasts only thirty seconds before Gordon reenters,
but the guitarists continue to perform their less harmonically and rhythmi-
cally centered material for the next two minutes before Moore begins to
sing again. When Gordon initially returns with her ostinato, she does not
immediately corral the guitarists’ circling phrases, choosing instead to create
an ordered space between the guitars’ controlled outbursts. The drums and
bass create the rhythmic center over which the guitarists glide, combining
the grounding the bass provides with the freer, improvisatory aspect of the
instrumental break. Ranaldo responds to the C-major tonal area solidified by
Gordon’s bass line playing glissando sweeps that land on tonic-chord pitches,
most often beginning near F or F# before sliding down to E. The guitarists
begin to attack more strongly on the downbeats after Gordon reenters and
gradually return to the opening material as Moore begins once again to sing.
Throughout, drummer Bob Bert circles around the toms, getting louder and
softer in response to the guitarists’ contributions.
The possibility of disruption hangs over “I Love Her All the Time,”
in part because of the way the band strings together the songs on the album
(and in concert). The dissonant interjections of the guitars underneath take
over at the end of the song, quieter and less unified than any previous
material. By working with material that their audience is familiar with—
chord progressions, repetition, and guitar riffs—Sonic Youth establishes a
foundation, or frame, from which they can launch their explorations of
noise, staying close to C whenever the bass is present. In this song, the
number of musical ideas investigated, the range of volumes explored, and
the conventional content of the lyrics all serve this expressive goal, even as
they push and pull against each other.
From its first days in New York, Sonic Youth participated in rock’s
long dialogue with noisiness, where noise signifies specific sounds including
guitar-based dissonance, abuse of instruments, and the clash of overtones.
On the albums Sonic Youth released in the early 1980s we can hear them
testing out a range of techniques to challenge order, challenges retained in
the face of rock’s discursive and musical talent for recuperating even the
most abrasive noise. Sonic Youth constantly changed their musical means
in order to create this noise. Unlike Branca’s grandly teleological formal
structures, they depended on repetitive, circular song forms, often returning
Clarity and Order in Sonic Youth’s Early Noise Rock 27

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

3. The song title is a homage to reggae musician Winston Rodney,

a.k.a. Burning Spear.
4. Other tracks on the album feature a wider range of percussion
instruments, including bongos on “I Don’t Want to Push It.”
5. Neutral was a joint venture with Josh Baer, the owner of White
Columns gallery, where “Noise Fest” was held. Branca later affirmed that
“part of the reason why I started Neutral Records in the first place . . . was
because I wanted to see Sonic Youth get a record out” (Julià and Gonzalo
38).
6. All of the bands he lists except Throbbing Gristle (UK) and SPK
(Australia) are American.
7. For example, Ranaldo uses F#F#GGAA on several songs written
in the mid-1980s, including “Tom Violence,” “White Kross,” and “Drunken
Butterfly”; and Moore uses F#F#F#F#EB for “She Is Not Alone,” “Shadow
of a Doubt,” “Death Valley ’69,” “100%,” “Kool Thing,” and “The Burning
Spear.” These tunings would be performed on the same guitar (see Lawrence
2012, “Fender Jazzmaster (Red)”).
8. In concert, the band created new versions of this introduction,
such as the one captured on the semi-official bootleg Walls Have Ears,
where they replaced “Not Right” with more than a minute of Madonna’s
“Into the Groove” (Like a Virgin, 1984).

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

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