Sonic Youth: Classic or Dud/S&D?

speaking of Sonic Youth shirts, one made an appearance in Apple's recent holiday ad (there's also a Dirty Projectors poster on the wall)

https://i.imgur.com/e5kRWhe.jpg

(and a DFA sticker on the laptop, though it's hard to see in that screengrab)

Here are sixteen awesome Moore songs.

Expressway To Yr Skull, Teenage Riot, yes

(also the first time I heard Kim's intro to Teenage Riot was a moment I will never forget)

Their finest moment

Unmade Bed is an overlooked Thurston jam imo

Pink Steam and Rain On Tin are two deep-cut favourites on this list

Peace Attack another great one from the later years.

(also the first time I heard Kim's intro to Teenage Riot was a moment I will never forget)

― Dan S, Monday, January 7, 2019 9:08 PM

same -- goose pimples

Me too! Not ashamed to admit I first heard it on Eddie Vedder's Self-Pollution Radio. Okay, maybe a little ashamed.

I will credit Rolling Stone. In 1988 when Daydream Nation first came out, they gave it a rave review and made it sound delightful to impressionable teenagers like myself who were otherwise not hip to the scene.

Early 90s guitar mags for me, I think.

Also how I found out about MBV.

Really good Kim list Alfred, love most of those (and like all)! Here are a few I haven't seen others throw out that I think are pretty excellent Kim songs and may make my list on any given day:

Massage the History > The Eternal
Shaking Hell > Confusion is Sex
Starpower > Evol
'Cross the Breeze > Daydream Nation

I really love that pretty much any attempt to list Sonic Youth songs brings drastically different results. I will say that "'Cross the Breeze" gets special nods for the way the intro acts on my animal brain. I love it to death and have trouble not turning it up extremely loudly every time I play it. "Starpower" probably the one that would cut first if I had to make a cut.

Watching 1991 atm. (I had a voucher - haven't watched it since I had it on video).

Everyone is unbearable.

the dance

the dance

the sucky wucky dance

i need this elixir. this elixir of... skinhead violence.

There's a bit on the extras where Thurston yells "Courtney Love is in love with the singer from Smashing Pumpkins".

IT'S FUCKIN LIVE MAN

I always knew Sonic Youth used wacky tunings. But it wasn't until today when I went through some stuff with a guitar friend and this chart (http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/tab/tuning.html) that I understood that apparently with the exception of the first EP and, weirdly enough, the song "Mildred Pierce," the band used insane tunings on seemingly literally *every single song.* That's just bonkers!

Yep. In the Aug 91 issue of Guitar Player, the band and Joe Gore broke down a bunch of their riffs and compared what you'd have to do to approximate them in standard. Despite being a fan for ages, I never played much of their stuff, at least not faithfully, out of nervousness as to what a lot of those tunings might do to my guitars tbh.

Yeah, we were talking about the need for different strings at least, let alone some custom guitars, to handle the (literal) stress.

That's why it seemed so devastating to me when all their gear was stolen in 1999 -- so much of it was modified.

What we couldn't figure out is if one guitarist is in a batshit tuning, then how does the other guitarist pick his totally different batshit tuning? Like, does Thurston work out a song in some strange tuning, bring it to Lee, and Lee thinks, ah, what this need is (insert equally strange tuning here). Take something familiar, like "Teenage Riot." Thurston is apparently in G-A-B-D-E-G, which is plenty weird. But how and why did Lee pick G-G-D-D-G-G for his guitar? And why *is* "Mildred Pierce" pretty much the the only song in their entire catalog in standard tuning?

this is dope

My neighbor was their guitar tech, he has a lot of stories lol.

Get him on this thread

I remember spending hours upon hours pouring over that tuning section despite having no ability to play a guitar. I remember finding it slightly amusing that thurston sorta settled into the pavement tuning as his default.

xpost: well G-G-D-D-G-G is basically a 5th power chord; it's going to work over anything in G regardless

Yeah, that example seems p 'straightforward' in musical terms. G major pentatonic vs G5 makes sense. Generally, it seems like they thought like composers rather than guitarists. xps

Generally, it seems like they thought like composers rather than guitarists.

Maybe that's because they started playing in Glenn Branca's guitar ensembles?

I mean Thurston and Lee.

I honestly think that aspect of their writing is a bit overstated. It's more that the strange tunings freed them up to try new things, whether approaches to actually physically playing the guitar or the sounds the guitar made. I'm not sure how much, I dunno, theory was put to work here.

So yeah, speaking of which, here are a couple of observations we made (my friend really knows guitar, but I do not, so bear with me!). There are some songs where the odd tuning serves a pretty clear purpose. Lee has talked about the "Judy Blue Eyes" tuning (something like EEEEBE), which allowed Stephen Stills to sort of drone along sitar-style with the lower strings while allowing him to play conventional lead with the standard tuning high strings. That's one application of a weird tuning. Another, as I think linee eludes to above, is that even in a tuning the guitars often have a sort of default key that can often be discerned in the song. But the third category of songs were ones we came across where the guitars were weird and yeah, one or both might have had a default key - but the song was still played in a *different* key (I hope that I am explaining that right). That is, what it seems the strange tuning is designed to allow is not what it's being used for, if that makes any sense.

And then I guess there is that extra-odd final category of "Mildred Pierce," which again is literally the only song afaict in virtually the entire catalog that is in standard but ... probably doesn't need to be, because they're just making noise while the bass carries the hook?

An intriguing counterpoint to this is a band like Fugazi. Fugazi operates afaict exclusively in standard tuning, but the parts are so creative and well worked out that they're able to imo evince a squall about as diverse and distinctive as Sonic Youth.

I remember getting a copy of Guitar Player magazine back around the time of Daydream Nation with an interview and some tabs with tunings and trying out the parts for Silver Rocket. I was kinda shocked upon discovering it was mostly one finger barre chords.

For the sake of comparison, Live Skull also wrote all of their material in standard tuning; albeit what they were doing was a slightly more hard-rock variant on the 80s NY noise thing. I suppose you can approximate a lot of what SY were doing in standard tuning esp. on their more pop/rock moments, but it's really only an approximation; it'll never sound exactly right - of course, it's a different story when thinking of actually composing this material.

xpost Someone mentioned that 1991 issue, which I couldn't find online but apparently the crux is how *hard* it is to play a lot of the songs in standard!

I'm pretty sure it's this one, despite not mentioning them on the cover -

https://dr-guitar-music.myshopify.com/products/guitar-player-magazine-february-1989-the-art-of-improvisation-cover

I love stuff like these pictures, where the guitar is labeled not only with tunings, but string gauge specifications! http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/eq/gtr124.html

Roger Miller from Mission of Burma used a lot of self created alt tunings, feel like he belongs in the convo

though he was definitely the most formally trained guy of any of the ppl mentioned

Yeah, he was classically trained, right?

For wacky tunings it seems that, besides the more obvious folk and blues precursors, it really springs up in the ... '60s? Stephen Stills, Joni Mitchell and really Ry Cooder spearheaded a lot of it, I think, at least in western music. And Davey Graham, Nick Drake, etc. Keith Richards got so much mileage from open G (which he learned from Cooder). And then post-punk there was a mix of primitivism and provocation, probably, with some tunings. "Lost in the Supermarket" is in open E, for some reason. A lot of the English Beat is DADAAD, which Dave Wakeling nicknamed "DAD-ODD" (since he was trying to tune to DADGAD). Mission of Burma (EEEAAA?), Sonic Youth, Pavement all get pretty wacky at times.

John Fahey

his first stuff was in the 50s

He was inspired by Charlie Patton, right?

Just read that Curtis Mayfield tuned to open F#, to match the black keys on a piano. Then there's Fripp, whose fucked up New Standard Tuning (CGDAEG) is tuned sort of like .... a cello?

Some of these can apparently be approximated with a capo, though.