Whether they're the most influential rock group since The Velvet Underground or a bunch of arty New York chancers is up to you, but love it or hate it, Sonic Youth irrevocably transformed the musical landscape - for the better. How quaint and almost hippyish it seems now, that back in 1990 people were yelling "sell out" when they left the independent circuit to sign to the big, bad world of major labeldom in the shape of Geffen. Nobody knew it at the time but the move had massive consequences for popular music and cultcha. Sonic Youth went on to persuade their close friends in Nirvana to leave behind the indie ghetto of Sub Pop records and join them in major label land. Nirvana duly signed to Geffen, recorded Nevermind and the rest is available in Q magazine, if you're bothered.
A product of New York's well-documented No-Wave scene, they managed to out-weird the weirdos with their avant garde take on dissonant hardcore. Taking the disharmonic musical template as favoured by Stockhausen and John Cage, throwing in some CBGB's "you looking at me?"-type punk rock and coming across as hipper-than-thou iconoclastic underground figureheads, they built up a reputation of sorts among the more self-conscious arty set with a series of lo-fi independent albums (Confusion Is Sex, Kill Yr Idols and Bad Moon Rising) that veered radically from sporadic brilliance to indulgent cacophony. Unlike their peers, a sense of humour lurked below the surface, as was evident in their ironically correct fascination with Madonna. One of their spin-off projects was a group called Ciccone Youth, who are still best known for the song Into The Groove(y). As the resident band on all the Lollapalooza tours, they toured the length and breadth of the US and were responsible, in no small part, for the Seattle explosion in the early 1990s. With the underground going overground, they let their contemporaries hog the cover of Rolling Stone while they dug their way back to "limited cult appeal". Their Geffen albums of the time, Goo, Dirty Boots and Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, never really bothered the upper reaches of the hit parade but had Harvard musicologists writing laboured theses on their use of dissonance.
"People have this perception of dissonance as being something that's kind of negative, a dark force within music, as opposed to the light force of consonance," says nominal frontman Thurston Moore, "but dissonance doesn't necessarily have to imply a conflict. It's not scarred music; it's just another tonal situation. I'm surprised anyone still has a problem with it in this day and age." That's as may be, Thurston, but tonal clusters do have a limited conversational appeal.
Currently involved in a mildly amazing spat with Oasis over differing musical ideologies - basically Noel Gallagher says Sonic Youth songs "are too clever by half", while they retaliated by saying "if Kurt Cobain were alive today he sure wouldn't be aligning himself with Oasis", they've also just brought out a new album A Thousand Leaves.
Described, typically, by themselves as "extrapolated, mostly instrumental forays into wild improvisational meditations and sub-conscious structural creations" the album isn't as bad as they talk it, despite the fact that they try to block any melodies off at the pass to enter into fuzzy musical logic. Perhaps better in theory than in practice, there's still no getting away from song titles like Contre Le Sexisme or Fe- male Mechanic Now On Duty; and when they do manage to merge the intellect with emotion, they're capable of providing some devastating musical moments. But like a bunch of wilful jazz or blues improvisers, they just go AWOL on a tune, de-tune their guitars and spend 10 minutes playing variations of some cheesy prog-rock chord progression. The scary thing is, the more you listen the more you're beguiled - and their sheer sense of bravado is almost worth the admission charge.
In some ways, a Sonic Youth album is rock's equivalent to Stephen Hawkins' A Brief History Of Time - people think they should buy it but rarely listen to it. Then again, in these days of dressed-up pub rock and musical necrophilia, they're a needful alternative to the alternative.
A Thousand Leaves is on the Geffen label. Sonic Youth play The Olympia, Dublin on July 18th.
