Sonic Youth

"It's just that when you're playing in standard tuning all the time, you're sounding pretty...standard."

"It’s hard to imagine where we would be without Sonic Youth. It’s unlikely another smart post-punk band founded around the same time — Big Black, the Meat Puppets — could have delivered us from hardcore’s fury quite the same way. What would indie rock sound like if Sonic Youth’s sublime din hadn’t enchanted and derailed all the college rock bands of the mid-’80s? We would have only been left with a bunch of sanguine Feelies rip offs, never having the chance to divulge a crush via careful mixtape placement of “Shadow of A Doubt.”"

"Sonic Youth albums aren’t as popular now as they were in the days of cassettes. That’s because now it’s a lot easier to say, 'Hey this song is going fucking nowhere, skip it.' Every single Sonic Youth song is a 'skip it' song. Every single one. Unless, of course, you enjoy hearing Thurston Moore sound like he’s dicking around with effects pedals at Guitar Center."

"To the extent that I wear skirts and cheap nylon slips I've gone native"

"Hailing from Long Island, New York, with noise rock stalwarts Sonic Youth, Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore sought to tear down the idea of guitar-driven music completely. One of many struggling bands in a busy NYC scene, Sonic Youth emerged as Greenwich Village darlings, riding to the top of the heap through a string of genre-defying albums. The pair's viewpoint on their instruments was fresh, vivid and untethered to all established norms."

"Perhaps even more than Joni [Mitchell], trying to summarize the music of Sonic Youth with just one tuning is an exercise in noisy futility. The pioneering art rock outfit took advantage of countless unconventional and angular tunings through their run, frequently blending multiple dissonant tunings from different guitarists within one track. [...] The sheer multiplicity of tunings that Sonic Youth used caused all sorts of logistical hurdles for the band. They used cheap guitars that could only function in certain detuned ways and famously used drumsticks and screwdrivers on their guitars to achieve even more adventurous sounds and effects."

"No artist did more for noise rock’s reputation — or for that matter noise’s reputation — than Sonic Youth. They brought it to a wider audience, made a handful of hit alt-rock singles out of it, crashed grunge as it was happening, and became a beloved institution, despite the fact that the bulk of their catalog features some pretty weird stuff. Throughout the ’80s, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo amassed an arsenal of cheap guitars that they modified and through which they employed bizarre tunings as well as techniques like playing the strings with drum sticks. Their noise wasn’t just unique — no other band could replicate it."