What Happens after the Primal Burn? Dissonance in Sonic Youth’s Middle Period

Abstract

Sonic Youth originated in No Wave, a movement from the late 1970s and early 1980s that reduced rock to minimal gestures and explored extremes of noise. In the mid-1980s, Sonic Youth’s style changed as they began to incorporate guitar parts that were reminiscent of 1970s hard rock. But their experimental tendencies persisted through this change, because they overlaid the parts in ways that created incongruity and tweaked hard-rock stylistic features in order to create dissonance or tonal conflict. Sonic Youth’s strategies for twisting hard-rock norms into clashing harmonies often follow one of two recurring types. The first, tonic divergence, occurs when separate lines have phase-mismatched tonic harmonies. The second, intervallic dissonance, occurs when instrumental lines are arranged in order to highlight harshly dissonant intervals or chromatic clusters. In many songs, their dissonant counterpoint works in tandem with their characteristic noisy guitar timbres by occurring in alternation, forcing listeners to continually re-evaluate how they perceive a song as a standard rock track. The analyses show how the band continued to experiment within popular style and created types of dissonance that influenced 1980s–1990s guitar-based indie rock.