![]() Both guitarists arrived in Manhattan during the height of the New York-based post-punk no wave movement and began performing with the avant-garde composer Glenn Branca, whose dissonant, guitar-based music provided the basis for much of Sonic Youth’s early music. Moore had spent his childhood in Bethel, Connecticut Ranaldo was from Long Island. Such success was unthinkable when guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo formed Sonic Youth with bassist Kim Gordon in 1981. During the ’90s, most American indie bands, and many British underground bands, displayed a heavy debt to Sonic Youth, and the group itself had become a popular cult band, with each of its albums charting in the Top 100. As their career progressed, Sonic Youth grew more palatable as well, as their more free-form songs began to feel like compositions and their shorter works began to rock harder. The band’s trio of independent late-’80s records - EVOL, Sister, Daydream Nation - became touchstones for a generation of indie rockers who either replicated the noise or reinterpreted it in a more palatable setting. Instead, their dissonance, feedback, and alternate tunings created a new sonic landscape, one that redefined what rock guitar could do. Sonic Youth rarely rocked, though they were inspired directly by hardcore punk, post-punk, and no wave. Borrowing heavily from the free-form noise experimentalism of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and melding it with a performance art aesthetic borrowed from the New York post-punk avant-garde, Sonic Youth redefined what noise meant within rock & roll. and Husker Du were fairly conventional in terms of song structure and melody, Sonic Youth began their career by abandoning any pretence of traditional rock & roll conventions. Sonic Youth were one of the most unlikely success stories of underground American rock in the ’80s. In 2006 Rather Ripped was made one of the Top 3 albums of the year, not bad for a band whose pedigree stretched back a quarter of a century. Stylistically they have moved away from their Punk roots and the more dense soundscapes of their earlier albums as can be heard on Washing Machine. Through the 1990s and into the 21 st Century Sonic Youth have continued to be both influential and critically successful. However, both were bigger sellers in Britain where Goo made No.32 and Dirty got to No.6. When they signed to Geffen Records in 1990 Goo made the Top 100 of the American album charts, a feat replicated two years later by Dirty. ![]() The album’s sales and the band’s visibility were helped by the release of the single, Teenage Riot, which picked up significant airplay. In 1988 Daydream Nation, although a bigger seller, was still more of a critical success than a sales story, however, in 2006, it was chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. The following year Sistergained massive critical approval, but being distributed and marketed by an indie label meant that sales were not as good as they should have been. It was followed by Confusion Of Sex and Bad Moon Rising in the next couple of years before the release of EVOL in 1986, which saw the band, at last, begin to break through in America and to establish itself as a truly important group. ![]() Sonic Youth’s self-titled debut album was a live recording at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall which came out in 1982. Many people see Sonic Youth as a pivotal influence on indie and alternative rock. Many of their influences came from the British Punk scene and they initially found far wider acceptance in Europe than back home in New York City. Formed in 1981, Sonic Youth hit upon the name for the band by combining the nickname of the MC5’s Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith with the reggae artist Big Youth.
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