The Brooklyn Rail

Thurston Moore is one of the founding members—along with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo—of Sonic Youth, which for thirty years was one of the most important bands to come out of punk and no wave, a living and profound link between rock and the non-rock musical avant-garde. He now lives in London, and has for a while. But he was back in New York in early December for a residency at The Stone that followed the release of his latest solo album, Flow Critical Lucidity (Daydream Library Series, 2024) and for public appearances around his 2023 memoir, Sonic Life (Doubleday). Amid all this, he had time to relax on the classics leather chairs in the rare books room at Strand Bookstore, leafing through a compelling collection of fetish zines out of Seattle and talking about the twentieth century avant-garde, song writing, what really made Sonic Youth rock and what made it experimental, politeness in free improvisation, and teaching young writers.

George Grella (Rail): I want to go back in time and start with the Sonic Youth Goodbye 20th Century (SYR, 1999) album that’s just been reissued. It’s not the first Sonic Youth album I heard, but it’s the first that spoke to me in a profound way. I come out of the post-WWII, experimental Western compositional avant-garde—Charles Ives, John Cage, etc. After the sound of all the—let’s call them the song-based albums—this cemented the band in the floating world of twentieth-century experimentalism in process and form. What strikes me about it is how natural it sounds compared to all the records that came before and what you are still doing. How did Sonic Youth decide to make that album?

Thurston Moore: The intention of that record, really, wasn’t to put forth this notion that we were making music as a rock band that was informed by twentieth century academic composition—because we had already figured that was a genuine part of our formation, particularly through Lee and I. Our connection was really instigated by the new music percussionist William Winant. He was a friend of Kim’s from LA from the seventies, she goes way back with him, and they were involved with this community in LA around the theater-based rock band Oingo Boingo. He came from an interesting family that was involved with TV, and went into the avant-garde and found his own voice, became a guest artist for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Iannis Xenakis was writing pieces for him, he was Cage’s percussionist in the later years, and he was Kim’s old buddy. I met him in the early eighties when I first went to LA, and we immediately got on like a house on fire.

We started talking about what I was interested in at that point as far as new music was concerned, coming out playing with Glenn Branca and being interested in modern composition. A lot of that I had gleaned through playing with Glenn and being around the New York downtown scene, and he was extremely well versed in this. So through the years, he was always there within the trajectory of Sonic Youth.

Willie had this idea, knowing Sonic Youth and that we had this knowledge base of twentieth century contemporary music in a way that maybe no other rock band did. It was his idea, and Jim O’Rourke was coming into our sphere at that point and was privy to this conversation. Of course, Jim was also somebody who was well aware of this music and that’s kind of how we met with Jim too. We all thought it was a great idea, so we brainstormed which pieces we would actually play, and Willie was friendly with a lot of the composers who were alive, so that worked out.

And it was…how much do we want to bring in the Fluxus aesthetics, we’ll do this Yoko Ono piece. We were banding around all these different composers, and I thought Cornelius Cardew would be important. That was my first foray into playing Cage, which I thought was extremely liberating to find, where the musician can bring whatever value or technique into it. It was about this understanding and respect of the musical idea. So I thought, he is new music. And we also brought in the composer of Burdocks…

Rail: … Christian Wolff …

Moore: Of course! His score was a bit of an abstraction, and to talk about how to express it with him was fantastic, because at some point we were looking at the movement on the score, the linear reality of it, and saying, is this a motif for a dynamic? He’s like, “It can be.” I was like, “Okay!” To give the musician that choice, it’s that respect in that exchange between the composer and musician. I’ve realized that with a few contemporary composers I’ve worked with through the years, where it’s just allowing the musician to bring in their own beneficent idea to the music. I just think that’s wonderful. Not everybody is like that.

You hear stories with Morton Feldman, talking about this liberated notion, now that it’s so easy, we have so much work to do.What a beautiful statement. It’s like there is this responsibility to being in the creative impulse, the artfulness of what you’re presenting, whether it’s crude or elegant, that is very political. That kind of intellectualism in music I always found really appealing. To approach a project like that, our intention was not to show Sonic Youth in some kind of pseudo-intellectual context, but to say that rock music can work in tandem with new music ideas without it being like Deep Purple plays with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Rail: It brings together these floating ideas, a secret history of California Music with William Winant, playing Lou Harrison. And you’ve got gamelan ideas in your latest album. The other part is you’re the first generation of rock listeners. And that connects Feldman, talking about now that we can do everything we have this responsibility … this post WWII era where it’s taken apart, and now people are rebuilding it. Same thing happens, I think, with rock, but in an accelerated way. It sounds to me like Sonic Youth, and now your own solo career, is this ongoing process of rebuilding rock. Punk shattered it, and now you’re rebuilding it, like composition. It’s the aesthetic responsibility, how do you keep making it sound a certain way?

Moore: I had a certain epiphany, that what makes a typical musical motif come across as transcendent by one person, and possibly banal by another person, I realized there’s this ineffable value that comes into play. It leads me into thinking about “spirit music,” whether it’s music from around the world creating a collective ritual based, or a spirit music that you would find in, say, open-ended free jazz, walking into the Jackson Pollock exhibit and hearing the guy next to you say, like, “Anybody can do this.” And, well, Jackson Pollock did that. Yeah, you could do a drip painting, but it’s not going to have Pollock’s spirit. That’s what I’m looking at, this certain gentleman’s spirit.

That’s where I want to be as a musician: free improvisation, drone musics, spirit musics, etc., they all inform ideas that I have that I want to put into the rigors of composition. Because I like the rigors of composition. Like when Robert Christgau says the best band was the New York Dolls, because they were all about concision and economy, but infusing it with this grandiose joy of rock and roll music, they’re playing rock and they’re playing Chuck Berry, and it’s like, everybody can play Chuck Berry. But, what are you going to do with it? And I’m always thinking in my songs that I like to bring in kind of traditional rock-and-roll ideas.

In Sonic Youth, that was a little challenging, because I knew that in some ways, Lee and Kim weren’t that interested in traditional rock-and-roll ideas. They both thought it best to not even go there, and I would bring in a “Louie Louie” thing, or even a “Kool Thing,” or whatever that was very rock-and-roll. And, of course, they got into it. But there was an article someone had written in the Village Voice, maybe it was Chuck Eddy or one of these writers, who said the two most important bands for post-punk are the Velvet Underground and Black Sabbath. And I was thinking, he’s absolutely right, because…the Velvet Underground, you can’t even think about where we would be without a band creating music like that in the sixties, and alternate-tuned guitars, playing these repetitive figures that Lou Reed was just basing on his love of early rock-and-roll and finding a certain way of expressing it. Certainly, John Cale’s ideas coming out of his studies with La Monte Young—and Black Sabbath, on the other hand, was like this grungy proto-metal. It’s kind of ripping. And I remember Lee saying, “I understand the Velvet Underground, I wouldn’t say the Black Sabbath has anything to do with what we’re doing.” I said, well, a lot of those little half step moves on the guitar for me are very Sabbath-y. And then when I saw younger players coming up, certainly somebody like J Mascis, who is in some ways a very experimental guitar player, was completely referencing that as well.

Rail: There’s something always fundamental …

Moore: That’s a great way of expressing it. How do you personally translate the fundamental in your music? Because without it, you just become an outsider. It doesn’t mean you can’t make music on the margins and have glory in that kind of elitism, but that again was never the intention.

Rail: I think that’s the opposite, too. I think of the avant-garde, as opposed to experimentalism—where you’re trying something and seeing what happens—takes this idea and, let’s push it as far as it can possibly go. You’re always in touch with the fundamental. Your sound through Sonic Youth, in your own work, boils down to just pure sensation and then builds up from there. And there’s always that solid fundamental that grounds everything.

Moore: Yeah. I mean, I find that in some ways for me, it’s just an It. I feel like it’s an honorific for it to exist in a way. And if I’m totally okay with this abandoning and going off into sort of Dada, you know? Why not? I know there’s beauty and chaos, but I try to find some kind of playful balance between all of this—where I find pleasure, and composition is where I find pleasure, improvisation as well. Sort of defining free improvisation as a genre away from, say, jamming. I’m far more interested in this—the language of free improvisation—than I am with just, like, smoking pot and jamming, right? Absolutely no interest in that. In fact, I feel like it’s like treading water for me, and I’d much rather be doing anything else, but when I’m in a situation where I’m playing free improvised music, it’s all about creating composition in real time. It’s spontaneous composition, Instant Composers Pool, and you bring [saxophonist] Evan Parker to the conversation. He’s like, “I don’t really like playing with musicians who don’t know how to end.”

Rail: It’s the hardest thing to do when you’re improvising.

Moore: Miles Davis said that famous thing to John Coltrane. It’s like, Coltrane said, “I don’t know how to stop.” “Take the horn out of your mouth.” There was one motif that I would see happen in electronic music—a man might say electronic music, I mean, like music on a loop where elements would just vanish or stop. And I thought that’s so beautiful and elegant and powerful when that happens. I love seeing free improvisers who just turn off; it’s a move that’s very deft, and when I’m playing with people, and I know that maybe they don’t know that move…but when they do, I look at them with just utter respect, like, that’s brave. Yes, it’s also a great move. It’s really polite in a way.

Rail: And it makes everything work. Because if you don’t know how to end, it doesn’t matter if you’ve done something spectacular before. You’re still creating a duration, but you’re not filling it anymore.

Moore: It’s a perfect alternative to struggle because I first started getting involved with free players, who have devoted themselves to the vocation of being free improvisers—which I have not but I’m very interested in engaging with. But I have had thoughts to myself, I should just be a devotee to free and improvised music, what a beautiful place to be. But I know that I love writing songs, so that’s not gonna stop.

Rail: I want to ask you about those two balances. One is that it seems you’re talking about free improvisation as its own genre, and that is a fruitful way to get at that spirit music. But then when you’re writing lyrics, how do you keep the words from confining the expressive possibilities?

Moore: That’s a good question. Most of the music making that I’ve been involved with, the lyrics follow, and it’s very rare that the lyrics pre-exist or even co-exist in the composing, at least for me, and I know in Sonic Youth that was certainly the case with Kim. I think Lee, when he would bring in a composition, he would have the words and the music. And I think for Kim and myself, it was divvying up the music. We were to have this instrumental music. It’s like, “Who wants to sing on this one? Who wants to sing on that one?” And it was just, I kind of like this thing on that one, those instrumentals there, they would come together with some idea where the placement would be for the vocals. But not always, sometimes it would have to be edited to work out, even in the studio—okay, can we just loop that section so I can sing this thing, and so and so.

In some ways, I thought that was the most experimental aspect of what we were doing: the tunings, the implements, the instruments, expanding the instruments. That was more fun and games, that was more like anybody can do this, where structuring of the songs, where they could still be evaluated as proper “songs” without completely coming from a lunatic asylum—that was, in a way, the most experimental aspect of the band. Like, how can this really exist as a song with some sense of logic.

So, you have this four-minute instrumental play that goes into, like a recitation of lyrics and then maybe drops into some other aspect, or you have a verse, and then, like, three choruses, and then that’s it. Or something where you would move those elements around. And I thought that was always… the structure was always the challenge, and that was where I think the experimentation with the band really came to the fore. But I’ve done a few solo records where there’s just no singing, and it’s wonderful. And then I would take it out on the road a little bit, and there’s no microphone on stage or anything. I just really enjoyed it. And then having a bit of trepidation, of someday I’m gonna have to get back and start singing again, because it just was this whole other level of stress for me: “Oh, my God, I gotta check the vocals,” and I am really not a trained singer at all, so it’s always, “I gotta really focus on at least being somewhere near the key that it should be.” And I’d rather not do that, but I like writing. I like lyric writing. I like writing poetry and prose and I like essaying. I just like to be a writer, and so my solo records—the last four records in London—I don’t do that much of the lyric writing. My wife, Eva [Prinz], she’s a poet and a book publisher and a book editor and a designer and a creative person, so when I’m writing music, she’s there, and every once in a while, a piece of paper lands in front of me, like, your music made me think of this, and, well, that’s it. I mean, I couldn’t ask for anything more.

For me, that’s like being part of the band. I mean, it’s a very collaborative thing, like a Robert Hunter/Grateful Dead thing. In Sonic Youth, I wrote just about everything I sang. Michael Gira gave me some lyrics once. I wrote a few of the lyrics that Kim would sing, because she was like, “I don’t know what to sing.” And I wrote some in the style of Stephen Malkmus. Check this out: There was a [Sonic Youth] song called “The Ineffable Me.” And it was totally based on me pretending I was Steve Malkmus. Oh, that’s funny, wrote “The Ineffable Me.” And I said “Kim, try these lyrics.” So she just sang them. She plugged them into the thing. And that’s what that was. That happened rarely, though.

Rail: What’s the relationship between what you’re talking about now and teaching?

Moore: I started teaching writing when Anne Waldman visited me in Northampton, Massachusetts, and she saw that I had a library of post-war poetry, mimeoed, stapled—she was so much a part of that. She took one quick glance, and asked, “Would you be interested in teaching at the summer writing workshop at Naropa, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics?” And I said, “I would, thank you.” Eight or nine years ago, I did my first summer there with Eileen Myles, and Hal Willner would be there, Laurie Anderson would be there—the faculty was always incredible. I knew they wanted me there to represent this connection to punk rock. And I wanted to be there where I could actually talk about writing, poetry, with what I’ve been investigating, gleaning and teaching myself for so many years. But I knew that I needed to go through the prism of who I am, what I’m known for. Kids would show up in the classroom with their guitars on their backs. I was like, nah, I know we’re not going to be playing noise guitar. We’re going to talk about the recorded legacy of Allen Ginsberg, because he’s been on so many records, and it allowed me to talk a lot about Allen’s life, his work, his writing. And then we would do writing prompts, etc. Did the same thing with William Burroughs one year. I did the same thing with the triumvirate of Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, and Richard Hell, and what that meant to punk rock, post-punk, etc.

It’s just four days. That is a short week, and then there’s a colloquium at the end of the week, but it’s long days—9 a.m. to 3 p.m.—and then there’s readings. You’re fully engaged at the school. I love it. But I don’t know about the fact that it’s school—I’m kind of anti-school. When I left school I was like: I have no interest in getting back into the academy at all. I went to university for less than a quarter of a semester, and I was screaming out of there. Of course, I had a place to go, screaming too, right? But I didn’t want to be in a classroom, and I don’t want to, and I also don’t really feel comfortable being in any place of authority. So, you kind of have to be in that place where you can diffuse it as much as possible.

Rail: There’s a relationship built in there.

Moore: I like doing it. There was a music school in Copenhagen that’s a really kind of rigid and strict music school, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, and they were into having musicians who could teach students ideas that broke away from the standards of high-technique. I got the call and I taught there for a few years. It would be a solid week-long class of these students that were very high-minded in learning high-technique— aspects of playing and notation and their instruments—where I was going in there and talking about ideas, which was appreciated, but I could tell they couldn’t get their feet wet with it in a way. And I would work with the idea where the class would actually do a collective piece of music at the end of the week with these ideas in play. It was challenging. It was fun. And it was definitely the European model of students being paid to go to school—that kind of, why are you here? Well, I think the government is actually funding me to go here. I was like, we don’t do that in the States, even on tour. I would ask musicians, are you gonna put a record out, after seeing some bands? “Well, we were gonna put a record out, but we lost our funding from the Arts Council in our country,” and I was just like: why don’t you put it out yourself, why don’t you get a job at the local donut shop and put the record out yourself? That’s what we do. And nobody’s giving us money to put records out.

Rail: It makes for a very different kind of music. I mean, there’s good and bad, but the music reflects on the society that it’s made in.

Moore: That realization for me was just like, huh, you’re exactly right. It really does affect the music. So when people would ask me, does New York City affect the sound of Sonic Youth, is Sonic Youth always the sound of New York? I said: “Well, yes, and no. I mean, we like to think outside of the box.”

Rail: There’s certainly the sound of music that can be made when it’s not so expensive to live in a certain place, like The Clash and Sonic Youth, and Sun Ra having his house in Philadelphia, and that’s like, okay, we all live together.

Moore: Last time I saw the Arkestra, a couple of years ago in London, and they were extremely late for the gig—these guys are all like, ninety-years-old—and they walk in, they set up, and the promoter comes over. I was like, what happened? He says, somebody broke into their van or something, like in Liverpool, and took all their money. They still were keeping cash in a suitcase in the back of the van. I was like, “Oh my God.” And then they played beautifully, this beautiful, astounding music. I guess that’s holy poverty. That’s like Jack Kerouac saying, “I write words that are informed by my holy poverty.” And this is like, what would Jack Kerouac sound like if he was comfortable? I don’t know.

Rail: Like Wallace Stevens?

Moore: I mean, the energy you hear in so many recordings of artists who are stretched out, I’ve never…I mean, Sonic Youth did pretty well, we had a high profile, we have a catalog, and we can pay the rent, and we were able to do that since maybe 1990. But we never really struck it rich. We never had a gold record. We all continue, each of us, to work all the time, just so we can continue to have some kind of lifestyle.

Rail: It’s very timely to hear you say that, because I literally just watched Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary. There’s this thing about these musicians in LA—very talented, they have a lot of great ideas, they make a record, and then it’s a hit. And then they have to do something else, because it’s more than just making music, you’ve got to keep succeeding on someone else’s terms. It’s interesting to see that pressure, there’s advantages and disadvantages, but also there’s advantages to your experience. It’s that Kerouac thing, that sound thing, where you’re still, I don’t know, pissed off or frustrated about things.

Moore: We’re in a culture that doesn’t look kindly on poverty or destitution as anything of value.

Rail: As being morally worthless…

Moore: I’m not sure when that changed. Even when Nirvana became multimillionaires, it just seemed like an anomaly. But it did become somewhat of a model for a lot of bands. Good luck, but it’s like being an actor, you’re one of zillions. That is a real lottery, and even when I teach writing… poetry is not known for its compensation. You make poetry, you make music, because it informs everything else in you. You don’t necessarily have to be a professional, but it really is something that is a beneficent factor in whatever else you do, for your mind and body and everything. But if you really want to be a professional musician or a professional, good luck, go for it. But live within the means. You probably won’t be able to live in the big city anymore. It doesn’t work that way.

There’s a friend of mine from London who’s in town, and I’ve been showing him around and walking down the Bowery and like, “Oh, that’s where Eva Hesse’s studio was.” And he’s like, “That’s a grandiose building.” Well, in 1969 she was probably paying eighty dollars a month, and hoping she could make that eighty dollars. It’s prohibitive now. So people live in far reaches, or through the digital realm. It’s the way it is, it’s a shift in our realities.

Some young person came up to me in a book signing line the other night, all of nineteen, living in Portland, Oregon, and she’s like, “I have a band. And I just wanted to ask you, how do you make a scene?” I was like, “How do I answer this?” I said, “Why don’t you find a place that’s all about people coming together, and play there and invite other people that are like-minded to perform, and do it every week.” People will start coming when they know there’s something happening, because people like to watch other people do things—and I certainly do, I go to gigs just to study people performing. “Find some inexpensive zone that you can do this in where you won’t get in trouble.” She’s like, looking at me really curiously, like: “What? Okay, I’ll try that.”

There’s really no recipe, and then I started, when I was saying those things like, thinking, why don’t I do that? My dream is to be a proprietor of a dusty bookstore with cats sitting on top of poetry magazines with a slight little space in the back where we can do readings and improvised gigs and live upstairs, and that to me is really all I would love to have in my life.