Sister: alternative rock?
 

I've been having a debate about this, so I thought the best place to get feedback would be here.

Do you consider Sister to be an alternative rock album?

My opinion is that the term "alternative rock" wasn't used until early in the 1990's -- particularly after Nirvana expolded -- so claiming that an album released in '87 is "alt rock" is just lazy.

SST wasn't an 'alt rock label' -- it was a hardcore label. If you have to label Sister as anything, why not label it as hardcore, or post-hardcore? Or even 'indie', which is what a lot of people called Sonic Youth-like music, until "indie" became synonymous with British major label pop in the mid 90's.

Sister definitely helped define what would become alt. rock in the 1990's, but claiming it's alt. rock is like claiming The VU & Nico is 'punk rock'.

This is probably not the most interesting debate ever, but never mind :) (or Nevermind?)

see in that case, the trick is to call it "proto-alt rock". :)

It is often hard to define genres of music, especially alternative rock. What is it an alternative to? Mainstream, top 40 rock? But I don't think it matters when the phrase "alternative rock" was first used. Sometimes, we don't come up with names for things until after those things are established. The phrase "global warming" might not have existed until recently. But does that mean it wasn't happening until someone came up with a name for it?

I would say that Sister, just like VU in the late 60's, fits my definition of alternative rock. It sounded nothing like the average person's concept of rock music back then and probably still doesn't. Imagine what would have happened if someone had tried playing Sister at a high school dance.

nirvana is "punk rock", don't you know? "alt rock" can be used since "bad moon rising" at least. and "sister" and "sonic nurse" are not indie but classic rocking

nancycat, you're right. This is a boring debate.

But I will say I miss the genre label "college rock." Whatever happened to that?

died with the pixies

so what do you call sonic youth's style of music?
when people ask me i say either punk rock or noise rock (depending on who i'm talking to)
but i also find myself describing other music as "kind of sonic youth-y" which i guess means more to do with an attitude toward music rather than an actual sound. focusing on texture and colour as much as melody or lyrics. its deeper than rock music, people often say on here how spiritual they find sy music

sonic youth is a philosophy man!!
sonic life etc

Sonic Youth is a rock band. A great rock band.

And after they reunited, what sort of music did they play?

Noise rock

Yeah, if you've got to subgenerize SY they are a noise rock band for sure. Who even talks about things being alternative nowadays anyway?

Back in the early 80's, bands like SY were called "College rock" because college radio stations (remember those?) were the ones that exposed most of these acts, at least to the airwaves. That term does not signiofy the sound of the bands though.
Then, that type of music was called "post-modern" rock, which is just pretentious as fuck, but kind of made you think it was some sort of advancement on the genero-arena-rock of the late 70's and early 80's. It still described nothing about the music, and lumped together bands like PIL, Jesus & Mary Chain, Pixies, sisters of mercy, who sounded nothing alike.
Then, someone decided to call the shit "alternative" rock, which was more correct as to the place those bands found themselves in, because they were not being played on regular rock radio. they were an "alternative" to the radio bands, in a sense.
None of it defined a musical sound. These terms were all basically political definitions.

Maybe these terms defined the spirit of the acts, but what most of them were playing was just rock music with rock instrumentation. SY may have taken the dissonance of rock, already found in Hendrix, and VU, and countless others, and upped the ante on it, constructing songs composed mostly of dissonance and chaos, but they are still a rock band, drawing from the fountain of past rock.

when people ask what you listen to do what I say. "I listen to good music."

You convinced me. Rock it is.

Swirl these two sentences around in the mouth:

"Sister is a great alternative album." (or post-college-noise-whateverthefuck)

"Sister is a great rock album."

The second one is better, no?

mucho better.

Noise Rock

Its hard to ask hardcore Sonic Youth fans a question like this, most of us adore much of the full 30 year spectrum of what they produced, and alot of us would draw a line stylistically from some of the songs from NYC Ghosts & Flowers directly back to songs from their first EP. For me thats a more important context in which to understand the stuff inbetween. Everything since that album for me has always felt like a very different group (Jim O Rourke joining contributed alot to that as well).

this is a real thread?

I never accepted the idea of Sonic Youth (or Television, for that matter) being considered punk rock. Again, the definition of "punk rock" is fairly subjective, but to me, "punk rock" implies simplicity. There is nothing simple about the music of Sonic Youth. Can you imagine Johnny Ramone touring with 20 guitars because the songs are in so many different tunings? Can you imagine him sitting in the studio late at night adding all sorts of little guitar fills and textures, as Lee did during the recording of Daydream Nation?

Real enough that you contributed to it. ;)

this might be another thread but for me Punk is more about Freedom than Simplicity.
The freedom to play really simple music. To play really fast music. to go out in your van and drive up and down the country playing really small shows to your friends. the freedom to put a drumstick in the frets and play your guitar with a powerdrill. to go freeform and realease improv noise albums. to record a pop album.

but the majority of people dont think about it this much and when you say "punk" they think of the sex pistols or siouxie and the banshees or those London Postcard punks with huge pink mohicans. or even fucking green day. And sonic youth are pretty far from that
similiairly if you say "rock" to most people they think of Queen or kings of leon/foo fighters. And sonic youth are as far from that as possible

so yeah, maybe noise rock

Punk, like funk, is an attitude.

Because they've been going for 30 years and aren't AC/DC or the Stones, you can't really call them a specific genre. Sister is a psych rock record to me: driving rock songs, weird pretty bits, scary bits (COME ON GET IN THE CAR!), spacy bits, some straight-up catchy bits (though I probably only think that because the whole fucking thing is indelibly printed onto my mind) - psych rock.

The term 'alternative rock' or 'alternative music' was in use here in Canada by 1986. The Pursuit Of Happiness, The Lucy Show, The Plasterscene Replicas, Sons Of Freedom, etc were all considered 'alternative'.

what about NoMeansNo! best canadian band ever!!!!

I would say that Sister is underground (80's)rock/psych-rock. To me that era of SY seemed to be an underground scene, which sometimes found outlet as "college rock" in the states, played on college radio but not so much thru ClearChannel popular radio or most mainstream media outlets.

I tend to equate that period of their music with other similar acts like the Flaming Lips, Butthole Surfers, etc. I don't usually call them college rock due to bands like the Replacements. They seemed very college/clean/indie whereas the more psych bands had a wild, untameable side to them.

I prefer the noise-rock term though. Heh. Just seemed to me at THAT time psych-rock. Mainly just because to the songwriting approach and the interesting SY style guitar arrangements/songwriting.

I cannot stand the "alternative" label though. "Alternative to what?" It seems a very "scene-ish" thing to say, like "indie" has become. I opt to just say underground, where the music had appeal outside of conventional media, etc.

I like the term 'pigfuck'.

you don't catch the difference between "revolution" and the previous songs of the beatles? if yes you understand what is "alternative". all wikipedia's articles contain the word "recent" for "alternative".

and for "sister" only "rockabilly" is available to describe it. "psych rock" is far from this.

I label all Sonic Youth as skronk

SKRONK people!!!!!

I once read an article that was trying to create a sub genre called "arsequake" that consisted of Sonic Youth and the other bands signed to Blast First and The Pixies

"noise-fuck-piece"

Alternative rock is an originally American term used to describe bands that broke into a sizable cult level of notoriety for a certain type of rock music that was created outside conventional mainstream ways of development for bands in general, and refers to bands like The Smiths, REM, Smashing Pumpkins and even Sonic Youth at a certain phase of their career. Nirvana fit into it straight away because musically they have never been weird or anything, just a good rock band with elements of the noisey, sludgey underground that produced them.

Out Of Tune Rock

being Sister was the very first cassette i ever heard of SY, i was totally blown away with sitting down trying to figure out how to play along on the guitar, and it just seemed impossible. there was no way in hell this stuff was in tune, so that's what i ended up calling it. it was at that time, not really underground anymore, as i think Goo was already out at the time. but to me it still remained an alternative to the alternative. no one plays more fucked up and out of tune then Sonic Youth. at least, not that i heard of. as for college rock? nope, because thats the last thing i would think of them as. most college kids wont listen to it, just because it's far to advanced for them, unless they are studying to become a mathmatics professor or something.

they will still remain OUT OF TUNE to me

Oh, definitely NoMeansNo!

Sometime when I get the chance, I'm going to re-read all the old magazine articles I have on bands like Sonic Youth in the mid to late '80s and see what they were being labelled as at the time. Besides 'alternative', I recall the term 'white noise' often being applied to bands like SY, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, etc. The first Canadian band that I remember being labelled 'low-fi' was Eric's Trip in the very early '90s. Sloan were being placed in the same sound category as SY at the time of their first two major releases, Peppermint and Smeared (both 1992--Christ! Has it actually been two decades?!!). I can also remember when Sons Of Freedom released their first album in '88, and Graffiti magazine compared them to Live Skull and Band Of Susans. That was fairly accurate.

thats so weird because to me that is 3 so different styles
Sloan dosen't sound anything like Sonic Youth
and Eric's Trip lo-fi-ness makes the worse SY sound like gold
i'm totally not dissing any of those bands, but whoever compared SY to Sloan dont know a damn thing about Sonic Youth then.
ive always wished that Eric's Trip actually covered that song whenever i saw them live.

Well, rumour has it that Sloan got signed to Geffen for Smeared on the grounds that they were Canada's answer to Sonic Youth. The first two records sound a lot like SY to me--without the 'alternative' tunings, mind you. Some people were accusing them of being a SY rip-off band at the time, right down to Chris Murphy's physical similarities to Thurston Moore. That's probably the reason they were starting to change by the time of their second Geffen record, Twice Removed (1994), bringing in influences ranging from The Beatles to The Velvets to The Ramones. Of course, they sound nothing like Sonic Youth today, all those albums later.

so why does Eric's Trip have a song called Sloan? named after the band?

You must spread some Replacements around before playing them for Genteel Death again. :cool:

it's an east coast thing
even if most of those bands aren't from the same province
there is some strange interconnected thing happening with some of those bands.
i'm going to guess it's because there is fuck all out here
and bands got to stick together.