When Music Sounds Like Noise
What happens when music doesn’t fit pleasantly into our predetermined rules about how sounds should interact?
Of the classic elements of music, melody and harmony are often held in higher importance by the mainstream audience than such things as timbre, structure, dynamics, etc. Melody, we’re taught from early on, gives a song its most basic form and captures your attention with sliding pitches in familiar intervals that worm their way into your subconscious relentlessly. Harmony gives music its beauty, its emotion—leading us into the deep melancholy of a minor blues scale or the beachside bliss of a well-placed major 7th chord.
Melody and harmony are essential to our music listening experience, but what happens when a musician intentionally strips both away? What happens when music doesn’t fit pleasantly into our predetermined rules about how sounds should interact? In other words, how do we accurately and meaningfully exegete the free-flowing, avant-garde experimentations of noisy rock bands like Fugazi and Sonic Youth?
Arguably, Fugazi—a DC-based group born from the embers of hardcore punk—and Sonic Youth—an NYC-based group who helped pioneer “noise rock” with alternate tunings and unorthodox instrumentations—created their most popular work in the late-80s (1989 collection 13 Songs and 1988 album Daydream Nation, respectively). However, each band’s influence and vigor for disrupting the mainstream carried into the 1990s and beyond. In 1995, Fugazi released Red Medicine, an album the band self-produced for the first time, leading to a deepened sense of noisy experimentation and a greater control of chaos. The same year, Sonic Youth released Washing Machine, an impressive collection of alternative rock that marries a wonderful sense of melody with jarring, unmelodious guitar thrashes, feedback, and overwhelming atmosphere. With both albums, the listener is asked to endure aural discomfort, but to what end?
Traditional wisdom would encourage us to seek out what is pleasant, harmonious, rule-abiding. However, when we live within the lines and never question the status quo, complacency reigns supreme. When music becomes too familiar, so too do its arguments and presuppositions. When “three chords and the truth” or a popular four-chord progression become ubiquitous, they form a sugarcoating around whatever theme, message, or attitude the writer wants culture to swallow.
We need to be disrupted.
Thus, Fugazi ends Red Medicine song “By You” with a little over a minute of pure feedback and squealing guitar racket, which sounds like trying to harmonize a dying robot with a UFO’s tractor beam. Unconventional as the improvised noise may be, it reminds us to consider the lyrics of the first stanza, “Define and redefine / You'd make them all the same / But molds they break away.” Here, Fugazi doesn’t attempt to fit the molds of mainstream culture because, one, molds promote uniformity over originality, and two, molds are always changing, “breaking away,” and being “redefined.” Fugazi argue against crowd-following contentment with their lyrics, but it’s their guitars that truly pack the punch.
Similarly, Sonic Youth’s 20-minute closing track “The Diamond Sea” explores self-reflection and rejects the status quo with extended, soul-searching wanderings via atonal guitars and thrumming bass. I know it’s long, but if you can take the time, sit for 20 minutes with this song and wonder with singer Thurston Moore about how the crazy toll of time and other people’s perceptions affect your own understanding of self. Even in the song’s most ear-splitting or droning moments, you feel with Moore and company. You feel a bleakness, a time-worn emptiness, an exhaustion you can’t possibly express within the confines of a four-minute song.
I spend most of my time listening to mainstream or mainstream-adjacent music—the music that follows the conventions of Western melody and harmony, rhythm and form—but every so often, I need to be jolted away and remember not to get comfortable, not to assume something is right because its commonplace, not to confine the expression of emotion and thought to what is culturally acceptable. The comfortable, the commonplace, the culturally acceptable—these are “Defined and redefined” across time and don’t always tell the truth. Don’t be afraid to explore the uncomfortable. You may just find a deeper truth hiding underneath those layered, melody-less shrieks of dying robots and UFOs.
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