The Wire 300: David Stubbs on Sonic Youth and the Blast First axis

As far as many people were concerned in the 80s, in the UK in particular, rock was a discredited medium. The phrase ‘rockist’ was coined as a pejorative means of referring to those who persisted with raucous, four-square guitar music and its attendant, clenched, Caucasian macho signifiers. Funk and soul were the new thing. Pop was the new thing. Synths were the new thing. Jingly-jangly indie was the new thing. Punk's job had not been to revitalise rock but to trigger its self-destruction. Let there be no more rock, let us move on, dispense with that hoary, discredited phallus, the rock guitar, and embrace diversity, postmodernity.

In America, these ideas never had so much traction. However, in the early 80s, American rock was beginning to feel awkward about itself, unsure where to go. At one end of the spectrum you had beyond-the-pale poodle-haired glam rock. At the other, you had the straight edge, neo-punk imperatives of hardcore, using serrated guitars to burrow inward to something somehow ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ but unsure as to what this would consist of. Rock felt strip-mined, no longer purposeful.

However, from around 1983, a cluster of American groups emerged and slowly began to haul themselves out of this quandary. Among them were Sonic Youth. The key to their subsequent progress was to regard rock not so much as a weapon of intent but as something to fixate upon, to mesmerise and be mesmerised by. Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore spoke of the “reinvention of the guitar” and, taking their cues from the ever-active experimental and Improv scene, subjected their instruments to various treatments, determined to wreak from their wood, metal and string an expanded lexicon of sounds and possibilities.

Sonic Youth represented a shift in mood from the wide-eyed sense of wonder of the 60s, or the profoundly sceptical vigilance of the post-punk era. They talked a lot about media overload, an overwhelming inkling that pop culture was supersaturated. You sensed it in the wiped out, concussed tones of Kim Gordon's vocals. To re-embrace rock in the early 80s was not just to toil under the burden of a huge, dead weight of history and legacy but also to be faced with the blare of all kinds of competing and contemporary distractions in a hyper-developed media environment.

By 1988's Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth were a group at once enervated and intensified. They sang about a “Teenage Riot” but that this riot would have to take a subtler, more inward form than posited in punk. On “Eric's Trip” it was clear that the sheer glut of their own era had reduced drastically their field of vision by comparison with, say, The Who on “I Can See For Miles”: “I can't see anything at all/All I see is me.” Clearly, rock's previous mission to change the world was no longer tenable. The world had changed rock. And yet, for all this, they kicked major ass. They used the burden of rock's legacy to their advantage. They were absorbent, they were everything, from the Velvets to hardcore, from bubblegum to Baudrillard. They were a heavy meta-group, intent on finding out just how white a heat this music could be brought up to. If it couldn't change the world, it could at least evolve, the way jazz evolved.