Thurston Moore Said It Better in Music

In the beginning there was nothing. Silence. Then: a bang. And then everything else. And though nobody was around (obviously) to hear the birth of the cosmos, the echoes of that primordial detonation linger, shaping matter and light and permeating the whole, vast, fathomless firmament. The universe, in a meaningful way, is made of noise. Noise is, for Thurston Moore, singularly meaningful: He is obsessed with its implications, its possibilities, and its sheer noisiness. In the early 1980s, Sonic Youth—whose evolving lineup was based around Moore and fellow guitarist-songwriters Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon, who was married to Moore for nearly 30 years—was the squealing edge of the so-called “noise rock” movement. Drawing inspiration from the avant-garde and the hard-core punk underground, noise rock prized volume, atonality, and wild waves of amplifier feedback, provided by cheapo guitars played in odd, unconventional tunings. The premise, basically: What if they made a whole song out of the bad parts of songs? Noise rock took the ostensible defects of amplified rock music and made virtues of them.