Shine On.

“The Diamond Sea”
Sonic Youth
1995 (single)
2006 (Track 11, The Destroyed Room: B-Sides and Rarities)





You might want to settle in and pour yourself a beverage, this is the “alternate ending” version. Go ahead & press Play now, it takes a half an hour.


SY-the Diamond Sea mp3


0:00 It starts all YoingYoingYoingYoing, quietly. That’s the idling amp, it white-whispers a phase effect. It will be the guitar’s voice phasing, in a couple of seconds. Drumsticks click a 4-count, & we’re off.

I think it’s fair to say that Sonic Youth have pretty much always provoked controversy & they (maybe) always will. The naysayers tend to fall into one of two principal camps: (1) the reflexively-dismissive (SY= pretentious, mere noise, it’s too damn weird), and (2) the hipper-than-thou (SY= sell-outs, dinosaurs, it’s too damn conventional). The pendulum swings errantly.

For more years than I care to count, I have been listening actively to Sonic Youth. I continue to be challenged & surprised, mystified & thrilled by much of what I hear. I can say without much irony that, maybe, I never really heard any music before I began to learn how to hear Sonic Youth. I hope I’m still learning: how to hear music, how to ignore every ridiculous kind of hierarchy that people want to interpose between the music & my two ears.

Anyway, right here from 0:02 is where the one camp will be heard to complain about rock star tropes & conventionality & whatnot. Because, unlike much of what SY have done (& have historically been understood to “stand for”), this here is a song, with a clear chord structure. At least for the moment: tandem guitar solos introduce what is about to be a sung melody.

0:38 “Time takes its crazy toll,” sings Thurston in one of his typically “trippy” lyrics. The sung parts of the song follow an A/B structure: alternating back & forth between two distinct melodies. No chorus, no bridge. Here’s what he’s on about: mirrors, reflection, diamond, crystal. Is it a drug parable? Adolescent allegory? Tragic love tale? Who cares, honestly. Thurston’s lyrics often seem to consist of a handful of Groovy clichés (here, e.g., dressed in dreams, lonely storm, running wild, love, sand, blood) shaken in a bag, & then arranged strictly according to rhyme. I don’t actually have any objection to that approach. Anyway, three verses, then we move on.

2:25 A little interlude, & then, 2:42, again with the “rock star” solos. This was right around the time SY very suddenly shifted from esoteric art band to Lollapalooza headliner, hence the backlash. Anyway, notice the bass, accelerating tempo at 3:15 & evolving into a new motif, the first indication that what’s ahead will be a serial structure, a series of discrete sections that may/may not refer back to the ostensible “song.” It all starts to stretch out here.

By 4:26, that one guitar is getting pretty noisy. Increasingly-extraneous overtones, drifting afield of any melodic reference, evolving away from the “song,” but back toward what’s more commonly understood as SY territory. At 4:38 it’s the bass, again, that triggers a shift by actually standing pat, declining to make the chord change, & then it modulates sharp. The guitars both are more noisy still, there’s some feedback, shading & modeling the contours.

4:41 A brief plateau (albeit monolithic), then 5:06 one guitar steps out deliberately: four notes descending, almost doorbell-chime tones. The other guitar is howling. The four tones repeat. The snare drum heats up a little. Beginning at 6:19, I think that’s the classic SY drumstick-wedged-in-guitar-frets move: just hitting those strings, bridged so tight they ring like churchbells. Harmonic overtones y compris.

Can we digress a little? Forget about music for a moment? Remember when we talked about Jasper Johns? In 1954, he made that painting & called it “Flag.” It’s nothing but a flag &/or it isn’t a flag at all it’s a painting. “Of” a flag, maybe. Or maybe it isn’t a painting “of” anything. Because it doesn’t re-present in the way a conventional painting does. So it can only be understood as “depicting” a flag if it actually is a flag bc that’s all it is, except it isn’t: it’s a painting. It only sort of is a flag, but it also stands apart & sort of refers to “the” Flag. Remember that?

“Flag” is constructed of the irreducible, coded elements of “the” Flag (the stripes, the stars), but rendered rough, ostentatiously textured, made to operate both as (1) a sensory object and (2) a conceptual provocation.

What if there were art in a similar vein that, instead of connoting “flag,” connoted something like “rock music.” Something that only “sort of” actually is the thing it refers to, but also sort of stands apart & comments on it? Well. I submit that that’s Sonic Youth. The list of coded elements is longer & their relative irreducibility more varied. But I don’t understand SY to have ever set out to make actual Rock music in any sort of conventional way. SY makes art pieces that only sort of actually are Rock songs. But which also stand apart, sort of referring to, connoting (signifying!), Rock songs.

In the present example, I think “The Diamond Sea” actually refers back to itself, as a “song” when, at 6:52, there is a slow-ish reprise of the chords (!) of the song (remember the song?). It’s probably the least expected development at this point after several minutes of what might fairly be called a Space Jam (truth to power, sorry), but there we are. Easing back into the song, the melody, & then 7:12 Thurston is singing another verse. Just the one, though. & still just that little bit slower. We’ve been outside for awhile now, & we’re taking a brief look back in.

Then we move on again. 7:58 begins a lengthy, slow meander. Drifting, if inexorably. By 9:58 the two guitars are shimmering against each other in a sort of auditory moiré pattern. Sporadic taps on the cymbal, the drums seeming to have dropped out almost altogether some time back. When did that happen? Is this a little disorienting? At 12:24 undercurrents are modulating, there’s no real solid ground. Did you ever read about those scientists in the ‘60s, taking LSD in their laboratories & then trying to keep notes? I keep getting lost here, having to go back & start over. Because this intoxicates me.

At 13:34 we’re rousted, after a fashion, with a single high note, then some feedback that builds for a full minute. 14:36 were those the doorbell chimes again? In reverse this time? At 14:46 a glottal stop, & then 14:58 the drums thrash a little, along with some backwards sounds at the periphery. By 15:51 it’s chaos. It’s anchored, but it’s chaos. Notice the texture. At 16:33 notice the texture. At 17:18 the texture. (Shit, for that matter, you could go back & just notice the texture at 14:00, at 8:58, at 4:54, & (not the slightest bit incidentally) at 0:02.) Shifting again into another new phase at 17:42, every image freakishly elongated & in black & white every voice slow motion underwater, a burglar alarm three blocks over. It’s a terrible movie, it’s waking from a dream. I love this part. Notice the texture.


OK but, texture, what?? Well, we can’t hope to hear this the same way we hear normal music, that’s not what this is. In normal music, you listen, e.g., to the melody, the harmony, to the way the soloist both accommodates & challenges the chord changes, that sort of thing. It’s a specific kind of structural interplay that is largely absent here, bc it’s just not what makes this music interesting or satisfying. &/but is this music at all? Is it “just” that art stuff discussed supra? Is it “just” noise? Yes, yes, & yes. It is capital-A Art, theoretically deployed, call it bullshit if you must. It’s also a bunch of old, broken cast-off guitars, tuned all “wrong,” played loud & sloppy & fast. Sonic Youth is pretentious elitism ­& it’s anti-elitist Punk, capital-P no apologies. Naysayers on every side are one hundred percent correct &/but don’t have the first idea how to shut the fuck up & Just. Listen.

There is Music here, but it is mostly not to be found in the rudimentary melodies, the inscrutably-haphazard harmonies, the (often, virtually) perfunctory rhythms. That’s not the intended focus here, it’s just the scaffolding. Here, those are just the coded elements (i.e., the stripes, the stars), just enough to situate you & provoke you. So then what you listen to hear here are the rich (shit, the endless!) variations of texture. It’s not about pitch it’s about timbre. It’s about relative depth, it’s about dynamic. It’s about dissonant tunings at high volume making harmonics that vibrate in your chest. It’s all about the way the thing just feels on a tactile level. You can’t hear it if you don’t shut up & listen. But it’s there for you. It’s fundamentally hedonistic, it’s luxurious it’s sexy it’s gorgeous it’s delicious. It fucking rocks. We don’t have a settled vocabulary to discuss it. This is not what they teach at Berklee, at Eastman, at Julliard. You’re pretty much on your own here. But you got ears.



At 18:41 a whole new palette of sonic colors is introduced. Like if everything were suddenly backwards, played in reverse. It’s an element that’s been hinted-at earlier in the piece (e.g., at 14:58), & now becomes the primary motif. Reminds me of all the mirrors referred-to eighteen minutes ago in the lyric: reflecting back now, turned inside-out. Backwards cymbals crash, feedback feeds back backwards. A rhythmic structure starts emerging, oddly, until at 19:43 everything (again!) degenerates, seems again to burn. Bass “notes” (quote-unquote bc it’s pretty much all melting textures now, all flaming magma) modulating now flat. I’m hearing scattered references to earlier thematic segments, suggestions of a reprise. Then made explicit at 23:14, where the guitar solo of 3:00 is revisited & reinterpreted, briefly. There are only a couple of minutes left, I’m shutting up I’m hearing giants walking.

Early Sunday morning it rained ferocious in my city, but the dog needed walking & so duty called. We went outside in the wet cold. We trudged, bundled, up to the park & around the pond. It was barely light. I wore headphones & listened to “The Diamond Sea” w/volume high, hearing nothing from the real world & feeling underwater. So the world around was as if silent while inside, in my head, it was very, very loud. Like I was deep inside of something relentless & oblivious & unspeakably beautiful. Soundless, ducks landed skimming the water from the air, the dog barked also soundless, in the downpour in the near absence of sunlight everything somehow gleamed. & shined & shined.

Represent, Two.

Well, it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell...

So, we were talking about the Jasper Johns painting, “Flag,” & how I can’t quite figure out exactly what it is or what it does or what it says or what it means. At the end of the day it just sits there Sphinx-like, posing riddles.

(&, I know this is not normal, but: I get a genuine thrill out of this kind of shit. The longer I ponder the paradoxes implicit in this painting, the more excited I get. I can’t help the way I am.)

oh, & btw, I fully realize that nothing I’m saying here is the slightest bit original, right? I mean, the intellectual resources of entire graduate departments are daily devoted to just these kinds of semiotic inquiries, of which I’m presenting only my own little thumbnail sketch, no doubt full of holes. I’m not undertaking a comprehensive review of the critical field here, ok? I’m just thinking aloud is all. Hence, no footnotes.

OK so Music, right, we’re talking about music. & more specifically right now: audio recordings of music. Which, to my ears, can be ambiguous & paradoxical much like (spoiler alert!) the Jasper Johns painting. I do listen to an awful lot of music. & a lot of what I hear amounts to a capital-M Modern subversion of Art-as-Depiction, or Art-as-Representation kind of deal. Because (obvious exceptions aside), recorded music no longer purports to re-present any particular performance, fixed at any point in time.

As a pre-Modern point of reference, here is the recording of Robert Johnson performing his song, “Love in Vain.”

RJ-Love in Vain mp3

Beautiful. Brilliant.

This recording is a documentation of a particular event that occurred in the history of the universe, in Texas, & that lasted for about two & a half minutes on one particular day in the year 1937. It’s a snapshot. It’s a historical record of something that once actually happened. This is what recorded music was, exclusively, for a substantial period of time: an audio photograph, a record (a record) of a single performance that otherwise would have existed only in its own present, ephemeral moment, & then afterward only in the unreliable memories of whoever was there. Now having been recorded, it’s a regularized (institutionalized) memory of that one past event, rendered communicable to anyone & for all future time.

OK, now compare: Fire up your iPod or whatever & hear Beyoncé Knowles. You don’t even need me to post the link, right? “All the single ladies! All the single ladies!” & we’re off: that song is stuck in your head for the next 45 minutes, am I right? I’m using Beyoncé as an emblematic example here, just because I know you know the song. But here, hear:

BK-Single Ladies(Put a Ring On It) mp3

What is this music constructed of? Primarily I guess it's a Voice & a Beat, but there's a lot of spice here in this Ratatouille. The squealing synthesizer loop; the funk drums chopping so seamlessly into the bass that I can't always distinguish between them; vocal harmonies processed through a super wet flange & chorus combo; reverb repeatedly inserted then extracted with precision. All of it exactly coordinated, calibrated, all of it enmeshed & all of it in motion. A complex & very finely-tuned machine; a miracle of modern engineering. Oh, & I almost forgot it's fucking great music! (No comment on the lyric, though.) Most of the vocal is a series of interlocking chants, but Ms. Knowles does also make a point of demonstrating that (hello?) she can sing. e.g., listen to her navigate that key change mid-way through the bridge (~2:20). But then also hear how the song quickly reasserts its own recorded artifice when the vocal grinds to a quick halt like a busted loop, & then immediately recovers (~2:40). & just btw, if you can hold your hips still during any of this, well, somebody ought to check your pulse.

But here is what I’m getting at: a recording made today no longer constitutes a documentation of a past performance of that music. No. Now, the present moment is self-actualizing, self-perpetuating. It’s a continuous & perpetual present moment, now. There is no longer any reference made to any then-present, now-past moment. All there is is Now.

Initially & substantially, this is a by-product of overdubbing. Just from the mere fact of different instruments being recorded at different times, we’re already outside the realm of documentation, of re-presentation. The actual, present moment becomes a fiction. The end product is an artifice; it may connote a single musical performance, but without documenting any event that ever actually happened.

Early on, overdubbing is just a benign sort of “cheating,” right? You go back & “fix” that one part of the guitar solo or whatever, but the record still operates as a representation of the band playing the song, more or less. Later, artists begin making music that deliberately calls attention to this technical aspect of itself. Sounds & individual performances that physically could not have occurred together are juxtaposed for deliberate effect, dramatic & otherwise. Music starts getting described in cinematic terms, because it’s so clearly & deliberately constructed & edited in ways calculated to draw attention to its own artifice. Now, entire pieces of music are built from this aesthetics of juxtaposition & incongruity.

You know what I mean, right? Every single piece of music that uses sampling is an obvious illustration of this. The sample takes a piece of some other sound, song, spoken text, bass line, whatever --& combines it incongruously. Dramatic & musical effects are constructed from the bare fact that the recorded elements do not really belong together. &, as a whole, the recordings operate as recordings: Each calls attention to itself as a recording that deploys part(s) of another recording; it is not a document or a “record” or a re-presentation of a past event. At most, the recording re-presents the past fact of another recording –mirrors reflecting other mirrors.

The use of sampling is a clear example of this distinction, but not an exclusive one. Beyoncé’s song is not built around samples in any obvious way. But neither does it refer to, or re-present any event outside of its own intrinsic present. The instrumentation is, obviously & aggressively, an amalgamation of studio-generated sounds that are looped, spinning tight cycles in a way that evokes (without directly operating as) hip-hop samples, all in a way that insists, again, on the fact of its own artifice.

Listen to the Robert Johnson, & you know & understand that you’re hearing a record of a historical event. Listen to the Beyoncé Knowles, & what you’re hearing is that song, timelessly. You’re not trying to fix it in any particular place or time. At most, you might be picturing the video. (Itself, incidentally, re-presenting no time or place at all, as dancers are suspended surreally in shifting tones of white, gray, no floor beneath, no walls around.) “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on it)” never actually WAS; it just IS, as long as you’re hearing it. On your iPod or in your brain.

Anyway, here’s where I’m headed. I think the Robert Johnson is the Mona Lisa: there, you’re looking through that window, taking in the scene, & understanding that it’s a depiction of a then-present, now-past historical occurrence. The Beyoncé is “Flag”: it’s all icons & emblems & cultural signs, steeped in context & meaning & adding up to a physical object operating on your senses, a Modern piece of Art.

& I think this matters, why? Because there obviously still IS such a thing as live performance of music. & it’s frustrating to hear music so often performed as an effort to re-present a recording. That’s a failed strategy, dead on arrival & ass-backwards. Live music is exciting & alive to the extent that it can accommodate surprise. Live music should entail not actually knowing for certain what’s going to happen. More about that in future postings. For now, my point is just this simple: a recording of music and a performance of music are DIFFERENT from each other; they are not the same thing.

Represent.

"Flag" -Jasper Johns, encaustic, oil, and collage on wood, 1954-1955

Long about the 3rd bottle of wine, my pal D was chuckling at something or other I had just slurred. We were probably playing the Clash. Or maybe the Buzzcocks. Anyway, D was far less impaired than I was (that's typical), & her claim is that she then texted me, quoting what I had just said. You know, for posterity & for hilarity. So I could see in the morning what nobody would otherwise remember. Here's the message I found on my phone next a.m.:

"I think really hard about things that no one cares about, thats whats wrong with my life."

It was actually pretty funny at the time. In context, I mean. I had been going on for a while about (big surprise) music. Recorded versus live music, my view of certain substantial & critical distinctions between the two modes, and what I see as analogous developments in early-to-mid Modern-era visual arts. In America.

I know, I know, I can't help it.

I just get that way sometimes. True story: I really actually do think about this kind of stuff pretty much all of the time. I mostly try not to talk about it unnecessarily when people are trying to just have a drink & a little fun. But D's been to art school & so I figure she's more used to geeks of my particular stripe, & I guess I gave myself license to be self-indulgent that night. More than usual, I mean.

Anyway, what I remember is that we were jamming some old-school capital-P Punk, & I was talking re: Warhol, de Kooning, & Jasper Johns.

i.e., a painting is a picture, right? It’s a depiction, a virtual window into a “scene” that we, as viewers, have to agree to believe in, to some negotiable degree. Right?

A painting is a picture. It’s a picture of something, someone. Some where. Some when. It’s a representation. A re-presentation, as in setting forth an artificial “present” moment, & asking us to be complicit in believing it’s real, & in believing it’s now. That’s pretty much the pre-Modern consensus on Western pictorial art, yeah? When we look at the Mona Lisa, Mr. da Vinci is asking us to pretend to believe we’re looking through a window at that nice smirking lady, comfortably placed in the foreground of a receding perspective scene. & we’re saying Yes, sure we’ll pretend to believe we see Her (& see her There) & not just smears of crackling sepia paint here, on an old piece of wood.

Then, in the capital-M Modern era, capital-A Art fucks with that consensus in a big way, right? It says, Whoa, not so fast. Let’s do look at the paint on the board (broadly defined). Let’s no longer pretend the painting is a magically-frozen present moment of some OTHER when/where/one/thing. No. The painting isn’t a picture at all any more. A photograph is a picture, yes. A photograph is a documentary event. Of an actual past moment, frozen now in an eternal present. But a painting is a painting: it's a physical object existing nowhere but the physical space in front of your eyeballs. Here. & occupying no present moment other than the one you’re alive in. Now.

Except. Maybe we're not always willing to go along with that. Maybe just because we’re human beings &, as human beings, we’re (maybe innately) inclined to invest physical objects (particularly objects created by ourselves) with significance. With meaning, even. We don’t want the painting to just be painting, or "a" Painting, no; we want it to be a picture. We want it to mean something. We want it to stand for something, for something other than what it plainly just is. We want it to depict, we want it to represent, we want it to re-present. We're inclined to want all of that.

I think these are the ideas that Jasper Johns was exploring when he made this painting in 1954, and called it “Flag.” It’s a super provocative piece because: What the hell is it? Is it a picture of a flag? Is it a flag? Actually, functionally a flag? & what, by the way, IS a flag? (I mean, speaking of physical objects invested with significance & meaning?) So, is this painting called “Flag” supposed to have the exact same significance & meaning as that flag on the pole at the Post Office across the street? Um, no? First, this thing is just different –it’s constructed of different materials, & it occupies a different physical context. Ok, but just because it’s made of wax & paint & wood & it’s hanging on the wall at the MOMA, does that actually mean ipso facto that it’s a picture? &, if so, of what? & what does it depict/mean/re-present?

Just by way of comparison, this is not the picture of Marines raising “the” flag at Iwo Jima, right? We know what that picture is, & what it connotes, & how it’s supposed to make us feel & think about “the” flag. But this thing? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what, if anything, it says. At least, I don't know what it says about its apparent subject matter: "the" flag.

Do you? I imagine you (reader), opening this page, seeing that picture, & forming immediate expectations based on that picture. & then I imagine you shifting your expectations as you understood we’re only talking about “Flag,” & not about “the” flag. Of course, by now what you’re really wondering is what ANY of this has to do with music, the stated subject matter of this blog.

& I will get to that.