“The Year that Punk Broke”: Notes on the Legacy of Dissonance
The relationship between musical and critical theory is well-covered terrain.1 Still, with contemporary culture's increased concern for polyphony, plurality, and fracture, musical concepts have become all the more useful in critical study. Indeed, by way of a concept of dissonance, we might begin to unpack a certain character that runs through critical and cultural production of the twentieth century. In what follows, I will make use of dissonance as a musical, but more importantly, extra-musical concept, in order to suggest that thinking about dissonance broadly elucidates some formal, aesthetic, and theoretical choices increasingly deployed across popular contemporary cultural sites. Moreover, a concept of dissonance serves to blur the otherwise firm lines of distinction between such sites, and offer a critical practice for thinking through an increasingly multiplicitous world. Given that dissonance could be (and has been) the subject of several book length projects, I will draw on a rather narrow example: the early '90s musical output of art/noise/rock band, Sonic Youth.
Rather than a direct trajectory or filiation between musical and critical theories, I submit that the relationship between the two takes shape as a mutually productive alliance for rethinking concepts of center and periphery, harmony and dissonance, in and across various intellectual sites. Indeed, Sonic Youth privileges an approach that, while offering meaningful and rich artifacts, refuses the audience the coherence or comfort of any central organizing principle, any stable sense of harmony or historically grounded closure. Thinking in what I term "the dissonant mode" excavates and makes explicit the value of such an approach, and establishes dissonance as a generative figure in thinking about the aesthetic and cultural polyphony of the contemporary moment in critical thought.
I. Toward a Concept of Dissonance
Parallel fifths sound bad (why?). This passing note sounds harsh (why?). There are no such things as ninth chords, or they sound harsh (why?)
- Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony
In a 1926 essay, Arnold Schoenberg asserts that Western music composition in the twentieth century inaugurated a re-thinking of tonality through explorations of chromaticism, serialism, twelve-tone composition, which resulted in "the emancipation of [...] dissonance."2 In the same essay, making reference to Debussy, Schoenberg suggests that certain harmonies can contribute "extra-musical [...] constructive elements" to a work. These "extra-musical" or "constructive" elements function as a way for the aural experience to signify something other than itself; for Debussy they serve "the coloristic purpose of expressing moods and pictures."3 The spatial character Schoenberg implies with the invocation of "pictures" is significant, if underdeveloped. Schoenberg's understanding of dissonance does not derive its function from beauty, but rather from a certain sense of coherence: "What distinguishes dissonances from consonances is not a greater or lesser degree of beauty, but a greater or lesser degree of comprehensibility."4 He notes further that comprehensibility is subject to history, that certain harmonies/dissonances become more familiar and thus acceptable, while others remain excluded from acceptance. For Schoenberg then, dissonance is always understood by way of a listening community, and to what degree dissonances disrupt norms of structure or comprehension. What emerges here is a way of thinking about dissonance as crossing the intrinsic threshold of a piece of music. By elaborating the intrinsic characteristics of dissonance outward, and attending to the extrinsic possibilities dissonance may evoke, Schoenberg begins to transpose dissonance from a purely structural category to a broad signifying concept. Indeed, Duke Ellington, years later, thinking about racial discrimination by way of dissonance, makes this position abundantly clear: "Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part."5 Ellington goes a long way toward elucidating Schoenberg's often forbiddingly technical prose. If certain harmonies signify outside or beyond music as conceptual tools as Schoenberg argues and Ellington makes clear, then Schoenberg effectively "emancipates" dissonance twice—first as a purely musical and now as an extra-musical concept.
In order to negotiate the specificity of extra-musical dissonance, it will prove useful to first ground our discussion in the vocabulary of music theory. The entry on dissonance in The Oxford Dictionary of Music redirects to "dischord," and states: "A chord which is restless, jarring to the ear, requiring to be resolved in a particular way if its presence is to be justified by the ear (or the note or interval responsible for producing this effect);"6 Grove Music Encyclopedia contextualizes dissonance further: "The antonym to consonance, hence a discordant sounding together of two or more notes perceived as having 'roughness' or 'tonal tension.'"7 The Harvard Dictionary of Music joins its entries for consonance and dissonance (suggesting the two are implicated in one another), and notes: "very generally, consonant intervals are regarded as primary and stable, whereas dissonant intervals are regarded as secondary and unstable. Theorists use this distinction to explain the sense of motion that occurs within pieces of music."8 In each of these accounts, dissonance appears as an exclusively negative category. A departure from stability is announced, and dissonance appears as something unsettled, a sense of peripheral movement that has yet to find a "primary" or central sense of home. Further implicit in these definitions is a series of oppositions—stability/instability, tension/resolution, movement/stasis—and such oppositions inform any discussion of dissonance. But, following Schoenberg's question, we must ask of these negative descriptors: why?
II. Harmony; or, the Cosmic Order
Where various music dictionaries provide technical grounding in dissonance, and Schoenberg's essay serves as a beginning for linking dissonance to emancipatory projects—musical, critical, literary, and so on—we might briefly turn to what has been broadly, if inconclusively, defined as postmodernism in this century's latter half in order to further establish an affiliation between musical and critical theories in the form of thinking in "the dissonant mode." As William V. Spanos suggests in his 1972 essay, "The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination," the history of Western thought is dominated by thinking Meta-ta-physica—thinking from above and/or beyond events themselves, and so viewing history and existence as "a well-made cosmic drama."9 This brief detour offers a productive avenue to conceive of dissonance as a critical practice. The tonal tradition that leads up to Schoenberg's emancipation established and guarded stable key structures predicated on balance and resolution, or—to borrow Spanos' language—cosmic order. While Spanos' essay takes literary history as its primary subject, his analysis extends across a continuum of interpretive sites, suggesting that this orientation is not local to literature, but rather part of an indissoluble relay of interpretation bound up with artistic, political, and cultural production. For Spanos, the postmodern imagination offers an alternative to any sense of totalizing ("cosmic") order, and thus discloses the errancies, discontinuities, and disarticulations so refused by carefully constructed and maintained accounts of being. Thought another way, the cosmic order serves to overwrite dissonance with stable harmonic structures.
Taking Spanos as a point of departure, the dissonant mode emerges as a way of thinking through constellations of disparate ideas across a broad spectrum of positions. Just as the postmodern imagination functions along a continuum of interpretive sites, the dissonant mode offers a critical practice specifically attuned to recognizing historically authorized "harmonic" (balanced, stable, centered) structures (be they cultural, political, artistic, or otherwise) and questioning or reconstituting their composition, utility, and comprehensibility. Thus, in Spanos' postmodern imagination we can rediscover Schoenberg's emancipation as a valid and polyvalent interpretive site from which dissonance can be thought. As we will see, Spanos' postmodern (significantly, a postmodern theory not bound to the periodization so often demanded of literary and critical movements) cultivates a space where Sonic Youth and Schoenberg can co-habit.
III. The Year Punk Broke
It was the music. Art's just this dead thing sitting on a fucking wall. This was exciting.
- Glenn Branca
Bearing Spanos' postmodern in mind, when making use of dissonance as a conceptual form for interpretation and analysis, it is productive to look at dissonance in a context temporally and aesthetically removed from Schoenberg's initial investigation. In a 1991 film documenting the European tour of Sonic Youth, singer and bassist Kim Gordon addresses the audience: "Did you know that punk rock finally broke in '91?"10 Gordon's declaration can be taken in at least two ways, each shedding light on the significance of this year (and decade) for the musical community it made known. Read one way, punk "breaking" might indicate obsolesce; punk no longer "works" the way it was intended and is thus malfunctioning. Read another way, punk "breaking" might indicate its wider acceptance in the popular music community, thus breaking through to a new audience. Given that punk music initially emerged as an alternative to the dominant aesthetic and political milieu, the latter may well signify the former. Regardless of Gordon's intent, this moment resonantly inaugurates a new era for punk music, and 1991 becomes a useful index for examining Sonic Youth's many experiments in dissonance. While Sonic Youth's inclination toward tonal dissonance is well documented—alternate tunings; "prepared" guitar where drumsticks; screwdrivers, even baseball bats are used to modify the sound; free noise improvisation—when paired with an understanding of their extra-musical content, Sonic Youth offers a point of reflection for thinking of dissonance as a far reaching conceptual apparatus for understanding the broadening landscape of artistic production in our contemporary moment. By extra-musical content, I mean the cultural and social signifiers that constitute Sonic Youth the band, rather than the music proper produced as a component of that band.
Sonic Youth played its first show in 1981, and released five full-length albums throughout the '80s. The '90s, however, represented a seismic shift in their career, both in intentionality and possibility. Signing to a major label—Geffen—for the release of Goo, the until-then independent group found increased funding and exposure: a performance on David Letterman, a music video on MTV, Gordon interviewing then-ubiquitous hip-hop star LL Cool J for Spin magazine—a bounty of era-specific signifiers of rock success. What is so interesting about Sonic Youth's "breaking," and what makes their career so rich for investigation, is their outright refusal to answer to the call of success as such. But in order to thematize the "break" in Sonic Youth's career (and what it means for contemporary concepts of dissonance), we must first understand the cultural and aesthetic context from which Sonic Youth emerged.
Sonic Youth can perhaps be most readily contextualized in terms of "No Wave," an anti-genre that emerged parallel to (and sometimes as a rejection of) the broad and undefined punk movement of the late-'70s. No Wave immediately presents a certain set of problems for any writer. As a genre-signifier, its very articulation contains its own negation, and thus leaves us adrift in ambiguous signification.11 Indeed, the moment one attempts to name No Wave as an event (an organizing schema, a "wave"), they must first acknowledge the resounding "no" to which that event is inextricably attached. No Wave thus disrupts any sense of coherence in thinking about genre, and proceeds from an indistinct set of formal and aesthetic principles. Perhaps the best way to begin to understand No Wave would be the Brian Eno curated No New York compilation, which features four seminal acts: the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and D.N.A. Still, "understanding" No Wave remains elusive, and moreover, understanding may be beside the point. Indeed, it is difficult to reconcile the paranoid motorik-funk of the Contortions with the industrial synth-leaning noise of D.N.A., and No New York leaves out entirely the equally seminal (though no less singular) Theoretical Girls, Suicide, and Lounge Lizards. Genre-instability aside, early Sonic Youth remained quite akin to the No Wave's inaugural moment: an early single ("Death Valley '69") featured Teenage Jesus and the Jerk's Lydia Lunch, and Sonic Youth's primary guitarists—Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo—met while playing in No Wave composer Glenn Branca's "guitar orchestra."
With its defiant emphasis on negation, No Wave reiterates Schoenberg's question—parallel fifths sound bad, why?—for a radically different time. Here, No Wave can be seen as questioning the entire generic enterprise for classifying music. But within the No Wave paradigm, such a question can only maintain the negative character of dissonance found in various musical dictionaries. The brief discussion of No Wave here serves to mark on the one hand, a distinction between early-Sonic Youth (growing from and maintaining the No Wave aesthetic of negation) and mid-career-Sonic Youth (moving away from the explicit emphasis on negation), and on the other, the shifting permutations of Schoenberg's question of dissonance made available by a sustained reading of Sonic Youth's career. For our purposes, it is no longer a question of why a certain dissonance "sounds bad," but rather, how is dissonance constructed and how does it signify? From what cultural milieu does the dissonance emerge? Updating Schoenberg's initial diagnosis, Sonic Youth's mid-career output become a question of the tonal, but more importantly, cultural comprehensibility (or lack there-of) of dissonance in a given paradigm.
Of course, the Sonic Youth of the '90s, while markedly less aggressive in sound than their early-career output,12 still demanded that the listener forego expectations of consonance in song structure, subject matter, and general expectation. Put another way: Sonic Youth's success comes bound up with dissonance in that they remain defiant of formal order—that is, what a rock song and band could, or should, do. Sonic Youth's dissonance is not simply the reorganization of tonal relationships (which is evident in even a cursory survey of Sonic Youth recordings) but it is the reorganization of the culturally and traditionally grounded foundations of popular rock music. Indebted somewhat to the enabling postmodern destruction of the totalizing institutionalized narrative (in Spanos' terms, the shattering of the "well-made cosmic drama"), Sonic Youth's output is able to enact dissonance across myriad musical and cultural sites. With references to Anita Hill, Nazi Germany ("Youth against Fascism"), Sports Illustrated ("Swimsuit Issue") and "Cinderella" ("Cinderella's Big Score")—Sonic Youth draws from disparate cultural and historical archives with little regard for pre-established categories of the mainstream or any alternative. In a 1991 interview, Moore speaks to this very point: "People say 'why do you deal with things that are so schticky and schlonky?' [...] you know, somebody on TV in your living room might as well be your sister."13 Here, popular media has encroached into the intimacy of the domestic realm, and, for Sonic Youth, music cannot help but reflect that condition. If those who equate such popular cultural references with descriptors like "schticky" and "schlonky" experience a sense of dissonance, it is only dissonance in the traditional, negative, estimation.
If we return to Schoenberg we find the question of dissonance developed once more. It is no longer a simple "why," but an immersion in the cultural paradigms that constitute listener comprehensibility; in what paradigm does the historical become schticky? This is not a simple rejection of norms, but rather the creation of something new. Indeed, in the '90s the resounding "no" from which Sonic Youth emerged is turned on its head. The record that garnered such major label courting and radically changed their career, Daydream Nation, provides a telling lyric, one that might serve to stake out this shift: "These times can't add up / yr life is such a mess / forget the past, and just say yes."14 The rhetoric of "adding up" contrasted with a life rendered "a mess" acknowledges the impossibility of the impetus for harmony, a refusal to let concepts of history or tradition authorize action, and out of this: an affirmation. Thus Schoenberg's "why"—now reformulated—ceases to be a simple interrogation from within a paradigm or tradition, and rather functions as an enabling question, a vault toward the affirmation of something new.
Sonic Youth's refusal to let tradition dictate their identity as a band (a refusal to succumb to any preordained cosmic drama, any pre-established formal harmony) is bound up with an unresolved tension, for they treat the traditions from which they emerge as fundamentally dissonant archives that can be rethought, reorganized, and left in a defiantly unresolved state. A brief addendum might make this clear. When Sonic Youth signed with Geffen, objections appeared from the community from which they emerged (punk, no wave). The accusation was that of "selling out." It is easy to follow this line of complaint: Goo put forth more traditional song structures than its predecessors, and, by virtue of how it was funded, was ethically compromised. Moore, in an interview with MTV, proffered a typically pithy reply: "So we sold out. What's it to you?"15 Indeed, it is not as if Sonic Youth's records became saccharine radio-ready exercises in mass-market acceptance. Rather, the '90s represent a period where, contrary to narrowing their provocations, Sonic Youth began to deepen their understanding of dissonance beyond the too-reductive negative encapsulation first dismantled by Schoenberg in the early twentieth century. Sonic Youth's dissonance, then, must be thought as an extension of Schoenberg's initial diagnosis, while making possible a far more rich textural (and textual) landscape from which to think.
IV. Contemporary Dissonance
The appropriation of dissonance here undertaken is a necessarily brief intervention. Yet, a pressing question remains: what can this specific genealogy of dissonance tell us about our contemporary moment? Indeed, Sonic Youth disbanded in 2011; why do they matter for our current moment (if they do at all)? As a provisional answer, I would suggest that what proves most enduring are the conceptual possibilities for understanding and elaborating dissonance they left behind. By listening to and thinking with this genealogy of dissonance, we might be able to conceptualize and think about contemporary works differently. Sonic Youth understood the parameters of form and content, genre and expectation to be permeable, and much of contemporary artistic and theoretical work affirms just such a commitment to the transformative possibilities of dissonance. In this sense, Schoenberg's "extra-musical elements" may well constitute one of the most useful functions of dissonance today. A brief example (by no means meant to cover of the overwhelmingly diverse world of contemporary art) is instructive. In 1999, Tom McCarthy founded the International Necronautical Society (INS), a "semi-fictitious society" whose manifesto declares that,
...we shall take it upon us, as our task, to bring death out into the world. We will chart all its forms and media: in literature and art, where it is most apparent; also in science and culture, where it lurks submerged but no less potent for the obfuscation. We shall attempt to tap into its frequencies - by radio, the internet and all sites where its processes and avatars are active.16
In this passage—as well as among the scattershot of INS declarations, radio broadcasts, and tweets—we can perceive that which impelled Schoenberg's twelve-tone composition, Ellington's social critique, No Wave's negation, and Sonic Youth's eventual affirmation. If, as I argue above, dissonance broadly constitutes a relentless interrogation of socially constructed understandings of form and content, then the INS becomes a fundamentally dissonant project. And this is all the more intelligible in that the INS has very little to do with the musical world this essay has thus far examined. By way of literature, art, science, culture, radio, internet and more, the INS operates within no true genre, no true field of practice; it opens a space where contradiction is embraced and dominant narratives are subverted.
In a 2010 declaration published in The Believer, the INS summarizes their project with a passage that serves as much as a mission statement as it does an intervention in (yet another elaboration of) the legacy of dissonance: "[What we are] feeling ourselves toward [is] the breach, the sudden, epiphanic emergence of the genuinely unplanned, the departure from the script."17 The resonant term here is breach—that which breaks with the accepted distribution of thought and practice. If dissonance has shifted throughout our genealogy from Schoenberg to Sonic Youth and beyond, it is because the script is always changing and the breach is necessarily new. Dissonance is thus freed from its strictly musical moorings, becoming rather a way of responding to questions and demands that are always shifting and reforming. Contemporary dissonance, then, is neither purely sonorous nor conceptual, neither musical nor extra-musical. Imagining Sonic Youth's affirmative intervention in dissonance as a jumping-off point, the demand becomes the maintenance of the potential for breach, so as to allow for that which is "epiphanic" and "genuinely unplanned" to continually emerge and be thought in the popular sphere.
Robert Ryan holds an M.A. in English from Binghamton University and, as of Fall 2015, will be a student in the PhD program in English at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is editor-in-chief at Wreck Park: A Journal of Interesting Fictions and Interested Criticism.
- For music and literature see: Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. (New York: Vintage, 1993). For music and political theory, see Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Mussami. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). For music and philosophy see Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Mussami. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) [⤒]
- Schoenberg, Arnold. "Composition with Twelve Tones," in Style and Idea, ed. Dika Newlan. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 104.[⤒]
- Ibid.[⤒]
- Ibid.[⤒]
- Ellington, Duke. "Interview in Los Angeles: On Jump for Joy, Opera, and Dissonance as a 'Way of Life,'" in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 150.[⤒]
- "Discord." The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. rev. Ed. Michael Kennedy. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 5 Mar. 2015. <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t237/e2989>.[⤒]
- "Dissonance." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 5 Mar. 2015. <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/07851>.[⤒]
- "Dissonance." The Harvard Dictionary of Music. ed. Don Michael Randel. 4th ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003.[⤒]
- Spanos, William V. "The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination," in boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 150[⤒]
- Gordon, Kim. 1991: The Year that Punk Broke, directed by David Markey (1992: Tara Films ), DVD[⤒]
- For a discussion of No Wave's refusal to act as a genre see Masters, Marc. No Wave. (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2008) [⤒]
- Compare, for instance, the drone exercise "(She's In A) Bad Mood" from Confusion is Sex with the relatively straightforward rock structure of "100%" from Dirty.[⤒]
- Sonic Youth. "Interview, 1991," YouTube video, 2:43, May 13, 2001. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeTDXtN5kS8>[⤒]
- Sonic Youth. Daydream Nation, SST Records, 1988, Vinyl.[⤒]
- Sonic Youth. "Sonic Youth interview Dave Kendall Summer 1990," YouTube video, 8:49, March 25, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPFMxTVTp-U[⤒]
- "Manifesto." International Necronautical Society, accessed May 20, 2015. http://www.necronauts.org/manifesto1.htm[⤒]
- International Necronautical Society. "Declaration on the Notion of "The Future" in The Believer November/December (2010). Accessed May 20, 2015. http://www.believermag.com/issues/201011/?read=article_necronautical[⤒]