Another one of the many bands that have been accompaying my life since their beginnings is Sonic Youth. My theory about rock music is that all the truly great bands have taken the music and sounds they love and re-invented them anew with the means they had available to them. It's therefore not necessary to be a studied musician at all (too much knowledge might even ruin it), but simply to go ahead and do it. Sonic Youth famously use a myriad of second-hand guitars, each one tuned differently to fit the sound of each separate song. This way their songs sound so different compared to mainstream music, since they're intregrating atonal tunes and noise with beautiful, sometimes even lullaby-like melodies. In my opinion the album 'Sister' is their masterpiece, where these techniques have finally been mastered to create a classic album of innovative rock music. I know everybody declares it's their next album afterwards, 'Daydream Nation', which I can agree with to the degree that that album was more of a perfecting and summing up of what they had already achieved. I could pick out any song from 'Sister', since I love them all, but 'Schizophrenia' is the first track on the album, and the first time I put the needle on that record, it was like a revelation: great new innovative guitar-based rock music! Like all their best songs it's more than just a mere song, but rather a miniature opera/symphony. You can listen to the title over and over again finding new aspects of how it is built, how it's being played asking yourself where they got this or that particular tone from, and their timing is so impeccable. Sonic Youth can start a song and then turn it into a 20 minute cacophony of the weirdest noise, but if you were counting, they'd return to the song on the pin point. The clip is a newer recording of the song and less noisier than the original, but you can clearly watch (and hear) how the song works. To this day Sonic Youth have stayed true to their beginnings and have been making their own music uncompromisingly and are still striving to break down barriers - and this all very successfully.
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