"Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry"
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Moore is praising a kind of artistic anonymity that feels almost punk in its refusal to play the auteur game. In rock, credit is currency: the frontperson, the “main songwriter,” the myth that genius has a single face. By saying “Most people can’t tell now who wrote what,” he’s treating that confusion as a feature, not a flaw. The band becomes less a hierarchy and more a machine for producing a shared language.
The intent is practical and political at once. Practically, blurred authorship keeps a group from calcifying into roles where one person “creates” and everyone else “supports.” Politically, it resists the music industry’s obsession with branding and marketable individuality. Moore’s “I like that” reads like a small provocation: if you need a signature to validate the work, you’ve already missed the point.
His phrase “unified thing” gestures toward Sonic Youth’s broader ethos: noise as collaboration, songs as environments, not diary entries. The subtext is that identity can be an obstacle to discovery. When authorship is indistinct, listeners stop hunting for biographical clues and start hearing structure, texture, risk.
The final jab at “historical poetry” is telling. He’s not dismissing the past so much as rejecting the museum logic that demands lineage, categories, and neat attribution. This is an argument for bandwork as its own form of writing: collective, unstable, and deliberately hard to archive. In an era that loves receipts and credits, Moore is defending the right to be untraceable.
The intent is practical and political at once. Practically, blurred authorship keeps a group from calcifying into roles where one person “creates” and everyone else “supports.” Politically, it resists the music industry’s obsession with branding and marketable individuality. Moore’s “I like that” reads like a small provocation: if you need a signature to validate the work, you’ve already missed the point.
His phrase “unified thing” gestures toward Sonic Youth’s broader ethos: noise as collaboration, songs as environments, not diary entries. The subtext is that identity can be an obstacle to discovery. When authorship is indistinct, listeners stop hunting for biographical clues and start hearing structure, texture, risk.
The final jab at “historical poetry” is telling. He’s not dismissing the past so much as rejecting the museum logic that demands lineage, categories, and neat attribution. This is an argument for bandwork as its own form of writing: collective, unstable, and deliberately hard to archive. In an era that loves receipts and credits, Moore is defending the right to be untraceable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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