"We never notate our music, so you can try to replicate it, but you don't really have it"
About this Quote
Control is the subtext here, disguised as a shrug. Thurston Moore is describing a practical choice - not notating songs - but the line lands as a provocation aimed straight at rock culture's obsession with preservation, canon, and perfect replication. Sonic Youth comes out of a post-punk, art-school ecosystem where the point isn’t just the riff; it’s the room, the volume, the risk, the accident. Refusing notation isn’t laziness. It’s a way of keeping the music mobile, contingent, and slightly unownable.
The phrasing matters: “so you can try to replicate it” grants the listener permission, even invites the attempt, then immediately pulls the rug with “but you don’t really have it.” That “have” is doing heavy lifting. It suggests that a song isn’t a set of instructions but a lived event: the alternate tunings that are half engineering problem, half personality; the physicality of noise; the micro-decisions onstage that never repeat; the social chemistry of a band at a specific moment in time. You can copy the notes and still miss the posture.
There’s also a sly jab at institutions that turn messy scenes into legible artifacts: sheet music, academic analysis, tribute bands, even streaming-era archival completionism. Moore isn’t claiming mystical genius so much as protecting a methodology. If you could freeze Sonic Youth into notation, you could domesticate it. By keeping the music unscored, they keep it slightly out of reach - not to exclude, but to preserve the friction that made it matter.
The phrasing matters: “so you can try to replicate it” grants the listener permission, even invites the attempt, then immediately pulls the rug with “but you don’t really have it.” That “have” is doing heavy lifting. It suggests that a song isn’t a set of instructions but a lived event: the alternate tunings that are half engineering problem, half personality; the physicality of noise; the micro-decisions onstage that never repeat; the social chemistry of a band at a specific moment in time. You can copy the notes and still miss the posture.
There’s also a sly jab at institutions that turn messy scenes into legible artifacts: sheet music, academic analysis, tribute bands, even streaming-era archival completionism. Moore isn’t claiming mystical genius so much as protecting a methodology. If you could freeze Sonic Youth into notation, you could domesticate it. By keeping the music unscored, they keep it slightly out of reach - not to exclude, but to preserve the friction that made it matter.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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