Chaos was the Future
Sonic Youth’s Confusion Is Sex 40 years later
It’s somehow appropriate that no-one seems to remember on what date exactly Sonic Youth’s second album was released in 1983. Some say sometime in March; others, sometime in April. Still others maintain that it was in early May — cardstock invitations to a Saturday / April 30th release party suggesting such a date. Its official listing on Bandcamp currently puts it at February 1st. Such doubt and sketchiness befit an album so favourably mired in makeshift and murkiness.
Whatever the precise release date, Confusion Is Sex was first issued forty years ago this year.
Like its self-titled predecessor, it was released initially on avant-garde composer (and band quasi-mentor) Glenn Branca’s Neutral Records label out of New York City. Unlike the first record, which clocked in at 25 minutes and featured standard tuning, it was a full-length album and featured a variety of alternate tunings and detunings.
The non-standard tunings were quite appropriate given the context in which the album was recorded.
Owing to an exhaustion of funds, Neutral couldn’t afford to book recording time in an established, higher-tech studio for a second Sonic Youth project. With money borrowed from wealthy Swiss arts patrons Nicholas and Catherine (Bachmann) Ceresole, and inspiration gleaned from the hardcore-punk movement of the day, the NYC band’s original alternative intention was to record a 7-inch at Wharton Tiers’s fledgling ‘Fun City’ Manhattan basement studio. At the insistence of Branca, however, the idea gradually grew into a full-length album. Technically, the album was a step down from their self-titled debut. Where Sonic Youth had been recorded on a 24-track console at Radio City Music Hall studios, Confusion Is Sex was recorded on 8-track. According to Kim Gordon in Ignacio Julià and Jaime Gonzalo’s I Dreamed of Noise (RUTA 66, 1994), the recording ‘console’ actually consisted of “two 4-tracks put together” (p. 46).
And apparently Tiers wasn’t overly familiar with the equipment yet. According to Ranaldo, he had just purchased his tape machine, “so he didn’t know how to work any of it very well at that point” (Ibid., p. 45). This was compounded by the renting of the second 4-track machine, and the subsequent disasters that befell the recordings — including accidental erasures. “We spilled things on the tape,” explained Moore in early 1992. “That thing broke… tape got broken… we taped it together with Scotch tape and we mastered it” (Ibid., p. 47).
Also, a stable drummer still eluded the core trio of Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon at the time, and resultantly two musicians had to fill the role in the making of the album. Former Teenage Jesus And The Jerks drummer Jim Sclavunos, who had worked on a Lydia Lunch EP with Moore and former Sonic Youth drummer Richard Edson in November of 1982 (In Limbo, released 1984), played on six of the eight tracks that required percussion. The other two drum-driven tracks featured Bob Bert — one recorded live while on the ‘Savage Blunder’ tour with Swans in the fall of ’82, and the other recorded especially for the album weeks after Bert had been officially sacked from the band.
It should also be pointed out that, quite contrary to popular belief, bass-guitar duties did not fall exclusively to Gordon during the making of this album. In fact, Moore or Ranaldo actually played bass on five of the ten tracks, while Gordon played second guitar on two.
Despite the odds and eccentricities, after several weeks of perseverance and resourcefulness the album was completed. The result is an exercise in minimalism and darkness.
The minimalism, for the most part, is inherent in the album’s financially challenged construction, as discussed above. This undoubtedly entailed, to some degree, the specific structure and/or selection of the numbers recorded and included. Ironically, despite the minimal technology utilised in its recording and the minimalist aesthetic that enabled its instrumental pieces in particular, Confusion Is Sex is a big, bad, intimidating monster of an album on one level. One might say that the whole — the impact — is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Sonic Boom’s speculation (vis-à-vis Spacemen 3) that minimalism equals maximalism ultimately comes to mind.
The darkness, on the other hand, is actually part and parcel of that big and bad persona, that intimidating aura. Confusion Is Sex is easily Sonic Youth’s darkest album musically, and — based on what we can glean of it, at least — one of its darkest conceptually as well.
There’s no obvious common theme running through the album lyrically, but there’s a sense of tension, loneliness and vulnerability present in virtually all the lyrics, and in Moore and Gordon’s delivery of them. This is compounded by the album’s gloomy black cover art that ‘encases’ the whole package. The front cover features a bleak-looking profile sketch of Moore by future-wife Gordon that had been previously used on concert posters, printed in inverted white on jet-black; while the back cover features a high-contrast black and white photo of the band performing live. The band’s name, the album title and song titles — all rendered in ‘slashy’ hardcore-style scripts or generic typography — have been printed almost exclusively in white on a black jacket and black record labels.
On a musical level, the darkness is like that which one associates with Joy Division or the early Pink Floyd: moody, atmospheric, and often plodding and sinister. It’s as if the particular tunings, dominant bass lines and wailing feedback lend themselves naturally to feelings of austere loneliness and a sense of the foreboding. It’s difficult to put into words. One might say that, for the majority of the album at least, there’s a definite chill in the air.
Musically and conceptually, Confusion Is Sex was not to be confused with classic heavy metal or the ‘horror punk’ and satanic ‘black metal’ of the day, mind you. Although the occasional demon shows up in at least one of the numbers, the album overall is more “She cried for help under heavy anesthesia” or “Careful with that axe, Eugene” than “Satan, laughing, spreads his wings”.
Side one opens with ‘(She’s in a) Bad Mood’, a relatively hard-hitting track built around one brief verse sung twice by Moore. With its subtle buildup of miniature crescendoes that lead into the vocals, and the gradual winding-down that closes it, the number is vaguely reminiscent of ‘Astronomy Dominé’, the opening track from The Pink Floyd’s debut album (1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn).
Slow and somewhat meandering, ‘Protect Me You’ is the only known track in the Sonic Youth cannon to feature Lee Ranaldo on bass guitar. Indeed, Ranaldo’s bass is a creeping, lurking gas — the perfect accompaniment to Gordon’s gothic prayer-like chants; e.g.:
Protect me demons
That come at night
I don’t know what they say
Their whispering
Sends the night air away
Equally sinister and creepy is ‘Freezer Burn’, an instrumental that, for the sake of atmosphere and ambience, was supposedly recorded at the walk-in freezer of a deli on the corner of the street where Tiers’s studio was located. Basically an early band study in drone and feedback, it segues startlingly into the ‘tail end’ of a version of The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna be Your Dog’. Featuring Moore on bass and Gordon on vocals, the low-fi cover tune had been recorded live at The Pier in Raleigh, North Carolina the previous November 15th.
Closing out side one is ‘Shaking Hell’, a kind of multi-sectional number that utilises what might be described as a minimalist funky buildup to a droning, drum-punctuated ‘plateau’. This subdued segment is overlaid with a Gordon-chanted account of a female who has “finally discovered she’s a…” after her male counterpart “told her so”. In a close brush with post-modernism, Gordon appears to ‘break the fourth wall’ by instructing listeners to “come closer” so that she might tell them of the girl’s or woman’s discovery. Regardless of the exact nature of the mystery revelation — lesbianism? transgenderism? cannibalism? — the narrator ultimately demonstrates the suggested inclination, with Gordon threatening, “I’ll take off your dress / I’ll shake off your flesh”. The number plods on with an increase in tempo as Gordon chants “Shake” repetitively, before ending with a short crescendo of guitar and a final shout of “Shake!”
Side two is dominated by Moore vocally, as demonstrated in the opening ‘Inhuman’. Arguably the most punk-indebted track on the album, it is awkwardly upbeat with clanking, thudding guitars and muffled, off-kilter vocals. Like ‘Shaking Hell’, it features Moore on bass and Gordon on guitar. Ranaldo, it is worth noting, can be heard playing a ‘modified’ zither in addition to guitar on this track.
Even more upbeat is ‘The World Looks Red’, the track generally seen as the album’s most commercially viable. Complete with an intro of guitar-stroke drone and driving bass in imitation of The Doors’ intro to ‘L.A. Woman’, the number finds Moore wailing almost lamentably in a distant voice over the surging guitars as if he were singing across the ages. Interestingly, the number’s surreal lyrics (e.g., “Push it away / The world looks red / People with fish eyes / The ground sucks”) were written by the Swans’ Michael Gira, who would record a version of the number decades later for the Swans 2016 album The Glowing Man.
Lending its title abstractly to the album, ‘Confusion is Next’ opens with a bright, clean guitar stroke followed by Gordon’s doomy plodding bass line. The other instruments follow her lead and the number creeps along with an almost intimidating air as Moore intones those ominous Dadaesque lines that would come to encapsulate the band’s early era:
I maintain that
Chaos is the future
And beyond it is freedom
Confusion is next and next after that is the truth
You gotta cultivate what you need to need
Sonic tooth
In the latter moments of the number the tempo increases dramatically, and the two verses are subsequently repeated in the lead-up to the track’s somewhat rickety, chaotic end.
Gordon returns to the mic for the penultimate ‘Making the Nature Scene’. Featuring Moore on bass guitar, the upbeat and slightly funky number is somewhat reminiscent of the ‘Good and the Bad’ instrumental on Sonic Youth. ‘Nature Scene’ also features the album’s most developed lyrics, with Gordon tapping into her inner Diane di Prima and J. G. Ballard as she reflects upon the ‘survival of the fittest’ dynamic inherent in her modern urban environment (“Nature reality is selection / The tool of critical intervention”). The number would be rerecorded circa 1987 for the Ciccone Youth project and eventually released on The Whitey Album in 1989.
The closing track was created and performed solely by Ranaldo; hence the title ‘Lee is Free’ that was imposed upon it by Gordon, supposedly. The instrumental piece was recorded on cassette at Ranaldo’s home and features him improvising exotically on guitar and possibly other stringed instruments in a manner that evokes traditional Chinese or Japanese music to some degree. Although easily passed off by the most dogmatic critics as ‘filler material’ or the like, the track brings a certain Far Eastern or even folkish vibe to the record, and serves as a musically optimistic or contemplative coda to such a dark and mysterious suite of numbers.
Like most Sonic Youth albums, even in the band’s early days, Confusion Is Sex entailed a ‘companion piece’ and at least one other related release.
The 12-inch EP Kill Yr Idols was released exclusively on the band’s German label Zensor in October of ’83. Housed in a jacket that features the front-cover art of Confusion Is Sex rendered in maroon and blue with the title crudely superimposed over the original, it consists of six tracks: ‘Protect Me You’ and ‘Shaking Hell’ from CIS; a live version of ‘Shaking Hell’ recorded at New York City’s Plugg Club on October 15th, 1983; and, comprising the flipside, three new numbers in alternate tunings recorded at Wharton Tiers’s Fun City studio — this time, live to two tracks. The drummer on the new studio tracks was Bob Bert, who had been invited back into the group in the wake of Sclavunos’s departure and in light of an upcoming European tour with Glenn Branca.
Lyrically and musically, the Moore-sung title track at the time was surely the most punk-rock number the band had recorded. Although not echoing the brevity of the hardcore-punk numbers of the day that Moore in particular identified with, the three-minute ‘Kill Yr Idols’ echoes their snarling angst in its rip-roaring delivery and lyrical swipe at Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau (i.e., “You wanna impress Christgau / Ah let that shit die”). With its references to “the end of the world” and “confusion is sex”, the number also picks up conceptually where ‘Confusion is Next’ leaves off.
Equally dismissive and cynical is the angry-but-groovy ‘Brother James’. Featuring vocals by Gordon, the number appears to take aim at the hypocritical religious figures of a Catholic upbringing; e.g.: “Take my hand, he said to me / Follow now or you’ll be damned”. Like the poetic observations of ‘Making the Nature Scene’, the track’s quasi-esoteric narrative also marked the band’s development as lyricists.
Also featuring notably poetic and mystic lyrics is the six-minute ‘Early American’. Substantially more subdued than the two previous tracks, the number opens with a two-minute improvisatory buildup of droning guitars and rolling drum fills, vaguely recalling the more free-form sessions of John Coltrane and other 1960s jazz exponents. When the discordant opening subsides, what’s left is a folkish, repetitive guitar melody that foreshadows the ‘Intro’ to ‘Brave Men Run’ on the band’s 1985 album, Bad Moon Rising. Over this, Gordon intones the arcane lyrics (e.g., “Don’t bother to leave / There’s no room outside”) in a sombre droning voice that recalls that of Nico on some of her early solo recordings. The vocals concluded, this mellow segment gives way to a final minute and a half of blunt, low-tone strumming and drumming. With hindsight, ‘Early American’ may be possibly the band’s earliest recorded example of the lengthy, asymmetrical improv pieces that would come to define a large facet of their sound in the later ’90s and 2000s, as evidenced particularly in their Perspective Musicales series and various soundtrack compositions.
“Kill Yr Idols was like the end of this backwards technological progression we’d been making,” stated Ranaldo in 1992 (in Reflex magazine). The first record had been done in a full 24-track studio. Confusion had been done on 8 tracks under truly ridiculous conditions, and Kill Yr Idols was direct to 2-track. We just felt like we were being unbelievably radical.”
In September of 1985 Forced Exposure magazine released a 7-inch single containing two tracks recorded at the Loft in Berlin on the 30th of October, 1983. (Over)Kill Yr Idols consisted of live versions of ‘Making the Nature Scene’ and ‘Kill Yr Idols’ — the latter retitled ‘I Killed Christgau With My Big Fuckin’ Dick’. The sleeve came complete with ‘psychedelic swastika’ cover art by Raymond Pettibon of SST album-cover fame. Pettibon, it is worth noting, would be called upon to do the cover art for the band’s Goo album nearly five years later.
The band’s 1983 European tours in support of the LP and EP would be further documented in the Live Venlo, Holland 12.27.83 CD, an ‘official bootleg’ brought out by the band’s Sonic Death fan club in 1995.
Confusion Is Sex was initially released as a 12-inch vinyl LP by Neutral in 1983. Zensor released a vinyl version for the German market the following year, a few months after releasing the Kill Yr Idols 12-inch EP. SST, after signing Sonic Youth in the mid ’80s, reissued it on vinyl in 1987 and released the first cassette and CD editions of the album that same year. Zensor reissued the companion EP in 1987, removing the front cover’s original LP title from beneath the superimposed “Kill Yr Idols” in the process. Geffen/DGC, who carried the band in the 1990s and early to mid 2000s, reissued the LP and follow-up EP together on CD in 1995. In the years since, there have been vinyl reissues of the LP by the Original Recordings Group (ORG) and the band’s own Goofin’ label, and several bootleg vinyl reissues of the EP in jackets of various colours.
“Both Kill Yr Idols and Confusion Is Sex were very gritty sounding records,” Lee Ranaldo has noted, “very low tech” (Ibid., p. 65).
Bob Bert has insisted that Kill Yr Idols “captured Sonic Youth’s best live sound better than anything they have done and that is a completely biased perception of the work” (Ibid, p. 61).
Ranaldo insisted in 1992 that Confusion Is Sex was “still maybe my favorite album, or one of my favorite albums. […] I think it’s a really cool record” (Ibid., p. 48).
The first time I heard Confusion Is Sex, decades ago, I had one of those Reader’s Digest or Time-Life ‘strange-phenomena-of-the-world’-type anthologies open next to me. I was reading about how a young Eryl Mai Jones of Aberfan foresaw the coal-slide disaster of 1966 while the likes of ‘Protect Me You’ and ‘Freezer Burn’ were playing, and it just seemed sinisterly appropriate. The album invokes that kind of darkness.
Considered one of Sonic Youth’s most important and essential records in the 1980s and early ’90s, for some reason the album seems to have fallen off the radar over the past two and a half decades, sadly. As I was commenting on social media just recently, one doesn’t see it featured in celebratory and analytical articles like one does so many of their other early albums.
It’s a shame. The album cover adorned t-shirts the length and breadth of the grunge ‘movement’, including that of Mark Arm on the back cover of Mudhoney’s self-titled 1989 album; tracks like ‘Inhuman’ and ‘The World Looks Red’, along with the EP’s ‘Brother James’, would remain part of the band’s live set for years; ‘Shaking Hell’ would be resurrected for the 2006 Rather Ripped tour; and I swear, considered sociologically, ‘Freezer Burn’ can even be seen as a musical harbinger of the ‘hum’ phenomenon!
Sonic Youth would never replicate the musical doom and darkness that they managed to conjure up with Confusion Is Sex. But lyrical concepts of an even more sinister degree would begin taking shape amongst band members by mid 1984. Furthermore, the lineup would remain stable for at least two more years. A bad moon was truly rising.
