Track This: Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia"

Starting with Steve Shelley's basic drum fills before the brightly ringing guitars begin,  matching the drum beats, "Schizophrenia" from Sonic Youth's 1987 album Sister. builds in an orderly fashion that feels loose over Thurston Moore's vocals, slightly recalling the track "Bull in the Heather" from 1994's Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. Chiming guitars answer the drums and bass throughout the song's nearly five-minute running time. Sonic Youth became the masters of this droning guitar dialectic with their different guitar tunings (in this case, F#F#GGAA for Thurston and DDDAA for Lee Renaldo) that they used to build a style and sound that was nearly unique in the early 1980s but meshed well with similar guitar interplay by contemporary indie bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Built to Spill. 

After the first vocal part, the song becomes more schizophrenic with squealing, harmonic guitar interplay and minimal cymbals. This continues through Kim Gordon's spoken word part before the guitars return to a variation of the intro that becomes noisier and more chaotic in the final parts of the song and threatens to break up by the end as the guitar and bass notes threaten to dissipate in distortion, the bass a particular barely contained distorted rumble. The song paved the way for later guitar freak outs as the band became even more sonically experimental in a more melodic context. The drums remain the one constant instrumentation throughout the song to keep it from fully breaking apart. 

Lyrically, the song examines Keller Gordon's paranoid schizophrenia by showing how mental diseases can feel very foreign to others, even when they try to help. Doctors had diagnosed Kim's older brother with the mental health condition after he graduated with his Master's Degree from UC Berkeley, and the shock of how much he changed affected her immensely. In a New Yorker profile, Alex Haberstadt revealed that when Gordon broke up with Thurston Moore, her husband of nearly thirty years, she compared it to her brother's disease: "This person who you lived with for so long is suddenly someone else." 

The lyrics capture the changes in two ways: the sufferer's beliefs and how people react. Thurston sings about a "friend's sister" with the condition and how the friend responded: "Her sister came over, she was out of her mind / She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I'm in." Her brother "says she's just a bitch with a golden chain / She keeps coming closer saying, 'I can feel it in my bones / Schizophrenia is taking me home.'" Thurston's part of the song discusses the schizophrenic's beliefs through speech and religious imagery that matches the patterns of the music and perhaps the call and response of old gospel songs. Kim's part focuses on the first part of the song's lyrical content, seemingly showing how either the schizophrenic feels or charting the thoughts of those who are trying to help. In a spoken word piece, she drones, "My future is static / It's already had it . . . I had a dream / And it split the scene / But I got a hunch / It's coming back to me." These lyrics focus on how the schizophrenic might experience life and connection to others. They attempt to show the circular nature of how people think while mirroring the earlier lyrics. Everything comes back together just like the song's cyclical music, but there is something different about those involved. 

For more information on tuning/other takes on the song, see: https://ragajunglism.org/tunings/menu/schizophrenia/ 

For the New Yorker Profile on Kim Gordon, see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/03/next-stage

Track This is a recurring feature of Snobbin' that turns the music appreciation dial up and rips it off of your stereo. It introduces a new track, allows readers to rediscover an underappreciated one, or serves as a forum to discuss a song that falls into the ear candy category and should be listened to unabashedly for years to come.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Contractions: Henry Standing Bear's Ethical Code

Do you remember huH Magazine?

Cal Smith: "So Long, Country Bumpkin"