Sonic Youth
This is all the more impressive when you consider Sonic Youth’s unassailable stature in the, ahem, indie-rock community. Their simple endurance is celebrated by girls who hold up Kim Gordon as the paragon of cool and would love to have 15 years and counting of collaborative marriage like she has had with Thurston Moore; by collectors of avant-garde rarities who credit Moore and his business partner Byron Coley with introducing hundreds to unappreciated treasures (and blame them for singlehandedly driving up prices on used vinyl); by fellow musicians who wish they had the time and energy to stick their fingers into every pie; by everyone who ponders how a band that’s never had a gold album has maintained such sterling relations with Geffen; by critics who find it remarkable that the concept of a “new Sonic Youth album” actually means something. Love them or hate them, Sonic Youth seem to have been born under a lucky star.
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But it’s not luck that got them here: it’s obsession. Gordon, Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley are completely in love with sound, forsaking all others, till death do them part. Not with songs per se, not even with rock ‘n’ roll necessarily, but with sound in all its myriad forms and all the uses to which it can be put–and that’s a topic too big to master in four lifetimes. The three Musical Perspectives EPs the band recently released independently were the first new product under the Sonic Youth name in two years; the rest of that time the four members were immersing themselves in side projects galore: running their own record labels; recording solo albums; making noise with friends in other bands; writing poetry, Moroccan travelogues, and earnest homages to their heroes; and displaying at the very least an admirable restlessness at an age (Gordon’s the oldest at 45) and status where plenty of rockers start cranking out best-ofs and live retrospectives.
The Dead, too, once drew from lots of outside sources, some from pretty far afield, some from way too down-home to register on the pop-music grid, combining them in an elaborate, overripe jam format. Like the Dead, Sonic Youth have woven together strands of everything they liked once–hardcore ferocity, no wave’s confrontational ugliness, indie-rock solidarity, ironic celebrity fascination, the wordless conversations of improvised music–and then embodied the combination onstage. All the times the collage fell flat testified to the realness of the risk they took, and the times when it caught fire testified to the fundamental rightness of the mix.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos by Marty Perez.
