I Miss Sonic Youth But The Music Is Forever

Friday is fun cos there's music. And always a playlist. (Or two).

Mar 24, 2022

When I was 13, I started reading Guitar World - I was obsessed with the guitar. I was listening to a lot of blues-rock stuff – Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck. But reading Guitar World helped me to go further back (Robert Johnson, Django Reinhardt) and wider/broader (Alan Holdsworth). I would read about my favourite guitar heroes (Ritchie Blackmore) and learn about new ones.

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It was through the pages of Guitar World that I discovered Sonic Youth.

An article with the band's guitarists, Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo had me fascinated; they had name-dropped The Velvet Underground. I wanted to find out more...

It would be a year or so until I would hear Dirty, the band's 1992 album (the interview I had read was, ostensibly, to promote 1990's Goo).

Listening to Dirty was mind-altering. I found room for Sonic Youth near the top of the list of my favourite bands. A list that still, at that point, revolved around The Rolling Stones and The Kinks and Santana and The Beatles and The Yardbirds.

Sonic Youth's music was a fresh new sound to my ears – I picked up Goo and Dirty and then worked back from there, picking up EVOL (1986) and Confusion Is Sex (1983); eventually hearing the seminal one-two of Sister (1987) and Daydream Nation (1988) and then buying 1994's Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star and 1995's Washing Machine when they were released.

I saw Sonic Youth on the Washing Machine tour – Foo Fighters opened; it was a good double bill, if a little strange. It felt like two separate audiences, somewhat uneasily sharing the room. During the break between bands, we overheard kids too young to know very much about Kurt Cobain but dressed a lot like him saying things like "apparently this Sonic Youth band is, like, really alternative".

Nearly a decade later I flew to Auckland to see the band again – after 2004's Sonic Nurse; it was while Jim O'Rourke was, fleetingly, a member. This time J. Mascis jerked the curtain; it seemed a better fit.

I'm not the biggest fan of the overly gimmicked play-a-classic-album-live routine but I do (still) regret not flying up to have a third bite at the Sonic Youth live cherry when they were performing Daydream Nation in its entirety.

The general consensus tends to be that, post-Washing Machine, Sonic Youth's discography is patchy-at-best; the albums are petering out, the band had run out of ideas. But I disagree. I think there's a lot to like on 1998's A Thousand Leaves, 2000's NYC Ghosts & Flowers, 2002's Murray Street, 2004's Sonic Nurse, 2006's Rather Ripped and 2009's The Eternal. Okay, there's no one classic album there – not one of those, track for track, could compete with Daydream or Sister or Goo or Dirty or Washing Machine – but there's still plenty of evidence of plenty of ideas.

Then there's the Sonic Youth Recordings (SYR) series. Since 1997 the band released limited edition EPs of noise and improvisation, collaborations with DJs and influential alternative/noise artists (John Cage, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich). Even the soundtrack to French film Simon Werner a Disparu; I'd argue that is one of the best things the band ever did. Overall the SYR series might fly under the radar – as it's basically designed to – and might be for the stronger stomachs only, but there's a lot of incredible music (and art, if you like) within those thin sleeves.

How about that band-name, Sonic Youth? It's iconic – but it's also ironic. It's like the band name went from being cool to even cooler; for a while there the name Sonic Youth might have seemed naff – and then just super-cool.

I always liked that Sonic Youth only ever flirted with the mainstream. And while whole albums might be deemed unlistenable (Confusion Is Sex) there is a lot of accessible material. (Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star is probably the band's least experimental offering; it's very easy to like - it even starts with an acoustic track!)

I saw Sonic Youth performing The Diamond Sea with the pulse of strobe lighting sending the song skyward, transporting listeners also, in an ethereal sense. I also saw this band all but fall apart on stage. To me they're the epitome of a group that learned the rules first – so that they could get tear them up and forget them, carrying on by writing their own. They moved through and around punk and post-punk, flirted with a version of grunge, were deeply experimental and then oddly placid, almost safe. They were hugely influential but retained their urgency, energy and originality - no one stole their thunder; their thunder was – and always will be – their own.

Nods to free-jazz and plenty of, er, sonic innovators and improvisers. The band embraced hip-hop and pop music – as cultures, as sources for ideas, as something to mirror, to trace around, to react to, to challenge and pay tribute to. The band recorded elegies for Karen Carpenter and Jimi Hendrix. They also wrrote songs celebrating Joni Mitchell and Mariah Carey. They recorded with Chuck D.

Sonic Youth is a band I've been listening to for more than half my life now - as long as I've been listening to bands that are almost completely dissimilar, Deep Purple for example. And I still find new things in the old material. And I'll still be interested - every time - in hearing a new album.

I would have to go to jazz – to the work of Miles Davis or John Coltrane - to find a more rewarding listening experience in terms of number of albums that hold my attention.

There are more than a dozen Sonic Youth albums that hold some form of magic for me. From howls and squeals of feedback and odd guitar treatments to the four-on-the-floor drumming (Steve Shelley is basically Moe Tucker if she played a conventional kit). It helps that there were three unique writing (and singing) voices propelling the group. It helps that there are three guitarists teasing and tweaking both melodic and rhythmic ideas: playing with angles. It helps that I have kept listening to the music, sure. But that's because they made a lot of it.

Kim Gordon has also managed, in her own inimitable way, to be a fashion icon, a sex symbol (while mocking the idea of being any kind of sex symbol) and a feminist icon. She's a punk rocker, serious artist, and mother. She's never had an issue being all of these things – and more. She never made a point of making it about being those things.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, the group broke up. They’ve been gone for a decade now. But they haven’t really gone…all of the members are involved in so many solo projects and collaborations. There are books of photos and poetry and memoirs – and some of this stuff was happening while Sonic Youth was still a going entity. It’s only, um, amped up since the band called it a day.

They finished because of a crumbled marriage. I mean the actual marriage (Kim and Thurston) within the band. And that’s gutting. It suggests there’ll never really be any sort of reunion. But I console myself that there’s a reunion every time I play anything from Goo or Dirty or Washing Machine or any of the others. I barely need to listen to a full album. Just a song or two and I’m there!

So, it was especially cool to find a brand new Sonic Youth EP. It’s a bunch of leftovers – largely instrumental – recorded over the last decade of the band’s career, all chosen seemingly at random but hanging together by various threads.

Around the time I find that I see that Thurston Moore has a new album out – also instrumental; an imaginary movie soundtrack. Entirely my cup of tea.

So all is not lost. New music continues to tumble. Kim Gordon is involved in many projects, Lee Ranaldo has been releasing brilliant stuff across the last decade, from the wilfully arty and obscure to the most straight ahead singer/songwriter rock music of any of the band. He’s been joined by drummer Steve Shelley on several shows and albums. Shelley has locked back in with Thurston as well. And, brief member and forever spiritual associate of the band Jim O’Rourke, appears on a new album or releases one seemingly every other month.

So much material to keep up with – but the new EP got me listening back to some favourites. It’s the best of its era and they were such an important band for me. My Velvet Underground I guess. And the only band I can think of, apart from Flaming Lips, to really graze and flirt with the mainstream rather than get swallowed up by it.

Sounds Good!

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