Huge Sonic Youth fan, albeit a younger one. I caught the tail-end of their career in my HS/college days, c. 2003-2010. I can't think of an equivalent band today that has the kind of stature they had at the time in the indie scene.
Part of what I loved so much about them is the number of free shows they put on. I can always pin the year that I saw them in Prospect Park at 2010, because the iPhone 4 had just been released, and my friend who I was with proceeded to watch the entire show through her new phone, being completely enamored with the "retina display" while tripping on acid.
When I saw them in 2008 in Battery Park, I had the pleasure of sitting on the lawn next to 90s child star Danny Tamborelli, who many will remember as one of the stars of Pete & Pete (a show with its own sort of indie cred). My friend I was with turned to me and said "That's Danny Tamborelli, we need to say hi to him" and before I could get "No we absolutely do not" out of my mouth, he dragged me over and proceeded to introduce us saying "We're great fans of your work". So I shook his hand, way too high for this interaction, as Thurston took a drumstick to his guitar in the background.
Saw them first in 2004 with my brother. Wolf Eyes opened, my brother ended up leaving because he was sick.
It was my first “real” concert. I’d been listening to music heavily by then, we’ll into indie, but being poor and 17/18/19 it was hard to see live music. I’d been to others concerts small and big (Closing Olympic Ceremonies) - but that one cemented my love for live music, and I got really into the local scene
after seeing another smaller show (Q and not U) after that.
I saw them again ~2008 and it was good, not as good, but Rather Ripped was a great album so got to see a bunch of stuff from them.
Pavement was up there for me too, and I just saw them twice over the last 12 months.
The Load Records/Three One Gee/Troubleman era was incredible.
Blogs and forums were ubiquitous, but the average person's attention had not yet been strip mined by * platform companies. Pitchfork was just getting started, too, and (cruicially) Spotify wasn't even an idea yet, so independent artists could reliably make money the old fashioned way (CD/album sales) but had access to a much larger community of potential listeners.
Everything still had a very decentralized and DIY feel.
but being poor and 17/18/19 it was hard to see live music
I count my lucky stars I grew up in a city with a lot of cheap, all ages shows. Of the shows I've been to over the years, seeing Q and not U in a church basement in ~2003 still sticks out in my mind.
The SLC Olympics? I saw Modest Mouse play at what was apparently the Ice Village (had to Google it). If I remember correctly, it was a weird and not great show.
If they had huge stature in your scene, it’s funny how different experiences can be. My interest in SY was piqued in 2000 because they had recorded an EP with song titles in Esperanto, something I dabbled in then. In spite of having a large circle of friends interested in indie music, and being active on some music forums, no one listened to SY or was even very aware of them. My conclusion at the time was that their star had waned and they must have been an ’80s or earlier ’90s thing.
They really were older mentors to Nirvana. They and their band were about 10 years older (1 Beatles career), recruited them to Geffen, and really got them their first exposure outside Seattle. They also were largely responsible for getting Dinosaur Jr. their break.
I did not realize how old they were when I was obsessed with Daydream Nation and Dirty in high school. Kim’s just younger than my parents and they could never have been that cool. I went back into their catalog from there and followed along with them. That’s when I realized they formed the year after I was born. Blew my mind. Listening to the stuff like No New York that they emerged out of is kind of fascinating. Not my thing, but interesting historically.
Kim’s autobiography was an interesting view into the era my folks grew up in. I’ll have to read Thurston’s some time. Still bugs me they fell apart. I don’t normally care about famous people relationships, but they were like some kind punk rock institution to me. They were together since I wandered into that kind of music and nurtured so many bands I loved. But they’re just pretty normal people with pretty normal problems.
I totally agree on Sonic Nurse and Rather Ripped as well. The stuff from A Thousand Leaves until then was interesting, but not stuff I play often. Those have stood up well next to the aforementioned albums, Goo, EVOL, etc.
Damn we were at the same show dude. That was a great one. Saw them two other times in the northeast a year or so before that one and man they (did :/ ) put on a hell of a show.
Random side note, saw Kim Gordon at a book signing in Brooklyn like 10 years ago (iirc post-Sonic Youth), and man she was looking rough unfortunately and was really out of it. Guess the whole situation she and everyone was dealing with took a bad toll :/
Similarly for me I saw a skate video a million years ago had the song Bloodstains by Agent Orange. Living in Darkness became one of my favorite albums & I still see Agent Orange whenever they come to town.
I've been listening to Sonic Youth since Evol. Their live sound got better as they aged, which doesn't happen for a lot of bands. This show from Austin City Limits in 2011, months before they broke up, captures it pretty well:
An underappreciated aspect of Sonic Youth is the drumming of Steve Shelley. He kept many of the discordant songs together and provided a driving beat (when needed) with some very creative fills and accents. I worked at a college radio station when Kool Thing came out and we got an alt mix or B side take on a 45 that was incredible thanks to his drumming.
Like Thurston said in the NYT interview, everyone is asking for Sonic Youth to reform for performances but I can't see Kim going along with it. OTOH Talking Heads got back together for the documentary release after David Byrne burned the proverbial bridges, so who knows?
Really good to hear that since I only saw them once and it was near the end, despite driving a car with a sonic youth bumper sticker for fifteen years. Thanks for the link!
Same, but I didn't get to see them live until Daydream Nation. Those shows were a lot of fun, but yeah, I was only catching the end of that, but earlier shows were... noisy. It took them a while to get art-rock inaccessibility-as-cred out of their system. Or maybe Moore is just really self-indulgent. Or both.
You never know what will happen, but after reading _Girl in a Band_, I don't think Deal is interested.
I have a Dutch import of a live Sonic Youth club show from Amsterdam in the mid 80s. It's practically unlistenable. I get that their crucible was art/punk/experimental/psychedelic but it would be some years before they put away the power drills and lava lamps and got down to being a solid live rock band.
Their studio efforts from the early era were better IMHO.
> Their studio efforts from the early era were better IMHO.
Oh, absolutely. I still listen to Evol and Sister fairly regularly. The noise shows were a lot of fun to be at when I was a kid, but I wouldn't want to listen to them again.
I don’t know why exactly Thurston Moore was interviewing an at that time almost unknown Beck, but it’s such a funny, strange, but warm interview that I never fail to get a kick out of it.
I remember this interview so well. It was a common reference for a friend and I in highschool. "Xanadu, I'm sure all the listeners will be able to relate to that"
Yeah, I had not appreciated the strange and sudden success of Loser after a bunch of tough times for the young musician - I just reviewed his page on Wikipedia.
What an amazing moment to capture. Thurston's deadpan style works perfectly. Thanks for the link.
My earliest memory of what has become modern, streaming video apps was Google Video (I think that's what it was called). It was before they bought youtube.
I very clearly remember searching for "Sonic Youth" on it and getting maybe less than a dozen results, but one of them was this indie documentary/tour-video called "1993: The year punk broke," which is about Nirvana and SY touring together through europe.
Its a really fun little movie, but mainly it felt absolutely huge to "discover" it like that. Its hard to imagine these days that you could search for anything and not get, at least, thousands of results. Back then being a hipster about music really felt like a special club, like some special minority of people drawn together by taste, and the internet as it was reflected that nicely.
Embarrassed now to remember moments where I tried to convince my friends of how good and important Sonic Youth, Neutral Milk Hotel, and the Pixies were, even if they hadn't heard of them; trying to quote Pitchfork and AllMusic reviews to make my point.
A guy I knew in high school got that movie on VHS (around 1993/1994-ish). I remember watching at his house after school once, but then later we had a falling out because he was in the cool alt-kid crowd but I wasn't allowed to dress in the "uniform" so he decided I was a poseur.
Ahh, high school. Grew up in the semi-boonies so it was when I first got introduced to loads of cool music and movies pre-widespread internet access, but kids were still dipshits.
I was a big SY fan in high school (early 90s). I would watch parts of "1991: The Year Punk Broke" almost every day after school. I have never been good at music but I tried to get into guitar. Evidently, learning to play guitar by trying to play with SY guitar tunings doesn't make it any easier. SY was a huge influence on my formative years.
I saw them live circa 1988-ish around the time of Daydream Nation.
They've all been super creative. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon and also Lee Ranaldo have had interesting side projects. I very much was interested in their noise stuff. Moore collaborated once with Borbetomagus. And Ranaldo did a lot of sound experiments.
I did get the impression that they were aiming for a much wider audience in the late 80's and early 90's, much like the Pixies, and also like the Pixies it never seemed to pan out-- but it was close.
Moore has done some television host stuff 20 years back, "Sonic Cinema". He definitely has a knack for that-- introducing films and interviewing artists, etc.
The mentions of Jim O'Rourke took me back to a meeting with him I've never forgotten. Thought others would enjoy hearing.
Our paths used to cross in Chicago through a mutual friend when Jim was in his early 20s. Through the mutual friend, I had heard a story that Jim had purchased a fax machine--something reserved for big corporation at the time--and was sending his scores around the world.
One night all of us ended up at the Old Town Ale House on North Avenue in Chicago, a real old school funky mix kind of a place. Jim sat next to me at one of the two tables by the windows. He pulled a photo out of his wallet, the way people share photos of kids. This picture, though, was of an old record producer he loved. Then Jim laid out a precise vision of an album he hoped to make some day. The vision he shared became Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Wilco did not even exist as Wilco at the time of this get together. This is one of my first direct exposures to a person with a distant dream becoming a reality.
Many years later I was flipping through the Sunday Chicago Tribune. The edition had a full page story on Jim when he decided to move from Chicago to New York.
A number of years after that, one Sunday I decided to walk to a local gas station to surprise my wife with the Sunday New York Times. What article happened to be inside? A full page piece on Jim moving from New York to Japan.
Met Thurston when he came to Bard College back in the early 00s. He did a small poetry thing and had brought his electric guitar and an amp and at the end of his reading he shredded for us for a bit. Then he hung out afterwards for a while. Super chill dude.
Sonic Youth is such an interesting group because they're hugely influential, like the Pixies, among musicians — and yet for as famous as they became, Nirvana really took the genre mainstream. Not that Nirvana was necessarily super happy about that.
I was never big on Sonic Youth but I met Thurston Moore at a poetry reading when he was touring around for his book. I went because a friend suggested. I was in awe at his ease with fans and his general excitement for "the scene". I wish that was how most musicians treated their local following. Great music is fostered by local communities and he knew that and emphasized it. I admire that as much as I admire his talent.
50% of marriages fail, 25% of surviving marriages are unhappy, so the odds of marrying, not divorcing, and being happy are a bit above 38%.
70% of divorces are initiated by women, and more in higher income brackets, yet only 50% of men undergoing divorce are unhappy about it, which means about 10% of married men are just waiting for their wives to take the first step in separation.
I do not want to excuse dishonesty, deception, breach of trust etc., but marriages are hard, humans are fallible, and age has taught me to be less judgemental of people failing on a difficult endeavor.
It is a shame, but stupid relationship drama seems to go hand in hand with high creativity.
I don't know if this is just "creativity breeds madness", "fame allows people to be shitty", "most marriages fail", or simply "reporting bias" (happily married couples aren't juicy news).
The idea that any musician can possibly be faithful to their wife, I'm just not even sure it's possible. It's like you hit the lottery and all the women are now chasing you. For most men that's pretty hard to resist.
The whole backstory here is, to say the least, complex, extends over about a decade, and is important subtext for the last few SY records.
Starting around 2003, Jim O'Rourke (go listen to Bad Timing and Insignificance, which are both amazing records and very different to each other) was in a relationship with Eva Prinz while she was in a (maybe?) open marriage to her first husband. In some order, then:
* Jim and Eva break up
* (2005) Jim a) leaves Sonic Youth b) moves across the country c) moves to Japan
* (2006) Eva and Thurston Moore start a publishing company, Ecstatic Peace Library
* somewhere in here, Eva Prinz gets divorced
* (2009) Eva Prinz marries Bernardo Guillermo, a furniture designer and the son of Princess Christina of the Netherlands; they have two kids, one before and one after the wedding
* (2010) Kim Gordon finds out about Thurston's affair with Eva
* (2011) Kim and Thurston separate; Sonic Youth split up
* (2013) Kim and Thurston divorce
* (by 2017) Thurston and Eva relocate to London
* (2020) Thurston and Eva marry
From the outside, assigning responsibility for anything here is kind of impossible and immoral, but the whole thing is remarkably cliched rock-and-roll nonsense for a band like Sonic Youth were...
One day mid-1995 (just looked it up and it would have been May 20, 1995) Sonic Youth was playing with REM at the Gorge in Washington. He and the drummer had a side project that came to the little record store in Ellensburg (Rodeo Records, owned by Mark Pickerel of Screaming Trees fame) for a secret daytime gig. I lived half a block away and was tipped off by a friend who worked there. Went and drank with them all after the gig. Class acts all the way
I've mostly fell out of listening to Sonic Youth, but it was the first band to ever open my eyes to the idea of 'weird' music. I think a lot of who I am today began with that first experience, when I first listened to Evol.
While I don't listen to them much anymore, I still put on Washing Machine from time to time. I'd argue that is their best work.
Agreed. I bought Washing Machine on the day it was released, during my secondary school lunch break. I remember the NME review claiming The Diamond Sea as the best thing SY had ever done. I agreed with that when I got it home, and still do. It was the pinnacle of their work really, which went rapidly downhill afterwards. Pitchfork's 0.0 rating of NYC Ghosts & Flowers was sadly wholly appropriate. But the records Evol-->Washing Machine altered my life completely, and turned me on to the idea of weird/experimental/avant-garde music, and art.
They had most of their (unique) equipment stolen a year before NYC Ghosts & Flowers was released[0], so they used whatever they had in their studio and put out an experimental album. Not my favourite record (Washing Machine and Daydream Nation for me), but I don't think it's that bad. Their later releases were also pretty good and the "really experimental" SYR stuff is quite interesting as well IMO.
> It was the pinnacle of their work really, which went rapidly downhill afterwards. Pitchfork's 0.0 rating of NYC Ghosts & Flowers was sadly wholly appropriate.
I think that was pretty much the only dud (together with Jet Set), Murray Street and the albums after that are quite ok.
Sonic Youth was a large part of my high school sound track. I had some class mates who were also into indie music, I lent my copy of Washing Machine to one of them, when she returned it to me she looked at me as if I was insane (or at least my taste in music).
Evol/Sister/Daydream Nation were my favorites though.
>>For Thurston Moore, a driving force in the important art-noise band Sonic Youth, the epiphany was “Louie Louie,” the indecipherable-at-any-speed single by the Kingsmen.
Haha, I named my dog after that song, or was it Richard Berry’s original, or all the other covers?
I got to talk to Jim O'Rourke after a show of their in Lexington and he was incredibly patient and kind. Definitely a lifetime "going to shows" highlight for me.
I’m the exact opposite, I find Kim absolutely grating a nerve in almost all the songs where she’s the primary singer. Thurston has a laid back sound that fits many of the tracks really well imo.
That said, I find I tend to either absolutely love or (more likely hate) their stuff in general. Not a big fan of random noise, though I can somewhat appreciate how the experimentation influenced others.
“Completely uncompelling” can be a virtue. One of the factors that makes New Order such a peerless band is Bernard Sumner’s unaffected, almost amateurish singing.
The older I get, and the more my knowledge of poetry has expanded, the more turned off I am by the doggerel that most popular-music lyrics are. My rock listening is increasingly limited to shoegaze, a genre where the vocals get so submerged in the mix, you can’t even make out the words and nothing hinders you from enjoying the pure sound.
I really appreciate your recommending me something. Often people might just bristle that I said anything negative about popular music (even if it’s purely a matter of my personal taste) and not even try to help me find something I might like.
That said, in your song, as remarkable as the first verse is (and it’s a great tune), the second verse is too close to pop tropes for me. FWIW, my favourite popular-music lyricist is Scott Walker, who I feel is fully a match for the 20th-century poets I enjoy, e.g. [0] [1]. Would love to find other similar lyricists.
Wow those are incredible lyrics. Thank you for the recommendation. I'll be checking him out
I will say if 'pop' music has failed you, and you're largely into instrumental music, I can't recommend Dead can Dance enough. Specifically Serpent's egg if you never listened to them. They're largely 'instrumental'(the singer made up her own language). The only song with defining lyrics on the album I also think are super beautiful:
I’m well familiar with DCD. I’m also aware that Brendan Perry’s lyrics of the 1980s are faux-profound and were created in a cloud of pot smoke. I suspect even he was eventually embarrassed at what he had written as a young man, as that material disappeared from concerts and he adapted a different lyrical approach for later efforts.
Part of what I loved so much about them is the number of free shows they put on. I can always pin the year that I saw them in Prospect Park at 2010, because the iPhone 4 had just been released, and my friend who I was with proceeded to watch the entire show through her new phone, being completely enamored with the "retina display" while tripping on acid.
When I saw them in 2008 in Battery Park, I had the pleasure of sitting on the lawn next to 90s child star Danny Tamborelli, who many will remember as one of the stars of Pete & Pete (a show with its own sort of indie cred). My friend I was with turned to me and said "That's Danny Tamborelli, we need to say hi to him" and before I could get "No we absolutely do not" out of my mouth, he dragged me over and proceeded to introduce us saying "We're great fans of your work". So I shook his hand, way too high for this interaction, as Thurston took a drumstick to his guitar in the background.
I miss Sonic Youth a lot.