Sonic Nation by Jill Morrison

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01 / Making History:

08 Introduction 12 Formation & early history 20 Mainstream success 34 Later career & disbandment

02 / The Band:

40 Band member profiles 42 Interview with Kim Gordon 52 Interview with Thurston Moore 60 Timeline

03 / The Music:

64 Musical style & influences 66 10 acts influenced by Sonic Youth 72 Discography 84 Music charts 86 Bibliography 88 Index

Introduction

Sonic Nation: Making History: Introduction

By the late Seventies, just about all the original New York punk bands were either out of touch, out of gas, out of town, or out of existence, leaving the hordes of aesthetic pilgrims who had migrated to New York on the heels of the punk explosion to create a new scene of their own. The city became a petri dish for all kinds of musical experiments, from the ultra-minimalist dance beats of Liquid Liquid to Klaus Nomi’s warped techno-opera, from the Lounge Lizards’ noirish jazz to Polyrock’s pointy-headed future-pop.

Photo: Jill Morrison; Previous page: Lee Ranaldo

A precious few, annoyed by how quickly the music industry had chewed up punk and spit it out as “new wave,” formed a small and insular movement defiantly dubbed “no wave.” The music was spare but precipitously jagged and dissonant, with little regard for conventions of any sort; the basic idea seemed to be to make music that could never be co-opted. Although shows by no wave bands were very sparsely attended, a tight-knit little community developed. But when Brian Eno recorded four no wave bands—Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, Mars, and The Contortions—for 1978’s No New York compilation, he unwittingly fomented the scene’s demise, as jealousies were sparked by the fact that some bands were picked to record and others weren’t. Despite the fracturing of the no wave scene, it was a heady time—the New York art scene was beginning to explode and the city’s underground rock community got swept up in its coattails. By 1980 downtown New York City rock clubs resembled art spaces and art spaces resembled rock clubs. As more and more artists started playing in bands, the music began to take on a noticeably sculptural quality, as if the musicians were shaping shards of sound. Graffiti by music-friendly artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat was all over the East Village and SoHo; musicians like Laurie Anderson and Talking Heads were bridging the “high” art world and the “low” rock world; eminent downtown New York composers such as Rhys Chatham, Steve Reich, Glenn Branca, and Philip Glass were all making music that, like rock, dared to place a premium on timbre, harmonic texture, and rhythm.

Sonic Youth took those ideas and transplanted them to rock music. Few American bands were asking to be taken seriously as art, but Sonic Youth did, and they got enthusiastic affirmation from the hipper precincts of the music press; that, coupled with the band’s strong connections to the art world and a rabid European following, gave them a unique prestige. Some accused the band of being charlatans borrowing promotional ideas from the art world to browbeat the underground into building a consensus of cool around them, but however finely calculated Sonic Youth’s astute promotional tactics, the power of their best music is undeniable. And the indie rock and art scenes have a lot in common: in both, talent is one thing, but otherwise it’s all about making the right connections and orchestrating one’s own creations into discernible and desirable movements. Relationships are currency, something Sonic Youth had picked up on not only from the art world but from the camaraderie of the SST bands. It was a survival tool: empowerment through grassroots maneuvering, as opposed to the way things were done in the mainstream— basically marketing them into existence. This was very autonomous, very self-sufficient. This was punk.

The band members’ voracious appetites for all kinds of music and their enthusiasm for spreading the word about it was a big part of the networking process. “We were, on the one hand, trying to take it all in,” says guitarist Lee Ranaldo, “and on the other hand, using whatever position we had to reflect people back out to see a larger world.” That kind of advocacy, given credence by their prescient taste in opening bands, immeasurably boosted the band’s stature. And as the decade wore on and indie rock became more and more codified, Sonic Youth was a vivid reminder of the original impulses behind the movement.

I Drea med I Drea m (1982)

[Kim]

[Lee]

Look before you leap, okay?

You slept

Do you read me?

Did I drift?

May all your dreams come true

Do I dream?

He’s standing by the door

Do you read me?

He’s got something in his hands

I’m not speaking

All the money’s gone

Do you read me?

All the money’s gone

I dream

The days we spend, go on and on Shift

I dream

Fucking youth Working youth

Sound today are you sound today

May all your dreams come true

are you sound today? Sound today are you sound today

A lot of people suffer

are you sound today?

From impotence

Today

All the money’s gone

These things don’t happen

The days we spend go on and on

automatically I dream

Fucking youth

Edith moves each step

Working youth

Fucking youth

The days we spent go on and on

Working youth

I dream

Fucking youth

Do you read me?

Fucking youth Working youth

Within four years of existence, Sonic Youth emerged as an indie archetype, perhaps the indie archetype, the yardstick by which independence and hipness were measured.

Photo: Sonic Youth

They made records that were not only artistically respected but popular; they helpfully provided at least the illusion that rock still had some fresh tricks up its sleeve. Sonic Youth was more an inspiration than an influence, which may be why, despite their renown, so few of the bands who have cited them as mentors and heroes have directly copied their sound. And despite their status as indie royalty, the band’s stature was actually enhanced, not diminished, by signing to a major label. Famously, the band retained their artistic control, but in retrospect, that wasn’t much of an issue since there was no pressure on them to sell records anyway. The real coup was the unspoken understanding that they were so cool that their chief function was as a magnet band, an act that would serve mostly to attract other, more successful bands. This move paid off beyond anyone’s wildest dreams when Sonic Youth brought a hot young band called Nirvana to Geffen/DGC Records.

Sonic Nation: Making History: Introduction

The members of Sonic Youth well remembered The Beatles and the Sixties, when there was a glorious interplay between the avant-garde, progressive politics, and popular culture, and they carried it on, perhaps more than any other band in the Eighties indie community. In doing so, they dignified the scene, but they also heralded the end of what former SST label manager Joe Carducci once called SST’s “New Redneck” sensibility, marking indie rock’s transition from the working-class side of suburbia to the world of urban aesthetes. Yet for all the artsiness, Sonic Youth’s appeal boiled down to one very basic thing: the perennial charms of whaling on a very loud electric guitar.

sttoorryy i h y rl a e & s i n H io t y a rl m a r E o FFor m ation & Sonic Nation: Making History: Formation & early history

Thurston Moore grew up in Florida and small-town Bethel, Connecticut, and was weaned on the standard hard rock fare of the day: Aerosmith, Kiss, Alice Cooper, and the like. He’d just started at Western Connecticut State College, where his late father had taught music and philosophy, when he suddenly decided to move to New York, arriving in early 1977. Punk was in first bloom, a heady time, especially for an artistic kid fresh from the suburbs. “It was David Johansen to Patti Smith to John Cale to The Ramones to The Dictators to Punk magazine to New York Rocker to Rock Scene to St. Mark’s Place to Bleecker Bob’s to Manic Panic to Gem Spa to Max’s to CBGB, etc.,” Moore wrote. He joined The Coachmen, a guitar-based quartet heavily in the vein of the hippest bands in New York at the time, Television and Talking Heads. Art student Lee Ranaldo soon became a fan, and he and Moore struck up a friendship. Ranaldo was in a band called The Flucts (a reference to the Fluxus art movement), who mined similar musical territory to The Coachmen. He was a Deadhead from the suburban wasteland of Long Island who had gone on to study art and filmmaking at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where, by his own admission, he spent more time taking drugs and playing music than attending class. After moving to New York, he joined Glenn Branca’s guitar sextet, touring the US and Europe several times. Branca felt Ranaldo understood his musical sensibility better than anyone in the ensemble and made Ranaldo his trusted musical lieutenant. The ensemble’s six electric guitarists played Branca’s compositions— a kind of minimalist heavy metal—at astoundingly high volumes. In order to achieve the sonic phenomena that were his trademark, Branca would string guitars with the same gauge strings, all tuned to the same note, producing a fascinating chorus effect, or devise unique tunings that produced massive, complex chords. Branca also used volume as a compositional element, actually calculating the overtones produced by the cacophony and incorporating them into the total effect of the music, which was staggering. After The Coachmen broke up, Moore jammed with Stanton Miranda, whose band CKM also included an artist named Kim Gordon. Miranda soon introduced Moore to Gordon, and the two hit it off. The daughter of a UCLA sociology professor father and a homemaker mother, Gordon had been born early enough to witness the late Sixties California rock scene firsthand, and by high school was a devotee of challenging jazz musicians like Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, and The Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Photo: Stephanie Chernikowski

shoulder

Sonic Nation: Making History: Formation & early history

Photo: Sonic Youth

Gordon moved to New York after getting an art degree and began curating gallery shows. She also immersed herself in the no wave scene and befriended Glenn Branca. Gordon wasn’t a musician but got the bug after she played in a one-gig band with members of Branca’s and Rhys Chatham’s ensembles. “I was sort of raised all my life to do art,” Gordon later explained. “I just felt like I should be doing music. It seemed to me that this was really the next step after pop art, you see, entering directly into a popular form of culture instead of commenting on it.” Moore took to Gordon instantly. “She had beautiful eyes and the most beautiful smile,” he wrote, “and was very intelligent and seemed to have a sensitive/ spiritual intellect.” The feeling was mutual—“There was something special about him, like he exuded this air of boyish wildness but incredible goodness,” Gordon said.

“I guess it was love at first sight.” Gordon began to introduce Moore, five years her junior, to the finer things in life, like jazz and modern art. A generation earlier Gordon might have been a cool beatnik hipster; Moore, on the other hand, boiled over with punk rock energy. “He was definitely a wild kid,” Gordon recalls. “‘Wild’ was his main description.” When Moore saw Branca’s ensemble, he was blown away. “It was the most ferocious guitar band that I had ever seen in my life,” he exclaimed, “even more so than The Ramones or Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.” Moore and Gordon formed a band that went through names like Male Bonding (then a new term) and Red Milk before settling on The Arcadians in late 1980. The Arcadians played their first show at the June ’81 Noise Festival at New York’s White Columns gallery—nine consecutive nights of three to five bands each—curated by Moore. Early in the festival, right after Branca’s set, Moore asked Ranaldo if he wanted to join the band.

Ranaldo accepted and the lineup played three songs at the Noise Festival later that week sans drummer, Ranaldo having rehearsed with them for the first time only the night before. They played three gigs with Moore and Ranaldo taking turns whacking some drums, before meeting drummer Richard Edson. Moore’s intensity was evident to Edson from the first time they played together. They were jamming at Edson’s East Village practice space, getting into it so intensely that they were playing with their eyes closed. “And I open my eyes and I see these red spots on my drums!” Edson recalled. “Even though my drum set was a piece of shit anyway, I had a priority interest— I wanted to make sure that they stayed nice. I was like, ‘WHERE THE FUCK ARE THESE RED SPOTS COMING FROM??!’ I looked at his guitar and I noticed one of the knobs was missing. It was just a piece of metal sticking up and he was playing and hitting his hand against this metal and I looked at his hand—he was bleeding from his hand! I was like, that’s pretty cool that he’s so committed that he’ll play right through any kind of pain and bodily injury BUT THE MOTHERFUCKER WAS BLEEDING ON MY DRUMS AND I DIDN’T APPRECIATE THAT! So I was like, ‘HEY… WHOA! WHOAA!!! STOP! STOP! STOP!’ He was like, ‘Oh yeah? Hey, man, I’m sorry! No problem.’ That was my introduction…”

The result was a particularly New Yorky strain of rock experimentalism that recalled the hypnotic steel-gray drones of The Velvet Underground, another band with close ties to the art world. The music was avowedly forward-thinking, thoroughly cloaked in teeming layers of distortion and dissonance. It was intellectual but also bracingly physical, right down to the often violent contortions Moore and Ranaldo went through to wrench the right sounds from their instruments. Edson had been aboard only a few weeks when Branca invited Sonic Youth to be the first artist on Neutral Records, a label he was starting with financial help from White Columns owner Josh Baer. Underground labels were few and far between, even in New York, so it was a major break for a band as obscure and challenging as Sonic Youth to make a record. As it turned out, most of their contemporaries went undocumented. That December they recorded five songs in one late night session at the cavernous Plaza Sound studios in Radio City Music Hall, where punk icons like The Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Blondie had all recorded their debuts. It was an intimidating place for a young band. “We thought, ‘Where are we?’” said Moore. “So we just let the engineer take care of it.” Like so many first-time recording bands, they played very cautiously and conservatively, omitting what Moore calls their “loose, just crazy, noisy stuff.”

Edson wiped off the blood and joined the band, which Moore rechristened Sonic Youth. Part of the name came from MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith and part came from the reggae music then in vogue, much of which came from bands with the word “youth” in their name. “It’s a state of mind,” Ranaldo says of the name. “It was never about being twenty, because we weren’t even twenty when we started. We had more experiences than just making rock music in a garage.” “It was odd,” said Gordon. “As soon as Thurston came up with the name Sonic Youth, a certain sound that was more of what we wanted to do came about.” That sound took the heady, transcendent discord that Branca had extracted so purely from rock and injected it back into a bracing stew of The Stooges, MC5, Television, noise-jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock, Public Image, Ltd., and no wave.

Not that the material they recorded was very conventional. “It was a lot more wide open as to what a song was,” Ranaldo says. “A song was a lot more about sound and structure than it was about chords and progressions and stuff like that.” On “The Burning Spear,” Moore’s guitar makes a sound like Chinese gongs and Ranaldo plays a power drill put through a wah-wah pedal. (Unfortunately, the drill broke soon afterward and the song was apparently never the same. “We could never find a drill with the same tone as that one,” Gordon said regretfully.) Despite the band’s looser tendencies, Edson laid down strict, danceable syncopations in the funky “street beat” style then favored by hip New York bands like The Bush Tetras and ESG. “He had a desire for discipline,” Moore said of Edson. “Whereas we were just an anarchy band, and really into being loose, anything goes.” The fact was the band wasn’t sure what they wanted to sound like yet. “Our first album was just a bunch of songs we wrote because we had the chance to record them,” said Ranaldo. “After that we understood better and better what we wanted to do.”

Neutral released the mini-LP in March ’82 to very little notice—no surprise, since the tiny label had no track record, no connections, and no real plans. Besides, Neutral’s staff—namely, Moore—didn’t know too much about the music business. “I didn’t know what a distributor was,” Moore admits. “I remember Glenn saying, ‘I think this is how it works: Call these distributors, see how many copies they’ll take, and write down how many they’ll take, and I think they should pay you within six months.’ We didn’t know.” Much to Moore’s relief, Branca eventually replaced him with Peter Wright, a savvy Englishman who had worked for The Buzzcocks’ label New Hormones. But Moore had wisely sent promo kits to the U.S. press, and what little reviews the mini-LP got were at least uniformly favorable, very encouraging to such an obscure band. And when word got back that The Bush Tetras had liked the bass sound on the mini-LP, “I was like, ‘Wow, we kind of impressed The Bush Tetras,’” says Moore. “‘Maybe we should take this seriously!’”

The band began a serious rethink of their music after Moore saw his first Minor Threat show in May ’82. “I just thought, ‘My god! The greatest live band I have ever seen,’ ” Moore said. “Sonically, they were just so stimulating.” Immediately the band—and Moore in particular—began to listen to whatever hardcore they could get their hands on. “We were so fascinated by it, especially Thurston, but we knew we weren’t of it,” says Ranaldo. “We were apart from it in a lot of ways—older, more art-schooly kind of music, not straight edge. But we were totally fascinated by it.” Despite their distance from hardcore, the members of Sonic Youth realized they could incorporate elements of it into their music. “I wanted to play high-energy music and I wanted to destroy, you know,” said Moore, “but at the same time work on sound and whatever.” Hardcore’s organizational energy was just as important as its musical energy—it showed how Sonic Youth could thrive outside the usual New York art world system of grants and patronage. “The way those kids networked was a marvel to us,” says Ranaldo. “You had these little pockets in all these cities, and all of a sudden you were hearing about—it wasn’t just Boston and LA and New

Unlike most hardcore kids, the members of Sonic Youth had firsthand experience of virtually the entire history of rock music, with the exception of the early rock & rollers. “We had real ties to Sixties music in a firsthand way, both British Invasion and San Francisco psychedelia—that stuff made a big impression on us,” says Ranaldo. “Which set us apart from young kids who were seventeen in 1980 that had really only heard about it from their parents’ record collection, if at all.” But no wave was just as resolutely antihistorical as hardcore, which meant that Sonic Youth didn’t speak up about their Sixties roots. “You didn’t want to be associated with the excesses of hippie music or any of the spiritual yearning side of it,” says Ranaldo. “The fact that it was involved with drugs and the questing that went hand in hand with the music at that point, people, didn’t want to be associated with that—and yet so many of the parallels are obvious. I would assume that with a lot of those people, it was only later that they were able to admit being really involved in a lot of that music. I know in the early days of our group, when I would admit to having a thing for The Grateful Dead at one period, it almost felt like a blasphemous thing to say.”

Photo: Catherine Ceresole

Sonic Nation: Making History: Formation & early history

York and San Francisco—it was Louisville and Athens, all these weird little towns that you’d never even heard of before.”

The band also had no strong connections to either hardcore or the New York art rock establishment. “We were,” Moore said, “a part of nothing.” “We just said fuck it,” he continued, “and got cheap guitars and screwdrivers and turned the amps up to ten.” Edson left the band in the summer of ’82. (He continued playing with the hip art-funk band Konk and soon became an actor, appearing in Desperately Seeking Susan, Stranger than Paradise, Platoon, and even an episode of Miami Vice.) The band made a flyer that said simply “Sonic Youth needs drummer” and stuck it on the wall at SoHo’s Rocks in Your Head, one of the city’s few underground record shops. Bob Bert had drummed in a noise band called Drunk Driving and studied painting at the School of Visual Arts. A familiar face on the New York punk scene almost from the beginning, Bert was a big Branca fan, so when he heard the maestro had started a label, he picked up its first release, the Sonic Youth mini-LP. “I loved it,” says Bert. “It was like PiL’s Second Edition—only better, more extreme.” When he saw their flyer, he called Moore right away and got the gig. Bert traded Edson’s busy little syncopations for an explosive tribal stomp—it wasn’t the manic hardcore style Moore had envisioned, but it merged with Gordon’s simple bass lines for a much more visceral impact.

Sonic Nation: Making History: Formation & early history

In the mainstream world of the early Eighties, it was still novel for a woman to play a leading role in a band. But not in punk rock.

Both Moore and Ranaldo had been playing guitar since high school, but Gordon was just learning how to play bass and it took a bit of a leap for her to get onstage. “I thought of it more emotionally, not in terms of trying to play music,” says Gordon. “I couldn’t do anything if I thought in terms like that—I always have to make a different picture for myself. “

As a woman I felt kind of invisible in the middle of it anyway,” Gordon continues. “I was there as a voyeur, pretty much,” she adds with a little laugh. Not entirely comfortable with the spotlight, Gordon preferred having a key role that wasn’t obviously key, which precisely describes the bass guitar. “It’s so important—it’s supporting but it’s…,” she says, trailing off. “I like things like that. It fits my personality.” Gordon preferred being a subtle but decisive force offstage as well, so while Moore often instigated everything from songwriting to record deals and Ranaldo was the musical maestro, Gordon was often the band’s aesthetic (and business) conscience. Early on Moore taught her simple bass parts; he’d play reggae records for her, to show how effective even just a few notes could be. The simple approach worked in their favor anyway—busy bass lines would have cluttered up the already teeming music.

While Moore and Ranaldo didn’t possess tremendous technique either, that didn’t prevent them from tossing off dense torrents of sound. “And she never plays like that,” Ranaldo says of Gordon. “Her stuff is all very spare and minimal and yet it’s very intricate. There’s something about the way she thinks harmonically, rhythmically, that’s really amazing to me.” As a vocalist, Gordon developed a sort of insouciant holler, like a kid calling to her friends about something great she’d found but trying not to seem too excited about it. Gordon was an artist who simply transferred her highly refined aesthetic skills to rock music, a genre that, as punk proved, required a sensibility more than chops anyway. “She was coming from an art school background,” says Bert. “That’s what made the band.”

Photo: Catherine Ceresole

Mainstrea m success Back before the term got too specified, Sonic Youth often got tagged as “industrial,” but that wasn’t quite it. Particularly in the mid-Eighties, New York was a veritable symphony of clangs, clanks, booms, thuds, buzzes, and hums; any resident whose ears had been opened by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen (not to mention the frenzied free jazz of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy) became a connoisseur of noises. “That stuff can’t be discounted, how important an idea those cityscape sounds are,” Ranaldo says. “The early periods of this band couldn’t have happened anywhere but New York.” The band also took ideas from conceptual art and media-savvy, urban angst-ridden artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman. They were also big Warhol fans, especially for the way Warhol, like Sonic Youth, mixed high art and popular culture. The music itself was the sonic analogue of the monumental, rough-hewn, and yet thoroughly premeditated and marked neo-expressionist art that was the height of New York hip, but that was probably unconscious. Far more conscious were the band’s use of avant-garde movements like cut-up art, which they adapted for their lyrics, and

Sonic Nation: Making History: Mainstream success

“appropriation art,” which they adapted for their album covers.

Even the bands that Sonic Youth made sure to champion were, in a way, appropriated art, things that were recontextualized and made to shed new light on Sonic Youth itself. Sonic Youth no doubt loved these bands, but the association with groups like Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney, and Nirvana also served to take the arty edge off Sonic Youth and emphasize their rock side (conversely, the other bands gained an artsy association they might not otherwise have gotten). “A lot of bands,” says Ranaldo, “are trying to present themselves as a singular entity in the center of it all. And I think we’ve always been the exact opposite, trying to present ourselves amidst a universe or a society of stuff going on.” The band set out on a six-week U.S. tour in June ’86 with their beloved European booking agent Carlos van Hijfte as tour manager. Van Hijfte had never been in the U.S. or even road-managed a tour, but the band didn’t care—he was their friend and they wanted to show him America.

Photo: Sonic Youth

Sonic Nation: Making History: Mainstream success

Also along for the ride were soundman Terry Pearson and a preposterously gigantic silver boom box that spewed anything from Black Sabbath to their beloved Madonna on the endless drives down the interstates.

“

There was a good crowd in Raleigh, where they’d played four distant years before on the Savage Blunder tour to approximately ten people. But elsewhere in the South it was a different story: desolate gigs in New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, and Austin with perhaps fifty people in the audience. Shelley estimates the crowd never exceeded 350 on the whole tour. They hooked up for several dates with fellow SST band Saccharine Trust, starting in Tucson, where the club billed the show as a hardcore night, hoping to draw the music’s built-in audience. But the hardcore kids of Tucson, no fools, stayed away in droves and the show was a bust. A confrontation ensued when the club allegedly refused to pay the bands their guarantee. “The club owners are sub-moronic with very low IQ’s, cheeze

“They were so good and their shows were different

business suits and pistols packed neath their vests,” wrote Moore in a tour diary for Forced Exposure. “They ripped us and Saccharine off for big bux.”

every night and they were angry as shit on stage,” Dinosaur bassist Lou Barlow recalls. “Kim’s bass was fucking up and she’d be like, ‘Urgh,’ all uptight about it.”

Then it was over to Southern California, up the coast to Seattle, a long haul to Denver, and a punishing twelvehour drive in the July heat to Kansas City. “All day in the van roof melting drops of corrugated scuzz on our 100 degree parched skin,” wrote Moore in his tour diary. “Sweating and shitty and irritable. Living hell.” In Michigan they picked up Dinosaur Jr, who had recently released their debut album on Homestead. The Dinosaur guys were awed by their heroes.

Now that the band was on SST, the mainstream music industry was beginning to take notice: music biz house organ Billboard praised a show at LA’s Roxy. “Although the band may be too raw and uncompromisingly experimental for many listeners,” wrote reviewer Chris Morris, “Sonic Youth is unmistakably rewriting the vocabulary of the electric guitar in the ’80s.” Even People acknowledged the band, albeit in a backhanded way: “Meanwhile, out on the lunatic fringe…” the EVOL review began, going on to term the album the “aural equivalent of a toxic waste dump.” And that was a positive review.

…to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless. —Kim Gordon

Respected New York Times critic Robert Palmer decreed that Sonic Youth was “making the most startlingly original guitar-based music since Jimi Hendrix” while a Melody Maker year-end roundup of 1986’s best albums (EVOL was number twenty-two), said, “EVOL is a murderous crush of perversity, paranoia and naked, twisted visions of blind rage, solitary insanity and silent, thoughtful violence. With truly modern psychedelia, erotic sex and pounding, mindless brutality, it is a cruising, careering mix of variety and movement.” “Starpower,” released as a single with the noisiest parts edited out, vastly raised the band’s profile on college radio; at number twelve, EVOL was the highest indie entry on CMJ’s 1986 year-end chart.

Photo: Sonic Youth

Each Sonic Youth record was selling more than the last; each was getting more praise and airplay than the last. And musically, the band was progressing by leaps and bounds. They were perfectly poised to capitalize on all the hard work. They recorded the follow-up to EVOL in the spring of ’87 at Sear Sound in midtown Manhattan; the studio boasted a vintage sixteen-track, vacuum-tube board— technologically it was out-dated, but the band wanted the unique “warmth” of the tube sound. “You can hear, actually, the sound of the tubes on the record,” Moore claimed. “You can hear the coils kind of, like, relating to each other, in a way.”

But perhaps the band was emulating the working method of one of their favorite new writers, William Gibson, who wrote his pioneering “cyberpunk” novels not on a computer but on an ancient manual typewriter. Or maybe they hoped the “dirty” sound of tubes would compensate for their musicianship and songwriting, which were cleaner than ever. Unlike any of their previous records, Sister is mostly up-tempo, with the band rocking out often, clearly for the sheer joy of it—they even cover the garagey “Hotwire My Heart” by the early San Francisco punk band Crime, which was the indie equivalent of the Stones covering a Slim Harpo tune.

Photo: Sonic Youth

The tunings were not as harsh and dissonant as before, the changes less arty—many numbers are downright sleek by comparison to their previous material. But this was still Sonic Youth, and despite all the catchy hooks, no song except for “Hotwire My Heart” has anything resembling pop music’s standard verse-chorus-verse structure. With Sister the band reached its fullest realization— for a long time afterward, anything else would be perfecting a formula. “Between EVOL and Sister, they basically defined Sonic Youth, in sonic terms,” says Steve Albini, “and they have stayed within those parameters ever since.” Some of the lyrics weaved in themes from visionary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who had replaced Charles Manson as the band’s obsession. Dick had written Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the basis of the film Blade Runner—and his dark vision of a beat-up, glitch-laden high-tech future fit well with Sonic Youth’s approach, from their fascination with dystopia to their embrace of outdated electronics.

“

Like Dick, Sonic Youth found beauty and genuineness in the messed-up and broken—like a bloodied hand bashing down on the groaning strings of a banged-up Japanese Telecaster copy. The album title refers to Dick’s twin sister, who died shortly after birth, while the song title “Schizophrenia” refers to a Dick story and ultimately to the author himself, whose mental health began to fail in his later years. But only a couple of Sister songs actually have anything directly to do with Dick’s writings. More prevalent is Christian imagery, which appears in nearly all of Moore’s songs, notably “Catholic Block,” “Cotton Crown,” “White Cross,” and even “Schizophrenia,” where a character proclaims that “Jesus had a twin who knew nothing about sin.” As in Confusion Is Sex, Gordon’s songs often deal in images of abuse by speaking in the voice of the persecutor—in “Beauty Lies in the Eye,” she murmurs, “Hey fox, come here / Hey beautiful, come here, sugar”; “Let’s go for a ride somewhere / I won’t hurt you,” she says in the creepy “Pacific Coast Highway.”

musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

Sonic Nation: Making History: Mainstream success

I never really thought of myself as a

—Kim Gordon

Out in America, a lot of young women were listening, especially those who later made up the Riot Grrrl movement, which particularly decried sexual abuse, harassment, and assault, and Gordon became an influential and highly visible role model for a generation of young women about to form their own bands. Although it didn’t quite equal EVOL, Sister had the bigger impact on the indie world when it was released in June ’87. Years of hard touring, plenty of glowing press, the powerful SST cachet, a decent showing on college radio, and the most inviting music the band had yet made all conspired to sell sixty thousand copies of Sister. The album reached number twelve in that year’s Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll—the first Sonic Youth album to crack the top twenty of that influential list.

Sonic Nation: Making History: Mainstream success

By the summer of ’88, as it became

“We felt like there was a little too much of a stoner administrative quality going on out there,” adds Ranaldo. “For as fuzzy-headed a group as we sometimes come across as, that’s really what it came down to—we wanted the business side of what we did to be serious and so the people that dealt with the business, we wanted them to know what was going on when it came time to ask those questions. We just felt like it wasn’t really happening.” By then Sonic Youth’s sales chart was definitely pointed up, and yet the band felt SST couldn’t, as they say in the music industry, take it to the next level. “SST is growing, but not fast enough for us,” Gordon said. And they felt SST wasn’t musically what it used to be, perhaps due to the stoner quality Ranaldo had detected. “[Greg Ginn] was signing, like, these bands from North Carolina, bands that he liked, but they were kind of boring compared to what was already there,” Moore says. “He had this thing that a lot of distributors won’t take you seriously unless you have a lot of product. So you become less specialized and you become validated as a label. It was all very uninvolving for me.”

increasingly apparent that the patrician Republican candidate for president, George Bush, would trounce his feckless Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, ensuring yet four more years of Reaganism, the band entered SoHo’s Greene Street Studios to record by far their most ambitious album yet, the classic Daydream Nation.

By 1987 SST had started to show unmistakable signs of hubris, such as releasing over eighty titles that year, a ridiculous amount even by major label standards. “Toward the end,” Ranaldo says, “we felt like whatever money was coming in from whatever records were making money was being used to fund a bunch of lame-ass records.”

Despite the success of Sister, Sonic Youth had grown disenchanted with SST. “SST’s accounting was a bit suspect to us,” Moore says, an alarmingly common complaint of SST bands. The band was also disturbed that the label had also been firing employees. “We didn’t like what was going on over there—it seemed sort of odd,” says Moore. “People we liked were being let go.”

Unlike bands such as The Minutemen or Saccharine Trust, Sonic Youth had no particular allegiance to SST— it was a business relationship, no more, no less. “They completely respected us,” says Moore, “but we did tell them that we didn’t want to do the next record with them.” Ranaldo describes the split with SST as “very unamicable.” (They eventually resorted to legal recourse to get their master tapes back from the label.)

Photo: Jill Morrison

“

A lot of brands out there are taking people for a ride by pretending that they are doing something valid, when in fact they are just rehashing things that have been done a million times before. At least we are sticking our necks out and having some fun. That’s what music is about; not following the rules. —Steve Shelley

Sonic Nation: Making History: Mainstream success

Sonic Youth had replaced the late, great Minutemen as the label’s heart and soul, and the band’s defection hit SST hard, starting off the label’s fairly rapid descent back into obscurity.

Blast First’s Paul Smith had long suggested that Sonic Youth could sell more records than SST was capable of selling. Of course, Smith had his own motives—he wanted Sonic Youth on the upcoming American branch of Blast First, not just because he loved the band, but because it would attract funding to the venture. In 1987 Smith set up a New York office and began trying to lure all the U.K. Blast First artists, including Dinosaur Jr (SST), Big Black (Touch & Go), the Butthole Surfers (Touch & Go), and Sonic Youth. But despite Sonic Youth’s enthusiastic lobbying, none of the other bands made the move. Even worse, Big Black’s Steve Albini was annoyed at them for trying to spirit away the best-selling artists on his good friend Corey Rusk’s Touch & Go label; Sonic Youth’s relationship with Albini was never the same.

Smith struck up a relationship with West Coast–based Enigma Records, which in turn was distributed by Capitol Records and half-owned by EMI, similar to the relationship R.E.M.’s label I.R.S. Records had with the music biz behemoth MCA Records. Smith convinced the band to go along for the ride. And so Sonic Youth did the seemingly unthinkable and edged ever so gradually into the major label world. Indie paragons like Maximumrocknroll, The Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, and the band MDC all preached strongly against dealing with corporate America. But at the same time, many alumni of the indie scene, from college radio DJs to people who had gotten their start packing boxes at indie distributors, were starting to get substantial positions at major labels. Naturally, they were looking to work with bands they knew and liked. Moore felt independent labels had lost what made them good in the first place, which was that they didn’t try to compete on any level with the majors.

Sugar Kane (1992)

[Thurston] You’re perfect in the way, a perfect end today You’re burning out their lights, and burning in their eyes I love you Sugar Kane, a-comin’ from the rain Oh kiss me like a frog, and turn me into flame I love you all the time, I need you 8 to 9 And I can stay all night, yr body shining

And I know There’s something down there sugar soul Back to the cross a twisted lane There something down there sugar kane

I’m back again in love, I’m back again a dove Where’d you get your light, your smilin’ sugar life Another lovers day, another cracked up night Every night I say, the light is coming

And I know There’s something down there sugar cone Back to the cross a twisted lane There’s something down there sugar kane

Hey angel come and play, and fly me away A stroll along the beach, until you’re out of time I love you sugar kane, a crack into the dream I love you sugar kane, I love you sugar kane I love you sugar kane, I love you sugar kane I love you sugar kane, I love you sugar

But, noting the steady growth in their sales, indie labels had lately begun to aim higher. “The whole thing of becoming bigger and bigger to me was wrong,” Moore said. “You should find a great neutrality and just stay there and maintain that force.”

Sonic Nation: Making History: Mainstream success

Unfortunately, capitalism doesn’t work that way—the indie scene wasn’t an alternative network of dedicated music fans anymore; it was now just another industry looking for increased market share—and not doing it very well. If that was the case, Sonic Youth figured, why not work with people who knew what they were doing? “I didn’t feel any allegiance for the independent scene anymore, that’s for sure,” said Moore, “because it was in disarray as far as I was concerned.”

And with reason: the album mixed the streamlined propulsion of Sister and the jagged high drama of EVOL, all executed by a band at the peak of their powers. The music is shot through with all kinds of strikingly vivid feelings: joy, ennui, sensuality, cynicism, frenzy, poignancy. Laden with guitar hooks, well recorded, and meticulously structured, it flows, like Bad Moon Rising, in one long blurt, with many passages so dense and ingeniously arranged, they border on the orchestral. The cover art, a photo-realist painting of a burning candle by distinguished German painter Gerhard Richter, seemed to speak of faith, illumination, and a righteous constancy that would eventually overwhelm the blithe ignorance of the “daydream nation” the U.S. had become.

Unfortunately, Capitol had no idea what to do with Enigma’s releases; consequently, it was difficult to find Daydream Nation in stores. “Enigma was basically a cheap-jack Mafioso outfit, I guess,” Moore concluded. “You can quote me on that, but I’m not quite sure how truthful that is. That was the impression we were given.” The band placed much of the blame on Paul Smith, who was already on thin ice with them ever since Blast First’s 1986 double-LP live set, Walls Have Ears. The album documents two incredible Sonic Youth performances, one with Bert on drums and one with Shelley; although the sound was not so good, the packaging was done with care. The problem was the band knew nothing about it until Smith presented them with finished copies. “[Smith] really thought we were going to be so pleased with it, that it was going to be like opening a surprise package at Christmas,” says Ranaldo. “He was totally flabbergasted when we were horrified by it.”

There had been the possibility of going straight to a major label, but Moore shrewdly decided against that just yet—going with a major would delay the release date of the new album, and he wanted it to come out at the end of the year, boosting its chances for a strong finish in the important Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll. Sure enough, Daydream Nation, recorded for a mere $30,000, finished second behind Public Enemy’s landmark It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Rolling Stone also piled on the hosannas, not only placing the album second in its critics’ poll, but naming Sonic Youth “Hot Band” in its “Hot” issue and placing the album at number forty-five on its list of the hundred best albums of the Eighties. The album was number one on CMJ’s yearend chart; in the UK it topped the independent charts of both the NME and Melody Maker.

Photo: Stefano Giovannini

Sonic Youth took swift legal action and forced Smith to halt production of Walls Have Ears at about two thousand copies. And yet two thousand copies was all it took for the album to make the UK indie charts, where it resided for several weeks. The band parted ways with a crestfallen Smith after the Enigma debacle and began shopping for a major label deal. Several labels were interested, but the band was most interested in Geffen. Among other people, they consulted Bob Mould on how to negotiate a major label contract, and Mould counseled them to retain creative control, among other points. Sonic Youth wound up with a unique deal that, among other things, gave the band members the ability to sign other bands. By letting such things be known, and talking a good game, the band preserved their underground credibility through the transition.

Their 1990 major label debut, Goo, continued the streamlining of their sound and songs, going in for a far more conventional rock approach. The album debuted at number one on the CMJ charts and even made the Billboard Top 100. Then Neil Young invited them on a tour for his latest comeback album, Ragged Glory. Although Sonic Youth was met by massive indifference by Young’s audience, it was a significant toe-dip into the mainstream; conversely, Young benefited from a massive hipness infusion from Sonic Youth and repeatedly called “Expressway to Yr. Skull” “the greatest guitar song of all time.” Yet being on a major label was not always so glorious. “It’s not really very exciting,” Ranaldo revealed. “It’s frightening.” Still, the band continued with Geffen throughout the Nineties, sustaining its large cult following with a long string of albums that were by turns intriguing, visceral, dark, puzzling, joyous, cerebral, and moving.

Photo: Stefano Giovannini

of their peers—bands like Live Skull, Rat At Rat R, and The Swans—eventually fell by the wayside? “In a lot of ways, Sonic Youth are trailblazers but in a lot of ways they’re followers,” Bob Bert observes. “A lot of times they were jumping on bandwagons and stuff. They were really good at that.” That may be so, but there’s no taking away the fact that they were (and remain) a great band. Another, more practical reason is that unlike their peers, Sonic Youth simply managed to stay together; their personal and collective longevity was vastly helped by the fact that they never got stuck in the quagmire of heavy drugs. And although it would be easy to assume that Gordon and Moore would side together on most issues, it was in fact as likely for the two of them to disagree with each other as with anyone else in the band. Gordon and Moore rarely seemed to discuss band issues among themselves, which was surely as good for their relationship as it was for the band’s. But all that meant nothing without the band’s relentless determination. “We were very focused on what we wanted,” Moore says, “even though we never knew what was going to happen from one month to the next. But we were focused on how we wanted to exist.” So when the band wanted to tour Europe, they made that happen; when they wanted to sign to SST, they made that happen; when they went to a proper major label, they did so on their own terms. According to Moore, squabbling within the band was remarkably minimal. “We always got along fairly well through those indie years,” Moore says, then struggles to recall an instance of band disharmony. “I remember Lee being in Phoenix and coming out of a rest stop with an ice cream,” he says, “I remember getting really bitter toward him because I couldn’t afford to have one.”

Many bands begin to fragment when one member starts to take control. The members of Sonic Youth had read enough rock history to know not to repeat that mistake. But perhaps more important, that same sense of history—as well as each member’s formidable cool— had made them each too self-conscious to, as Ranaldo puts it, “start wearing silk scarves and prance in front of the other three onstage.” And best of all, Sonic Youth inhabited a charmed zone where they were successful enough to keep going and yet low profile enough to elude the compromises of success. Although each record sold more than the last, there were no spikes in their sales graph that would have prematurely attracted the attentions of the mainstream music business. “Luckily, we were smart enough in the early days to work it out so we were making enough money to subsist off it,” says Ranaldo. “We never went for the stupid route that might have given us a lot of cash in the short term but also would have been the death knell.” But no one ever believed the band would last as long as it has. “When I was in the band, there was never even a thought that we’d even be around five years later,” says Bert. “There was no thought of it ever being much beyond a tiny little footnote in Lower East Side history.” By the early Nineties, the band had become more famous for being influential than for their music. “Interviewers would say, ‘Why are you significant?’ Or, ‘How does it feel to be influential?’” says Gordon. “And it became this catchphrase, whereas nobody actually talked about why we were influential. “We were influential,” Gordon concludes, “in showing people that you can make any kind of music you want.”

Sonic Nation: Making History: Mainstream success

Why did Sonic Youth succeed when all

Later ca & st di sb Tire meer liHi or yand ment On July 4, 1999, Sonic Youth’s instruments, amps and gear were stolen in the middle of the night while on tour in Orange County, California. Forced to start from scratch with new instruments, they recorded NYC Ghosts & Flowers and opened for Pearl Jam during the east coast leg of their 2000 tour. In 2001, Sonic Youth collaborated with French avant-garde singer and poet Brigitte Fontaine on Fontaine’s album Kékéland. When the September 11, 2001 attacks occurred, several members of the band were blocks away; Jim at their NYC studio (Echo Canyon on Murray Street) and Ranaldo and his wife Leah nearby at home. After the attacks, they curated the first U.S. outing of the All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival in LA The festival was originally scheduled for October, but it was delayed until March the following year due to the attacks. In the summer of 2002, Murray Street was released; many critics heralded a “return to form for SY,” seemingly revitalized by the addition of Jim O’Rourke, who became a full member during this period, playing bass guitar, guitar and occasionally synthesizer. It was during this period that the band were filmed for Scott Crary’s documentary Kill Your Idols, depicting Sonic Youth as a key influence upon the post-punk revival then happening in New York. This was followed in 2004 by the release of Sonic Nurse, an album similar in sound and approach to its immediate predecessor that also received positive reviews. “Pattern Recognition”, a song named after the 2003 William Gibson novel, finds the band once again using Gibson’s work for inspiration. The band also showed their pop culture commentary and sense of humor with the track “Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream,” a faster-tempo song sung by Gordon, which spoofed Carey’s life, including her short-lived relationship with rapper Eminem, which originally appeared on a 2003 split 7” with Erase Errata (on the album cover, the reference to “Mariah Carey” in the title was replaced by “Kim Gordon” due to potential copyright issues).

Sonic Nurse had decent sales, in part due to performances on TV talk shows including Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The band was also slated to perform in 2004’s Lollapalooza tour along with acts such as Pixies and The Flaming Lips, but the concert was canceled due to lackluster ticket sales. When the band toured later that year, they played extensively from their 1980s catalog. On October 6, 2005, LA CityBeat reported that some of the gear stolen in 1999 was surprisingly recovered and that it might be used for recording of the next album, then tentatively titled Sonic Life. The report also said that Jim O’Rourke might be leaving the band soon; his departure was confirmed by Lee Ranaldo in an interview with Pitchfork Media. In May 2006, the group announced on their website that ex-Pavement member Mark Ibold would play bass for the band on their upcoming tour. Rather Ripped was released in Europe on June 5, 2006 and in the USA on June 13, 2006. Compared to previous Sonic Youth recordings, the album features many short, conventionally-structured, melodic songs and fewer feedback-fuelled left-field improvisations.

Sonic Nation: Making History: Later career & disbandment

Photo: Sonic Youth

Later that summer, Sonic Youth played the 2006 Bonnaroo Festival, as well as Lollapalooza, promoting the album. In December, Rolling Stone made it their number three Album of the Year 2006. The band released The Destroyed Room: B-Sides and Rarities in December 2006. It features tracks previously available only on vinyl, limited-release compilations, B-sides to international singles, and some material that had never before been released. This marked the band’s final Geffen release. In April, 2007, the band became one of the earlier big-name rock bands to play China when they were brought on a China tour by Beijing and Shanghai based company Split Works. In 2008, the band independently re-released Master= Dik for the first time on CD, exclusively at their online store. They also released two more editions to the SYR series, SYR7: J’Accuse Ted Hughes and SYR8: Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth. SYR7 was released on April 22, and SYR8 was released July 28.

Sonic Nation: Making History: Later career & disbandment

On June 10, they also released a compilation album on Starbucks Music, called Hits Are for Squares. The first fifteen tracks were selected by other celebrities, and track sixteen, “Slow Revolution,” is a new recording by Sonic Youth.

Also in June, the band was the subject of an intensively researched biography, Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth, written by music journalist David Browne. The book featured new interviews with the band as well as nearly one-hundred friends, family members and peers. It was published by Da Capo and included over sixty rare photos. On August 30, 2008, the band premiered two new songs at the final McCarren Park Pool show. Thurston Moore stated that in November the band would start recording a new studio album. The band did not continue their contract with Geffen, being discontented at the way Geffen handled their last four or five albums.

On September 8, it was confirmed by Matador’s Matablog that Sonic Youth would release its sixteenth album (titled The Eternal) in spring, 2009, on Matador Records. In December, it was also announced that the group had recently collaborated with John Paul Jones (of Led Zeppelin fame) on a piece that served as the soundtrack for a new Merce Cunningham Dance Company piece. This work was performed by the company on April 16–19, 2009, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in celebration of Cunningham’s 90th birthday. On February 12, 2009 the band revealed the cover art for The Eternal via their website and blog. The album, produced by John Agnello, was released on June 9. With the release, Matador Records also offered an exclusive live LP only available to those who preordered the album. The band scored and composed the soundtrack of the French thriller-drama Simon Werner a Disparu, which premiered in May, 2010 as part of the Cannes International Film Festival. The soundtrack has been released in 2011 as SYR9: Simon Werner a Disparu, the latest edition of the SYR series. On October 14, 2011, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore announced that they separated after 27 years of marriage via a statement by Matador. Matador also explained that plans for the band remained “uncertain,” despite previously hinting that they would record new material later in the year. In an interview on November 28, 2011, Lee Ranaldo said that Sonic Youth are “ending for a while.” “I’m feeling optimistic about the future no matter what happens at this point,” Ranaldo said. “It was a pretty good tour overall. I mean, there was a little bit of tiptoeing around and some different situations with the travelling—you know, they’re not sharing a room any more or anything like that. It remains to be seen at this point what happens. I think they are certainly the last shows for a while and I guess I’d just leave it at that.”

Ranaldo also suggested there are no plans for Sonic Youth to record new material. “There’s tons and tons of archival projects and things like that still going on,” he said. “I’m just happy right now to let the future take its course.” In November 2013, Ranaldo said in response to the question of a possible reunion, “I fear not. Everybody is busy with their own projects, besides that Thurston and Kim aren’t getting along together very well since their split. I think you can put a cross behind Sonic Youth, same as you can put it behind the names Mike Kelley and Lou Reed. Let them all rest in peace.” In her 2015 autobiography Girl in a Band, Gordon refers several times to the band having “split up” for good.

“

We never notate our music, so you can try to replicate it, but you don’t really have it. —Thurston Moore

shoulder

Sonic Nation: The Band: Band member profiles

Kim Gordon

Thurston Moore

Born in Rochester, New York, Gordon was raised in Los Angeles, California, where her father was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. After graduating from Los Angeles’s Otis College of Art and Design, Gordon moved to New York City to begin an art career. There, she formed Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore in 1981. She and Moore married in 1984. Gordon was also a founding member of the musical project Free Kitten, which she formed with Julia Cafritz in 1993.

Moore was born in Coral Gables, Florida and related with his family in 1967. He moved to New York City in 1976 to join the burgeoning post-punk and no wave music scenes. It was there that he was able to watch shows by the likes of Patti Smith and spoken-word performances by William S. Burroughs. In 1980 he moved in with Kim Gordon to an apartment at 84 Eldridge St. below artist Dan Graham, eventually befriending him, sometimes using records from Graham’s collection for mix tapes. Moore, with Gordon, Anne Demarinis and Dave Keay formed a band, appearing under names like Male Bonding and Red Milk and The Arcadians, before settling on Moore’s choice of Sonic Youth just before June 1981. In addition to his work with Sonic Youth, he has also released albums as a solo artist and collaborated with scores of musicians.

In 2011 Gordon and Moore separated. Following the dissolution of Sonic Youth and her divorce from Moore, Gordon formed the experimental duo Body/Head with Bill Nace, releasing their debut album Coming Apart in 2013. She subsequently formed Glitterbust with Alex Knost, releasing a self-titled debut album in 2016. Body/Head released their second studio album, The Switch, in 2018.

Previous page: Catherine Ceresole

Lee Ranaldo

Steve Shelley

Ranaldo started his career in New York in several bands, and joined the electric guitar orchestra of Glenn Branca. In this orchestra he played mainly electric guitar, but also some of Branca’s harmonic guitars Branca had designed and built himself. In 1981, he and David Linton briefly joined the band Plus Instruments formed by Truus de Groot. With this line-up they recorded the album February–April 1981, released on the Dutch Kremlin label. After the release of the album, he left the band and started Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon.

Shelley was born in Midland, Michigan, played in several mid-Michigan bands, including Faith and Morals and Strange Fruit, and was among the original lineup of the punk band The Crucifucks. In 1985, he joined with Sonic Youth, when he replaced Bob Bert.

In 1987, Ranaldo released his first solo album, From Here to Infinity, compositions which ended in locked grooves. The second side of the album also featured an unplayable engraving by Savage Pencil. Among his solo records are Dirty Windows, a collection of spoken texts with music, Amarillo Ramp, pieces for the guitar, and Scriptures of the Golden Eternity.

Photos: Sonic Youth

In 1992 he founded the independent record label Smells Like Records, based in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he also resides. Along with friend and Two Dollar Guitar musician Tim Foljahn, he helped advance Cat Power’s musical career, serving as drummer on her first three albums. He also produced Blonde Redhead’s debut self-titled album in 1993 and Cat Power’s What Would the Community Think? in 1996. Steve was able to track down Lee Hazlewood in 1997 and secure permission to reissue five of the finest titles of the Hazlewood back catalog. Smells Like Records also released a collection of standards, which was the first new recording from Hazlewood released domestically in nearly two decades.

viewed r e t n I n o d r o G m i K t: A nother Aspec

Sonic Nation: The Band: Interview with Kim Gordon

Stephanie Boland | April 26th, 2015

Stephanie Boland sits down with Kim Gordon to discuss the pitfalls of an artistic persona, improvised ballet at the Frieze art fair (of course), her working process, the economics of feminism and her memoir Girl In A Band. When I mentioned to other journalists that I had this interview with Kim Gordon coming up, a lot of them told me she was a tough gig. Even those who hadn’t spoken to her themselves relayed accounts: Kim Gordon is famously reticent; she hates being asked anything; she’ll tell you how little she wants to be there. As a Sonic Youth fan—let alone as someone who’d have to write up whatever happened—I was nervous. So let me set the record straight, for future writers: Kim Gordon is not tough to interview. I have interviewed difficult subjects— people who are outright hostile to being questioned, or become angry if you ask them something they feel is outside the interview’s purview. (Incidentally, no-one warned me about these writers, who are men.) True, Gordon is obviously an introvert who takes no pleasure in doing publicity, accepting the extroversion of her job only as a necessary tax on being an artist. But she is all the things that make working with someone enjoyable: kind, polite, funny and very, very smart. Reticent as she is when talking about her own life and motivations, she opens up when the subject shifts to art—a far preferable state of affairs to the reverse. At one point in our interview, we sat in silence for some minutes while she looked up the date of a particular ballet on her phone. Kim Gordon has her priorities in order. Since the release of her memoir Girl In A Band, she’s done a lot of interviews. Gordon appeared on Women’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 with Caitlin Moran, where she was asked about her current music taste (and was forced to admit she doesn’t keep up with mainstream music). She invited the New Yorker into her home— Alex Halberstadt also seemed not to mind her uncompromising manner. Sometimes, it feels like every media outlet has asked her about Thurston Moore.

Photo: Ebet Roberts

I can’t understand why. Actually, that’s a lie; I understand good copy as well as anyone else. But if you have Kim Gordon in front of you, it seems remiss to ask about her private life when you could be asking about her artistic process. (For the record, the pedal she likes the most right now is a kind of Hendrix optic fuzz, although she’s not played bass for a while.) In the London Review Of Books, Kristen Dombek ends her Girl In A Band review by vocalising a question she intuits unspoken in the text: “if you wanted this book to be about a life destroyed, why?.” As I left the Foyles office where I met Gordon, I found myself silently asking the press who have complained about her a similar question: “if you find Kim Gordon frustrating to deal with, why?” I love that you start with this moment headed “the end”— what made you decide this is the moment to write it? Kim Gordon: Um, well, other people were starting to ask. I…yeah, it was just sort of looking back over my life, it seemed like a good time to figure out how I got to where I am. Writing is a good way for me to figure out how I’m feeling, or thinking about something.

Sonic Nation: The Band: Interview with Kim Gordon

It was hard to find a way to talk about Sonic Youth because there’s so much there to talk about, and I didn’t want to write a book about Sonic Youth; so I tried to make little essays around certain songs, and then pitch it around different things going on.

You work across so many different mediums—I guess the autobiography is a separate thing. More generally, what’s your creative process like? Is it free-flowing, intuitive? KG: It’s pretty structured. I mean, if I’m in my arts studio I’m thinking about artwork. It’s not as free-flowing as, say, one thing leading me

It’s weird doing an autobiography, of course, because you go on living after…

in one direction, or one thing leading me to another; it’s more like certain ideas are part of something. But you know, occasionally ideas will enter into something else—lyrics that I’m thinking about will end up in other work.

KG: Right! I don’t know. It’s weird, because one of the things that helped me be able to write about it was to not actually have to think about…doing interviews [laughs]. It’s more about a process: it’s something creative to do. I don’t really want to deal with talking about it.

Sometimes I will start writing as a process of thinking about ideas for an art show. And, yeah, I can sometimes only think if I’m writing. I mean, not entirely, but…I’ll write and go: “Oh, who is that!” How do you know when something’s finished? In a way the hardest bit is giving something away.

KG: I don’t know—it’s different for each thing. Sometimes you get ideas as you’re installing something; the installation is another aspect to the work. Or you get sick of working on it. With the book, I didn’t want to overthink it, or become overly precious about it, about what is or isn’t in it. I kind of wanted to just do it. And it’s not the “stamp” of my whole life; it’s a story.

“

With the book, I didn’t want to overthink it, or become overly precious about it, about what is or isn’t in it. I kind of wanted to just do it. And it’s not the “stamp” of my whole life; it’s a story.

Were there any stories that didn’t fit the narrative that you wish you could have fitted in? KG: No, I mean, there’s certain things I wish I could have articulated better…I didn’t want to think of more things to put in. Although, actually, that happened: I was talking to a friend and he was like “did you put in that story about Henry Rollins?” and I was like oh, shoot. I had to go back and put it in again. I guess I wish I’d been more articulate about the Lana Del Rey stuff. The version that went out was not even in my book. I was being lazy about articulating the difference between persona and what a person is: their image, their brand, whatever. I read that Guardian interview of hers, though, and it was definitely a thoughtless interview. KG: Yeah… I didn’t actually read that. I saw it out of context, I saw Frances Bean Cobain reacting to it. I was thinking, oh, she’s really taking her seriously, because she thinks that’s really who she is. She doesn’t realise that’s just Lana Del Rey’s image, she’s just saying it. But that’s been taken out of the book by everyone: this one thing.

KG: I know. I mean, it’s so little in my book, and I didn’t even say that in the final version. And that thing about feminism: again, it was taken out of context, but her saying “doesn’t feminism mean you can do whatever you want?”—I don’t actually think that’s what feminism means. You have to have a moral boundary. You can’t kill someone! It’s not a licence to have no responsibility about what you do. And not everything is about feminism, but I realise that celebrities get tricked into this feminist question. People get tricked into a lot of questions, or things get blown out of proportion, or plucked out of context. I shouldn’t have reacted in that way. But I felt protective of Frances; I was being reactive, in a way. But it is kind of infuriating, the media coverage of female celebrities. And artists use “feminism” as branding, without actually changing what they’re doing. KG: Right. Yeah. It’s just… it is really about equal rights and equal pay, regardless of what’s going on. It’s economic. KG: Yes! Also: why are people so excited to see women in a catfight? Still? Like that’s the most important thing.

KG: At least they weren’t talking about my marriage. But there were so many headlines. It’s annoying. What about your latest project, Body/Head? Do Sonic Youth fans say anything about the change of direction? KG: I don’t think most people at this point do. At least, live they didn’t—or they didn’t seem to. They were respectful. By the time the album came out, they were used to the idea. Is it nice to get to a more pared down form? KG: It’s nice just playing with one other person. It’s kind of like back to basics: how much you can do with two people. The music scene today is different, too. You have that wonderful line in the book where you ask “did the 90s even really happen? ”. How do you think we’ll look back on today’s scene? KG: A lot of artists on Soundcloud, in the ether. Before people are putting out CDs, they’re putting out things on Soundcloud. I don’t really pay that much attention to the music world right now. But the venues and cities, even, are different: London and New York have changed a lot. KG: I guess so. I don’t really go out. Not that much, to clubs, y’know, in New York. I don’t live in New York. It seems like there’s more money in NY—real estate’s changed. What about the arts? What’s interesting you right now? KG: I like this artist Nick Mauss—he’s got shows at the same gallery as me in New York. I was here in London last fall doing collaboration with him on this ballet during Frieze. It was inspired by a ballet that Njinsky’s sister wrote, a gossipy salon ballet. Actually, at the time, it was considered the first avant-garde ballet. It was deconstructed. Mauss worked with the Northern Ballet Company and this woman, a choreographer, who used to work with Michael Clarke. There was something going on all day long. Julian Huxtable also wrote a text; we both wrote a text, and played music at different times. That was really fun: we improvised, the dancers improvised, and that was great—to see the dancers improvise. I think it was…early 1920s? [She looks it up on her phone] 1924.

“

…why are people so excited to see women in a catfight?

Sonic Nation: The Band: Interview with Kim Gordon

Nobody went through your book and went, “Danny Elfman’s a big deal!”

How does it compare to a club, or another venue where people are there to see you? Do you like those more incidental spaces? KG: Well, that was an unusual situation, because people are just wandering in and don’t know what’s going on. I mean, it was four or five days—by the end people were more informed about it and knew what it was. But, actually, the first day this irate booth owner, gallerist, came storming over— just, actually, as I was ending, but it seemed like she’d cut me off. She was this woman with bright red hair, and she was like: this cannot happen! I paid thousands of dollars! You’re interrupting my art sales! But it was the Frieze people who commissioned it, so there wasn’t much she could do. It was funny timing. You seem to be very interested in what compels female performers to perform. Do you still feel male and female performers come to rock with different motivations?

KG: I don’t know…I hate to generalise. For great and lesser degrees, they do it because they’re seeking attention. Whether or not they’re an out and out exhibitionist is another question. I went to see the David Bowie exhibit, and it starts out with his writings, talking about how he never thought about being a performer; I thought that was really interesting because he was such a performer. I don’t know enough about him to untangle that. And, you know, there are a lot of shy people who end up being performers. It’s not surprising to me, because I tend to be more introverted, but some people are better at being out in the world as “personalities” or something like that. They really thrive on doing interviews and things. But I don’t relate to that as much. Have you got used to it yet? KG: I hate it! I find that that then becomes hard to move around in the world and do different things, if people think of you as a “personality.” You sacrifice that malleability? KG: Yeah.

Photo: David Markey

Photo: Stefano Giovannini

“

or something like that.

better at being out in the world as “personalities”

tend to be more introverted, but some people are

performers. It’s not surprising to me, because I

…there are a lot of shy people who end up being

Sonic Nation: The Band: Interview with Kim Gordon

Kool Thing (1990)

[Kim] Kool Thing sittin’ with a kiddie

Yeah!

Now you know you’re sure lookin’ pretty

Don’t be shy

Like a lover not a dancer Superboy take a chance here I don’t wanna, I don’t think so I don’t wanna, I don’t think so

Word up! Fear of a female planet? Fear of a female planet? Fear, baby! I just want to know that we can still be friends

Kool Thing let me play it with your radio

Come on, come on, come on, come on let everybody know

Move me, turn me on, baby-o

Kool thing, kool thing

I’ll be your slave Give you a shave I don’t wanna, I don’t think so I don’t wanna, I don’t think so [Chuck D] Yeah, tell’em about it, Hit’em where it hurts Hey, Kool Thing, come here, sit down

When you’re a star, I know you’ll fix everything Now you know you’re sure lookin’ pretty Rock the beat just a little faster Now I know you are the master I don’t wanna, I don’t think so I don’t wanna, I don’t think so

There’s something I go to ask you. I just wanna know, what are you gonna do for me? I mean, are you gonna liberate us girls From male white corporate oppression? Tell it like it is! Huh?

Kool thing walkin’ like a panther Come on and give me an answer Kool thing walkin’ like a panther What’d he say? I don’t wanna, I don’t think so I don’t wanna, I don’t think so

“

I’ve been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I’ve always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I’ve never released it. —Sufjan Stevens

Sonic Nation: The Band: Song Lyrics

Photo: Sonic Youth

e Ta lk s or Mo on st ur Th : ns io ss Se Pa ste So nic Yo uth d an rk Yo w Ne s, es sn ou Co nsci

Sonic Nation: The Band: Interview with Thurston Moore

By Matthew Oshinsky | June 20, 2017

The towering (literally) post-punk guitarist just wants you to make something. On first listen, Thurston Moore’s new solo album, Rock n Roll Consciousness, has all the sonic hallmarks that fans have come to expect from the ex-Sonic Youth guitarist over more than 30 years of recording. There is Moore’s famously unhurried tenor, his dynamic guitar with its alternately brooding valleys and freaked-out peaks, and his trademark urban-poet lyricism. One song, “Smoke of Dreams,” even offers a paean to New York, the city that nurtured Sonic Youth in the late 1970s and ‘80s and helped transform the foursome from art-world rejects into globe-trotting post-punk darlings. Look a little closer and you can see the subtle but significant evolutions in Moore’s life and music. He’s based in London now, having split from his longtime wife, the ex-Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon. His relatively new band—with Deb Googe on bass, James Sedwards on guitar and Sonic Youth mainstay Steve Shelley on drums—is at once lither and sturdier than it was on Moore’s 2014 solo outing, The Best Day. But most of all, Moore seems to be creating music with more precision and purpose than he has in years, with themes of mindfulness, femininity (thanks to lyrics by the London-based poet Radieux Radio), and transcendence coursing through the five sauntering songs on Rock n Roll Consciousness. Moore, 58, visited the Paste Studio recently to talk about Rock n Roll Consciousness, his relationship with mysticism and poetry, the sad decline of art you can hold in your hands, and how the legacy of Sonic Youth seeps into the music he makes now.

Your new solo record, Rock n Roll Consciousness, was recorded with the band that you’ve been playing with for a few years now. Is this the music you would have produced anyway with whatever musicians you had in the studio, or is this the product of these four musicians specifically? Thurston Moore: I suppose that as far as songwriting goes, I think maybe I would have written these songs regardless of who I was playing with, but I was thinking about who they were when I was writing those songs, so it’s a little bit hard to answer.

Photo: Thurston Moore

“

Sonic Youth was a forum for all of us to bring something into. No matter what you brought into it, no matter how alpha I was bringing stuff in or whatever, it didn’t really matter. It was all about it existing in that context. Whereas in this group, I’m basically

Sonic Nation: The Band: Interview with Thurston Moore

putting my name on the marquee.

Photo: Thurston Moore

I knew that the guitar player in my group, James Sedwards, I wanted him to sort of express himself in a way that I know he can, which is amazingly. I was thinking about that in some of the songs, like, “This section would be really cool with James’s lead guitar on it.” The first record we did a few years ago, called The Best Day, that was not in my mind at all. In fact, I didn’t realize what the group would be until we actually started day one of that first session. Is this like what your process was in Sonic Youth, where you would bring a song structure to the group and have those guys fill it out with their idiosyncrasies? TM: With Sonic Youth it was a different experience, because we all came up together since we were in our early 20s, and we were together for, like, 25-plus years. The relationship was really based on having this really democratic forum where we would all work together. Regardless of who brought what into a session, it became a group composition, and it was credited as such and it always would be. I would never be so presumptuous to say, “I’m writing the lyricism of Steve Shelley’s drum playing,” and he’s certainly not saying, “Well I helped on those lyrics you’re singing.” These conversations never really arose so much. I think maybe I might have had those feelings about that at some point in the ‘90s. I was like, wait a minute, I feel like maybe I should get maybe a little more of a share because I wrote these lyrics or these structures or whatever. So Sonic Youth wasn’t exactly a democracy… TM: That group was a forum for all of us to bring something into. No matter what you brought into it, no matter how alpha I was bringing stuff in or whatever, it didn’t really matter. It was all about it existing in that context. Whereas in this group, I’m basically putting my name on the marquee. I have chosen [my bandmates] to be in my solo group for their expertise.

I know they’re going to play something really amazing and they’re going to come up with their own musicality. That’s why I want to work with them, but I’m going to take all the songwriting credit. That relationship is a bit of a conflict there. I remember I read this interview with David Bowie where he was just saying, “It’s my record,” you know? You see interviews with some of the musicians on his records saying, “I wrote that riff. That’s my song.” It may very well be, but it was in the employ of this vision. I’m not so hard-lined as that, it’s just I feel like I want to be in more of a four-piece gang in a way. I like the idea of a group. I wish I could have a group name besides Thurston Moore Group. Thurston Moore is the name on the record—you could just put “group” at the end. TM: I actually was going to. I did a record called Chelsea Light Moving. It originally was Thurston Moore, and the record was called Chelsea Light Moving. At that time I was like, maybe I’ll just use that as a band name. That’s a really good band name,” as opposed to just a record title.

Or you could call the album Thurston Moore. TM: Sonic Youth went through that, too. At some point I wanted to really change the name. When we were recording a record called Washing Machine, there was this idea that we bandied about like, let’s call the band Washing Machine. Let’s just, like, stop Sonic Youth and call it Washing Machine, and that’ll be our next record. At that time we kind of seriously considered this, I think. We were going out on this impending tour supporting R.E.M. in some places in the USA. We said, “Can you list us as Washing Machine?” and they were just like, “No, if you wanna play the gigs you’re playing them as Sonic Youth. You can’t play them as Washing Machine.” I was like, “But we’re the same people. We’re playing the same music.”

Do you find now that these many years later, even as you make your solo albums, that there’s an expectation of what a Thurston Moore record sounds like? TM: I realize that I have a certain language that I use, and I am not trying to create some wholly other new thing just to reinvent or whatever. I like having this ongoing, identifiable sound, or whatever I have, or whatever anybody has. I go to certain records by all different artists, knowing that I appreciate what they do, and I want to hear what they do all the time. Sometimes they think they can change it up and it can be really surprising and wonderful, and sometimes it’s really frustrating, because I like so much what they do, and it’s like, no, no, no, don’t wear that cloak of some other genre.

Sonic Nation: The Band: Interview with Thurston Moore

It seems a balance that a lot of bands need to strike is that they don’t want to get hit for sounding the same, but they don’t want to get hit for moving too far out of their zone.

TM: To me, I feel like I’m always sort of defined by whatever contemporary experience I’m living in, so it’s like, that’s always going to be there. The record I write now is hardly the record I would have written 10 years ago, and it’s not going to be the record I write in 10 years. I trust the actuality of the moment to be the flavor of the record. I like genres that have a community sound, like, “Oh, reggae, it all sounds the same.” But it’s like, “Well, I like that.” I like that there’s this shared idea of what these musical aspects are in reggae, or in hardcore, or in black metal. I like knowing that these genres have these shared communities of sounds and everybody sort of agrees on certain tropes. Maybe Sonic Youth didn’t really have that so much, because we were sort of taking from so many different places, and all these traditional places, and all of these unorthodox places as well, and trying to create all these different collaborations with the experimental and the traditional.

In terms of environments, you’re still closely associated with New York of the ‘70s and ‘80s, when Sonic Youth were at their peak. But now you’re based in London. Now that you have a certain remove, have you given up on New York being what it was to you in the ‘80s and what it could be for young people now? TM: I would never disparage the city for its contemporary makeup that it has. It is quite different from what I experienced in the ‘70s into the ‘80s. It certainly has become a more moneyed city. It’s become a city that, in a way, is safer, due to real-estate demanding a more moneyed, social culture. There’s pros and cons to what that is. It was a lot of street life, a lot of street crime, a lot of desperation in the inner city in the ‘70s. Do I miss that? I don’t know. I have a romantic retrospect on it, because it’s wholly poverty, as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the streets with no money and writing poetry and sort of just being bards to the beatific visions of the urban poet. Yeah, that was a great time to be and I think in a way that aesthetic still exists for a lot of young artists, but they don’t really necessitate the city anymore because we’re so interconnected. The utopia of the internet keeps us in a place where we don’t have to leave the confines of wherever we live and still share, and I like that. The other thing about the internet is that there are so many different sub-groups, so many specific sounds targeted to specific people, that it’s easy to like what you like and not venture too far outside of it. Does that have the larger effect of stripping rock music of its ability to be this revolutionary force if it’s compartmentalized so cleanly to various audiences? TM: Well, I mean, it certainly is more factionalized. You are in this bubble on the internet for things like music, art, entertainment, as well as other dialogues— political dialogue, you know. It’s easy to see how insidious it is and how it can be balanced and possibly rectified by continuing to work in the physical world.

Photo: Nick Sansano

When bands ask me, “What did you guys do? What should we do? We have all these songs,” I say, “Well, just keep putting them out there in the digital realm and on your social media and on the Soundclouds of the world—but make something. Make something that is vibratory, that you can touch, that you created in the physical world, and don’t do it for money. You have to use money to do it, but you don’t have to use that much money.” There’s lots of economic means of making things, whether it be a cassette or a stapled book or whatever you do. These things are really elemental, and you can gift them, and by gifting them it’s like you’re passing something on and it’s through touch, it’s through all the senses of the human animal. That is a really good place to start. Do that. I don’t really ever see digital media overtaking it. I can see it being a dominant force of communication, as it already is. But I also see the library of extensions of the physical self existing—the book, the magazine, the record, the CD, whatever it is. Anything you can touch, you can smell, you can taste, you can lick. Are you still a buyer of music? TM: That’s all I do. I find my meditation in going into primarily secondhand stores. I’m all about vintage. If it’s going to be new, just keep it in the digital media. I’m all about being in that zone where you have the history, and the history of the artifacts and the archives just kind of palpitating… We’re sitting in one right now, here at the Paste Studio.

Sonic Nation: The Band: Interview with Thurston Moore

TM: With all these live recordings around us.

This is actual tape. You could burn this in a fire and it would be gone. TM: Even if you burn it, it becomes smoke, it becomes part of the atmosphere. I find that all of these documents are really sort of spiritual documents, and I find solace in it. I find intrigue in it; I find inspiration in it. I’ll spend enormous amounts of time in these places and either by myself or with like minded compatriots, it’s just being there. Those are your friends. They’re your cards, and you’re giving around tickets to each other. I like that activity. It’s fairly old-fashioned, too, but I like old-fashioned. I like old. I’m gonna call the record, We Are the New Old. That’s a working title. I went for Rock n Roll Consciousness, because it just, I don’t know why. It felt right to me.

About that, you’ve been teaching a poetry workshop at Naropa University in Colorado, which was founded by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa. So consciousness is probably a concept that’s on your mind these days. TM: [Trungpa] was the teacher for Allen Ginsberg as far as his Buddhist practice was concerned. Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman founded the summer writing workshop in 1974, and it is called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I became aware of it when my fascination with the history of underground poetry production came into play as I got older into my 40s. I was always interested in literature and always interested in marginalized literature and beat literature and its relationship to what I liked in music, you know, the relationship between literature and music from Bob Dylan, to Patti Smith, to most of punk rock and more of art rock and intellectual rock. The literary was key as an element, and that was something that led me into investigating post-war poetry that was kind of lost from the shelves. Eventually I started teaching there. I wasn’t really wanting to have it become something that became my thing. I wasn’t looking for authority like a teacher in the realm of religious thought, but I liked a lot of what I was reading, and the word “consciousness” is always bandied about there.

“

So what does that word mean to you now? TM: Consciousness, the whole idea of mindfulness through meditation. You see the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical in the sense of universality, which has all these great concepts of kindness and sharing. It’s really a complete and benign opposition to what we see in the political agendas that we’re sort of being ensnared by, about greed and the devaluation of women and those who are at a loss from poverty and war. I like these concepts and the idea of consciousness, and I was like, well where do I find that, through what meditation? I don’t really feel like I want to get into the practice of meditation so much, but I do get something from it in some other sense. I said, “I guess what people find in meditation I find in blaring feedback from an amplifier.” Where is that meditation coming from? It’s devotional. I really love it. It’s really spiritual. I see rock ‘n’ roll as being, historically, coming from the voice of the people of the earth. It comes from gospel, it comes from church, it comes from this kind of spiritual mindedness. Then it becomes really interesting when it is sort of treated academically. You have people like John Cage coming out of academy, going like, how can we liberate this idea of music being so stuck in academy? Let’s take that out of there and focus on these other things that can open it up. Which he did so magnificently. Rock ‘n’ roll does it, too. It’s this chain-breaking kind of idea of music. That’s where I was like, oh, it’s rock ‘n’ roll consciousness.” Rock ‘n’ roll being anything and everything. It’s not just Chuck Berry—God bless Chuck Berry—but it’s everything. It is gospel, it is hip-hop, it is R&B, it is everything. It’s jazz, it’s rock ‘n’ roll, and I like the idea of what that is. That was the grandiosity of that title.

What people find in meditation I find in blaring feedback from an amplifier. Where is that meditation coming from? It’s devotional. 61

TimTeilmie Hl ii sn te ory

shoulder

Musical style & i n fluences

Alternative tunings Sonic Youth’s sound relied very heavily on the use of alternative tunings. Scordatura on stringed instruments has been used for centuries and alternative guitar tunings had been used for decades in blues music, and to a limited degree in rock music (such as with Lou Reed’s Ostrich guitar on The Velvet Underground & Nico). Michael Azerrad writes that early in their career, [Sonic Youth] could only afford cheap guitars, and cheap guitars sounded like cheap guitars. But with weird tunings or something jammed under a particular fret, those humble instruments could sound rather amazing—bang a drum stick on a cheap Japanese Stratocaster copy in the right tuning, crank the amplifier to within an inch of its life and it will sound like church bells. The tunings were painstakingly developed by Moore and Ranaldo during the band’s rehearsals; Moore once reported that the odd tunings were an attempt to introduce new sounds: “When you’re playing in standard tuning all the time [...] things sound pretty standard.” Rather than re-tune for every song, Sonic Youth generally used a particular guitar for one or two songs, and would take dozens of instruments on tour. This would be the source of much trouble for the band, as some songs rely on specific guitars that have been uniquely prepared.

Sonic Nation: The Music: Musical style & influences

Influences

Moore said that they were heavily influenced by The Velvet Underground. Besides The Stooges, Branca, Patti Smith, Wire, Public Image Ltd. and French avant-gardist Brigitte Fontaine, another influence was 1980s-era hardcore punk; after seeing Minor Threat perform in May 1982, Moore declared them “the greatest live band I have ever seen”. He also saw The Faith performing in 1981 and had a strong admiration towards their only two records, a split LP with fellow Washington, DC hardcore band Void and the EP Subject to Change. While recognizing that their own music was very different from hardcore, Moore and Gordon, especially, were impressed by hardcore’s speed and intensity, and by the nationwide network of musicians and fans. “It was great”, said Moore, “the whole thing with slam dancing and stage diving, that was far more exciting than pogoing and spitting. [...] I thought hardcore was very musical and very radical.”

Photo previous page: J. Scott Wynn/Retna

Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo expressed on numerous occasions their admiration for the music of Joni Mitchell, such as this quote by Thurston Moore: “Joni Mitchell! I’ve used elements of her songwriting and guitar playing, and no one would ever know about it.” Additionally, as with Sonic Youth, Joni Mitchell has always used a number of alternative tunings. The band named a song after her, “Hey Joni”. Members of the band have also maintained relationships with other avant-garde artists from other genres and even other media, drawing influence from the work of John Cage and Henry Cowell. For a 1988 John Peel Session, Sonic Youth covered three songs by The Fall and “Victoria” by The Kinks, also covered by The Fall.

Sonic Youth has featured album art by several wellknown avant-garde visual artists, such as Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler and Gerhard Richter, whose paintings from his “Candles” series was used as artwork on Daydream Nation.

Musical instruments Sonic Youth’s sound was generated by their vast collection of unique and exclusive instruments; from guitars altered to meet the needs of the unique tunings employed to effects and amps designed to around their whims, Sonic Youth used a wide array of custom instruments in creating their sound.

Photo: Monica Dee/Retna

Youth c i n o S y b d e c y n ue flm eliHistor Ti 10 Acts in

shoulder

The voice of underground New York for a time, Sonic Youth were the keystone to the American noise rock movement, but gave birth to many groups that would go on to interpret their own version of the quartet’s post-punk experiments in the process. So many genres of popular (and not-so) music came in the wake of Sonic Youth’s explosion; others were irreparably changed by their presence. Sonic Youth’s sound was important, but the DIY nature of how artists approached music, business and image changed with them too.

shoulder

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I can feel it in my bones

Schizophrenia (1987)

Schizophrenia is taking me home

Photo: Jill Morrison; Opposite: Monica Dee/Retna

Sonic Nation: The Music: Musical style & influences

Photo: Jill Morrison

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Sonic Nation: The Music: Musical style & influences

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Thurston Moore

away from it being a solo song.

into a Sonic Youth song and completely

whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it

with the song and it totally changes it from

Each member does whatever they want

Studio albums 1982 / Sonic Youth Sonic Youth was the band’s debut record, featuring five songs recorded in late ‘81 with original drummer Richard Edson. Though considered an EP by some, the band have always referred to it as the first album, and that is the official status appointed to it for the purposes of this site.

1983 / Confusion Is Sex

Sonic Nation: The Music: Discography

Confusion Is Sex was Sonic Youth’s second release, this time with interim drummer Jim Sclavunos behind the kit, aside from two tracks which feature Bob Bert. The album was originally conceived as a quickie single, but as more songs were written they decided to record all of their new material instead, laying the foundation for their first full-length release.

1985 / Bad Moon Rising Bad Moon Rising was preceded by the “Death Valley ‘69” 7” single in 1984 which featured demo versions of both “Death Valley” and “Brave Men Run” from Bad Moon Rising. The original 12” release contained 8 songs, from the majestic opening notes of “Intro” to Lydia Lunch’s furious howl that ends “Death Valley ‘69”—all songs segue together except for the side break between “I Love Her All The Time” and “Ghost Bitch.” Bad Moon Rising also marks Sonic Youth’s first music video.

Discography 1986 / EVOL EVOL was significant for one fairly obvious reason: the addition of Steve Shelley behind the kit. Steve joined the band in mid 1985, and this is the first album he plays on. EVOL also features the first real “guest appearance” on a Sonic Youth album—Mike Watt, who contributes bass to “In The Kingdom #19” and the non-LP bonus track “Bubblegum”. “Shadow Of A Doubt” became their second music video.

1987 / Sister Sister was Sonic Youth’s second consecutive album with the same drummer performing on all tracks. Obviously, SY had found their groove w/Steve behind the beats, and it’s with those beats that “Sister” begins, kicking off with a little tune called “Schizophrenia” that’s been a sonic staple since its composition. It’s on this track that Thurston and Kim first trade verses, and that’s just one of several sonic firsts on this LP, also including use of acoustic guitar for melodic purposes, use of a Moog synthesizer, and the return of Thurston on bass for the first time since Confusion Is Sex. This was the first Sonic Youth album that didn’t have a proper single release.

1988 / Daydrea m Nation Daydream Nation was SY’s first double-LP, clocking in at just over 70 minutes. This was their last album recorded for an “independent” label, and was arguably the record that drew the strongest major label attention. It kicks off with the anthemic “Teenage Riot,” again pairing Kim and Thurston vocally, and never lets up, boasting an unprecedented three Lee songs, another Mike Watt appearance, and the sprawling “Trilogy” which closes the record. Three singles were released from the album, along with various live versions of “Silver Rocket,” and all 4 songs had video clips filmed.

Studio albums 1989 / The W hitey Album The Whitey Album sort of originated with a long-running band joke involving SY’s claim to one day cover The Beatles’ White Album in its entirety—somehow this project morphed into a twisted beatbox/sampler experiment masquerading as a tribute to Madonna…SY even took Madonna’s surname for their own, calling themselves “Ciccone Youth.” The first Ciccone Youth single, featuring SY’s version of “Into The Groovey” and Mike Watt’s cover of “Burnin’ Up” was initially released in 1986. Ciccone Youth unveiled themselves again on the Master= Dik EP, and decided to round out an entire album in late ‘87/early ‘88.

1990 / Goo

Sonic Nation: The Music: Discography

Goo was Sonic Youth’s first for DGC/Geffen. The album was their major label debut, and with arena rock staples like “Kool Thing” and “Dirty Boots” deep in its grooves, it allowed Sonic Youth to enter the mainstream world, destroy everything in their path, and emerge victorious, riding the top 10 charts to sonic stardom and glory…or at least get them the opening spot on the 1991 Crazy Horse tour.

1992 / Dirty Dirty was the second album recorded for DGC/Geffen. They went into the studio with a perhaps unprecedented abundance of material, and ended up issuing a double-vinyl release w/an exclusive bonus track, “Stalker.” A “limited” amount of the CD versions featured a “dirty picture” in the tray liner. Four singles were released, each with a video, all of which are now available on the Corporate Ghost DVD. Dirty also marks the first significant appearance of three-guitar/no-bass Sonic Youth, present on “Swimsuit Issue,” “Wish Fulfillment” and “On The Strip.”

1994 / Experimental Jet, Trash & No Star Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star was the first record for which SY did not tour. It’s also the first album since Sister to include a lyric sheet (vinyl only), and the first album since Bad Moon Rising which doesn’t feature any songs with Lee on lead vocal. Jet Set is also the last record to heavily feature Kim on bass—she primarily plays guitar on all of the subsequent albums.

1995 / Washing Machine Washing Machine is the first record to almost exclusively feature Kim on guitar rather than bass, and contains some of their lengthiest material since Goo and Daydream Nation, including the epic “Diamond Sea” which drifts onward for an unprecedented 20 minutes, still the longest track on any SY album (excluding the SYR releases). Incidentally, “The Diamond Sea” would prove to be one of the band’s most popular songs, and it along with SY’s headlining spot on the summer Lollapalooza tour would introduce legions of new fans to their music.

1998 / A Thousand Leaves A Thousand Leaves followed Sonic Youth’s release of three EPs on their own newly established record label. For the first time, SY debuted their new material live in a largely instrumental shape, sprawling compositions allowed to naturally progress with each performance. With their own studio capable of producing more than just demos, they were now able to record virtually anything they wanted, and they enlisted former Confusion is Sex producer Wharton Tiers to assist with the sessions, paving the way for the abundance of material released by the band in 1997 and 1998.

Studio albums 2000 / N YC Ghosts & Flowers NYC Ghosts & Flowers is Sonic Youth’s thirteenth album, and yet manages to sound fresh and familiar at the same time—probably largely due to the theft of an extensive amount of their gear directly prior to the album’s composition. It’s also their shortest record in years, a fact that shouldn’t be interpreted as lack of new ideas— instead, Sonic Youth offer a fury of chaotic, melodic, and psychotic soundwaves that leave you wanting more

2002 / Murray Street Murray Street was released Japan, Europe, and then North America. Some French copies of the album came with a limited edition bonus blue 10” featuring 3 exclusive tracks from SY’s recent soundtrack works: “Derniere Minute Electrifee” on one side, “Le Paysage Zim Zum” and “Coca Neon Kamera Sutra” on the other. Only 500 of these were available. In North America, the disc is enhanced, with a screen saver, plus a link to a “secret site” on sonicyouth.com that features exclusive promo photographs, desktop backgrounds, mp3 downloads, and two music videos. The gatefold vinyl edition is available via Smells Like Records on the “Goofin’” imprint.

2004 / Sonic Nurse With Jim O’Rourke continuing his role as the ‘fifth sonic,’ Sonic Nurse feels like the logical continuation of the ground established with Murray Street, but through the revisitation of “vintage” sonic tunings, mixes the complexity of the quintet dynamic with a familiar overtone. Unlike the previous two albums, Nurse clocks in over an hour, with ten tracks, most featuring extended instrumental extrapolations. The band continues to provide exclusive online “enhanced” CD content, this time including a video for album closer Peace Attack.

2009 / Rather Ripped Rather Ripped is Sonic Youth’s, their first without Jim O’Rourke’s assistance since A Thousand Leaves. Here, SY provide a 12-song set of concise melodic rockers, recorded once again at Sear Sound, capturing crystal clear guitar tones, both warm and bright. The band’s own Echo Canyon studio would close forever shortly before the album’s release, and some of the last tracks recorded were two Rather Ripped outtakes that appear on a companion 7.” Kim plays bass on all tracks but one, Lee’s “Rats,” which features Thurston on bass for the first time since “My Friend Goo”. Former Free Kitten/ Pavement bassist Mark Ibold was enlisted for the subsequent tour.

Breaking the clockwork-like routine they’ve followed for the last decade, there was a 3-year gap between The Eternal and their last studio LP Rather Ripped, for the first time since Washing Machine/A Thousand Leaves. Several factors played into this, like relearning the Daydream Nation material around the time in their standard cycle when they’d begin working on new tunes. However, the fact that this album would be their first since leaving Geffen after a 20-year relationship meant that they had to find the right venue to release it, which they did, in Matador Records. This is also the first album recorded with Mark Ibold on bass, no stranger to Matador Records himself. Another noted first is that many of the songs feature all three vocalists in the band singing in unison, or playing off each other, a practice SY had rarely employed until now.

Sonic Nation: The Music: Discography

2009 / The Eternal

Extended Plays 1983 / Kill Yr Idols This EP, released just half a year after Confusion Is Sex, features several cuts from Confusion, one live recording, and 3 new songs recorded live to 2-track at Wharton’s studio in October 1983. “Shaking Hell” was recorded on October 15th, 1983 at Plugg Club in NYC. Kill Yr Idols was the first Sonic Youth release on Zensor, hence the inclusion of 2 songs from Confusion is Sex, which wasn’t released on Zensor until later. The first pressing had title super-imposed over Confusion Is Sex cover. The four non-Confusion songs were included as bonus tracks on the DGC reissue of in 1995.

1987 / Master=Dik

Sonic Nation: The Music: Discography

“Master= Dik” is different than on the Sister CD—this version has a beatbox track instead of Steve’s live drums. “Beat on the Brat” recorded at Wharton’s in NYC. The inner sleeve features a rant by Ben Weasel from Maximum Rocknroll November 1987. Although the record itself says 1987, this seems to have been released in January 1988. This was a surprising candidate for the Goofin’ reissue treatment, appearing in 2008 with no bonus tracks.

1990 / 4 Tunna Brix 4 Tunna Brix is an official 12” bootleg. All songs are Fall covers (Victoria originally a Kinks song) from the October 19th, 1988 Peel Session and was released by Sonic Youth themselves on their Goofin’ label.

1993 / W hores Moaning This EP was released to coincide with Sonic Youth’s January/ February 1993 tour in Australia and New Zealand. The title is a parody of Nirvana’s 1992 limited tour EP entitled Hormoaning. It is essentially the “Sugar Kane” single with some tweaking, it features the radio edit of “Sugar Kane,” “Personality Crisis” from the Sassy flexi (recorded July ‘90), a prototype instrumental of “Shoot” from December ‘91 called “The End Of The End Of The Ugly,” “Is It My Body” from the Sub Pop Alice Cooper tribute (recorded April ‘91), and the lengthy instrumental “Tamra” from November 1991.

1994 / TV Shit TV Shit is a series of covers, all of the same track: Washington, DC hardcore punk band Youth Brigade’s song “No Song II”. The original version was a one-second song consisting of the spoken word “no.” The album cover’s spine and back cover (with the exception of the photo) were from the Karlheinz Stockhausen album Gesang der Jünglinge, which is often credited as being the first electronic album. Brian Flota of AllMusic called the EP “a fun, throwaway exercise” and “a must for all Sonic Youth fans, and it will alienate just about everyone else”.

1998 / Silver Session for David Knuth The Silver Sessions were taken from an evening when Sonic Youth had to do vocal overdubs for A Thousand Leaves—the band upstairs was hammering out some funky metal overdrive, so they decided to fight fire with molten lava and turned every amp to 10+ and leaned as many guitars and basses they could plug in against them. They ran an outmoded beatbox through the PA and it blew out horrendous distorted pulsations. Of course they recorded the whole thing later.

Live albums 1984 / Sonic Death Sonic Death is a vastly underrated audio collage recorded live between 1981 and 1983. It was originally a cassette release compiled by Thurston on his own label, Ecstatic Peace!. There was no track listing, just “side 1” and “side 2.” When SST and Blast First simultaneously reissued Sonic Death in 1988 on cassette and CD, no attempt was made to isolate the tracks, the CD just separated side 1 and side 2 onto 2 tracks. It’s not clear whether or not Sonic Death is an album per se, but it’s without a doubt an indispensable recording and a perfect snapshot of the first 3 years of Sonic Youth’s musical output.

1986 / Walls Have Ears Originally suggested (half-jokingly) by Moore to be put out as a 2x10” in gatefold, the band finally said “no.” Blast First went ahead anyway (was not created by Blast First for official bootlegs) and when the band heard it was out it was withdrawn (ie. all remaining copies were allowed to be sold). The official pressing was a numbered edition of 2000, though there are more unnumbered copies indicating a second press.

1991 / Hold That Tiger Hold That Tiger was recorded October 14th, 1987 at Cabaret Metro in Chicago, IL. Released on the band’s own “official bootleg” label Goofin’ (which also released “4 Tunna Brix”). It sounds as though the recording runs a bit fast, possibly to fit onto the vinyl? The final 4 songs are Ramones covers.

1992 / Live at the Continental Club Recorded live April 12th, 1986 in Austin, TX at the Continental Club. This was the first gig where the bulk of EVOL was debuted. Sonic Death members received this disc free upon joining. You could also buy it thru Sonic Death for $13.50. Lee designed the artwork.

In August 1985, Sonic Youth toured North America in support of Bad Moon Rising. Steve Shelley had only been in the band for a few months, and these were his first shows with SY outside of NYC. The tour opener on August 1st in Columbus, OH was released on video by Atavistic. Ten days later, the band played Chicago for the first time. A recording of this show appeared on a fairly common bootleg in the early 90s called Anarchy at St Mary’s Place, but access to the four-track source inspired the band to remix and release the show in its entirety on their Goofin’ label. The show is a great document of this era of the band. They open with “Halloween” and the suite of Bad Moon Rising material, then perform a new song that only appeared on this tour—a piece called “Kat ‘n’ Hat” that Lee was trying to develop a vocal part for before it was abandoned.

Sonic Nation: The Music: Discography

2012 / Smart Bar Chicago 1985

Bull in the Heather (1994) Sonic Nation: The Music: Song lyrics

[Kim] 10, 20, 30, 40

10, 20, 30, 40

Tell me that you wanna hold me

Tell me that you wanna scold me

Tell me that you wanna bore me

Tell me that you a-dore me

Tell me that you gotta show me

Tell me that you’re famous for me

Tell me that you need to slowly

Tell me that yr gonna score me

Tell me that yr burning for me

Tell me that you gotta show me

Tell me that you can’t afford me

Tell me that you need to sorely

Time to tell yr dirty story

Time to tell yr love story

Time f’r turning over and over

Time f’r turning four leaf clover

Betting on the bull in the heather

Pattern Recognition (2004)

I’m a cool hunter making you my way

Can you sell me

Like a brand name you’ll replay

Yesterday’s girl Cuz everyday I feel more like her

I will know you

Oh baby baby

I won’t show you, yeah yeah

Please don’t go

You’re the one [x4] Pattern recognition Heat-seeking missile freak

Is kind of slow

Black magick

Like a cool hunter watch the disarray

Scared to speak

Keep your secret foolish head away

I will know you

I won’t show you, yeah yeah

Will you buy me a shaky heart

Close your eyes and feel the fun

Let’s forget has torn me apart

Pattern recognition’s on the run

I will know you

I won’t show you, yeah yeah

I won’t show you, yeah yeah yeah

You’re the one [x4]

TCihmaerltiHHiissttoorryy

Peak Pos WoC

Date

Album Title

10/29/88

Daydream Nation

02/04/89

The Whitey Album

07/07/90

Goo

05/04/91

Dirty Boots â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Plus 5 Live Tracks

08/01/92

Dirty

05/21/94

Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star

10/14/95

Washing Machine

05/23/98

A Thousand Leaves

06/22/02

Murray Street

06/17/06

Rather Ripped

06/20/09

The Eternal

Peak Pos WoC

Date

Song Title

09/15/90

Kool Thing

07/11/92

100%

11/07/92

Youth Against Fascism

04/03/93

Sugar Kane

05/07/94

Bill in the Heather

09/10/94

Yesterday Once More/Superstar

04/27/96

Little Trouble Girl

07/11/98

Sunday

Bibliography Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the America Indie

Underground 1981–1991. Little, Brown and Company, 2002.

AZ Lyrics. “Sonic Youth Lyrics.” www.azlyrics.com/s/sonicyouth. BBC. “10 acts influenced by Sonic Youth.” www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/

articles/3QyNq7TM6lJdC0N8xd8xJzY/10-acts-influenced-by-sonic-youth.

Boland, Stephanie. “Another Aspect: Kim Gordon Interviewed.” The Quietus, 26 April 2015, www.thequietus.com/articles/17757-kim-gordon-girl-in-a-band-book interview-art-persona. Browne, David. Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth. Da Capo Press, 2008. Caroline. “Sonic Youth | Timeline.” www.carolinetimeline.com/sonicyouth.

Sonic Nation: Bibliography

Official Carts. “Sonic Youth.” 2018, www.officialcharts.com/artist/26459/sonic-youth.

Oshinsky, Matthew. “Paste Sessions: Thurston Moore Talks Consciousness, New York

and Sonic Youth.” Paste Magazine, 20 June 2017,

www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/watch-thurston-moore-talks. Sonic Youth. “The official website of Sonic Youth.” 2011, www.sonicyouth.com. Stearns, Michael. 331/3 : Daydream Nation. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2007. Wikipedia. “Sonic Youth.” 2018, www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Youth.

Compiled and designed by Jill Morrison Infographics by Jill Morrison Typeset by Jill Morrison in the Frutiger family and VTypewriterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Remington Portable. Printed on 100# Text Premium Matte paper by Blurb. ÂŠ 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without permission.

Index

Symbols

4 Tunna Brix 78, 80

Daydream Nation 26, 30, 65, 73, 75,

77, 84, 86

42, 44, 52, 86

“Death Valley ‘69” 72 Del Rey, Lana 45

Greene Street Studios 26

All Tomorrow’s Parties 34

DGC 11, 74, 78

Amarillo Ramp 41

Dick, Philip K. 25

Arcadians, The 14, 40

Dinosaur Jr 20, 22, 28

hardcore 17 “Hey Joni” 65

A Thousand Leaves 75, 77, 79, 84

avant-garde 11, 20, 34, 46, 65

East Village 9, 15

Homestead 22

Azerrad, Michael 64

Echo Canyon 34, 77

Hold That Tiger 80

Edson, Richard 15, 72

Ibold, Mark 35, 77

EMI 28

Bad Moon Rising 30, 72, 81

Enigma Records 28

Beatles, The 11, 74

Eternal, The 36, 77, 84

Bert, Bob 18, 33, 41, 72

EVOL 22, 23, 25, 26, 30, 73, 81

Best Day, The 52, 55

Experimental Jet Set, Trash and

Billboard 22, 31 Blast First 28, 30, 80 Body/Head 40, 46

No Star 75 Expressway to Yr. Skull 31

Bowie, David 47, 55

Branca, Glenn 9, 12, 14, 41

Faith and Morals 41

Browne, David 36

feminism 42, 45

“Bull in the Heather” 82

Flucts, The 12

“I Dreamed I Dream” 10 independent 28, 30, 41, 73 indie 9, 11, 22, 23, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33 I.R.S. Records 28

J jazz 8, 12, 14, 15, 20, 59

Fontaine, Brigitte 64

Kill Your Idols 34 Kill Yr Idols 78 “Kool Thing” 50, 74, 85

Free Kitten 40, 77

Frieze 42, 46, 47

Lollapalooza 35, 36, 75

Ciccone Youth 74

London Review Of Books 44

CMJ 22, 30, 31

Geffen 11, 31, 36, 74, 77

college radio 22, 26, 28

Ginsberg, Allen 56, 59

Confusion Is Sex 25, 72, 73, 78

Girl in a Band 37

Madonna 22, 74

Continental Club 81

Glitterbust 40

Male Bonding 14, 40

Crary, Scott 34

Goo 31, 74, 75, 77, 84

Master= Dik 74, 78

Crucifucks, The 41

Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of

Matablog 36

Capitol Records 28 Carducci, Joe 11

Sonic Nation: Index

Gordon, Kim 5, 12, 22, 25, 36, 40, 41,

Albini, Steve 25, 28

art rock 18, 59

Goofin 76, 78, 80, 81

Sonic Youth 36, 86

Los Angeles 40

Matador Records 36, 77

Ramones, The 12

Velvet Underground, The 15, 64

Maximumrocknroll 28

Ranaldo, Lee 8, 9, 12, 35, 36, 41, 65

Village Voice Pazz & Jop 26, 30

MCA Records 28

Rather Ripped 35, 77, 84

Melody Maker 22, 30

Red Milk 14, 40

Minor Threat 17, 64

reggae 15, 18, 56

Walls Have Ears 30, 31, 80

Mitchell, Joni 65

Riot Grrrl 26

Warhol 20, 25

Moore, Thurston 5, 12, 36, 37, 40, 41,

Rock n Roll Consciousness 52

Washing Machine 55, 75, 77, 84

Rolling Stone 30, 36

Watt, Mike 73, 74

42, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 65, 71, 86 Murray Street 34, 76, 84

N New York 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,

Weasel, Ben 78 White Album 74

Savage Pencil 41

Whitey Album, The 74, 84

“Schizophrenia” 25, 68, 73

Whores Moaning 79

Shelley, Steve 28, 52, 55, 73, 81

20, 22, 28, 34, 40, 41, 46, 52,

Silver Sessions 79

56, 66, 86

Simon Werner a Disparu 36

Young, Neil 31

New Yorker 42

Sister 23, 25, 26, 30, 73, 75, 78

Youth Brigade 79

New York Rocker 12

Smart Bar Chicago 1985 81

New York Times 22

Smells Like Records 41, 76

Nirvana 11, 20, 79

Smith, Patti 12, 40, 59, 64

Noise Festival 14, 15

Sonic Death 80, 81

noise-rock 66

Sonic Nurse 34, 76

no wave 9, 14, 15, 17, 40

SST 9, 11, 22, 26, 28, 33, 80

NYC Ghosts & Flowers 34, 76

Starbucks Music 36

Stooges, The 15, 64 straight edge 17

O’Rourke, Jim 34, 35, 76, 77

Strange Fruit 41 “Sugar Kane” 29, 79, 85

Paste Studio 52, 58 “Pattern Recognition” 34, 83 post-punk 34, 40, 52, 66 punk 8, 9, 14, 15, 18, 23, 34, 40, 41, 51, 52, 59, 64, 66, 79 Punk magazine 12

Switch, The 40 SYR 36, 75

T TV Shit 79

Sonic Youth rose from the drug-infested streets of 80s downtown New York City to change the face of alternative music and rock history, influencing pop culture to this day. More than perhaps any band of their time, Sonic Youth brought previously considered “fringe” art into the mainstream—and, along the way, irrevocably altered the cultural zeitgeist.