STARFIELD ROAD

Entertainment Weekly March 9th 2002

You know it's coming; it's only a matter of when, and how long' it will last,
and how loud it will be. On a recent afternoon, the only band in rock history
to be caricatured on The Simpsons, endorsed by Neil Young, and accorded
an exhibit at New York's Printed Matter art gallery has gathered for a web
cast performance from its windowless rec-room rehearsal space two blocks
north of Ground Zero.
As the other members of Sonic Youth take a break, Thurston Moore, the
band's lanky blond grasshopper of a guitarist and singer, can't resist.
Six-string slung below his waist so that his gangly arms can reach the strings,
Moore crouches in front of his amp, grabs his guitar's whammy bar, and out
it comes-a screeeggghhhh of feedback. Imagine a whale, in its death throes,
attacked by seagulls. Despite egg-carton-shaped soundproofing on the walls,
the clamor reverberates down four floors, to the lobby of the building. Soon
after, the rest of the band-rumpled, gray-flecked guitarist Lee Ranaldo;
lean-faced, diminutive bass player Kim Gordon; boyishly eager drummer
Steve Shelley; and impish, matted guitarist and bass player Jim O'Rourke-join in.
Except for Gordon, who is done up in an off-white blouse, sky blue skirt, and
heels, the musicians are dressed in sneakers, gashed-knee jeans, and work shirts.
The mood is casual and unprepossessing, but the music that emerges from it is
anything but. Guitars and melodies lull one moment, erupt into metallic shards
the next; Ranaldo croons as Gordon bites off her words. As if killing cockroaches,
Moore, Ranaldo, and O'Rourke jam their feet down on effects pedals to create
tornado drones. Moore leans over and picks up what looks like a giant nail file
and jams it between the strings, resulting in another harsh roar. Together, they
create a sound like no other in rock-a hypnotic mix of melody and disharmony,
structure and chaos, beauty and cacophony. "Well, the songs didn't stop on a
dime," Shelley cracks, "but they did stop."

Sonic Youth have been making that sound for 22 years and just as many
albums-alternative music touchstones like Confusion Is Sex, Daydream
Nation, and Dirty that dismantled rock & roll and reassembled it in ways no
one had done before. None of those albums have sold more than 300,000
copies, but as with the Velvet Underground before them, the impact of Sonic
Youth is not judged by numbers. Nirvana admired them so much that the trio
signed to the same label, Geffen.
The Sonic Youth sound can be heard in a wave of bands that followed, from
PJ Harvey to Pavement; their concerts were attended by, among others,
future members of the Donnas. "They've created an environment where people
who make music that is even crazier than theirs have a chance of playing in front
of more than 10 people," says Matador Records' Gerard Cosloy, who signed
the band to an Indie label in 1985.
Similarly, female musicians and artists have taken their cue from the fiercely
assertive feminist heroine Gordon. "To see Kim and the strength of who she is,
a woman playing bass-she's a goddess," gushes filmmaker Tamra Davis, who
graduated from Sonic Youth videos to Billy Madison and Crossroads. To
Simpsons producer Born-lie Pietila, who recruited the band for the 1996
"Homerpalooza" episode in which the group appeared.
Sonic Youth are an icon-there's nobody else like them. The respect accorded
Sonic Youth is only partly about music; equally significant is the band's unrelenting
sense of integrity in a business not known for tolerating it. Sonic Youth albums
sound essentially the same as they did in the '80s, when the band was part of
the American indie-rock movement that spewed out the Replacements, Soul
Asylum, Husker Du, and many others. All those groups are history, yet Sonic
Youth continue to make exactly the music they want to make. And to everyone's
surprise, for the Universal-owned Geffen, which has such reverence for Sonic
Youth that the band can do whatever they want, from releasing drawn-out feedback
soundscapes to recruiting young, noncommercial artists as collaborators.
(Next month, the label is reissuing Dirty as an expanded-edition double CD,
part of a series that also includes accepted classics like Marvin Gaye's What's
Going On, Frampton Comes Alive!, and, yes, The Velvet Underground & Nico).
"They have the ability to pull people from different worlds and empower them,"
says director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), whose early
skateboard footage was introduced to the world via a Sonic Youth video.
"They're very inspiring in terms of encouraging others that there's not a set way
to do something." For all their trailblazing and too-cool New York artists image,
Sonic Youth's dirty little secret is that there are no dirty little secrets.
Despite their skewed, unconventional songs and their irregularly tuned guitars,
these musicians are disconcertingly normal; scandal does not become them.
The notion is as radical as it is refreshing.
The webcast performance done, the five members sprawl around their control
room (its walls bedecked with Joni Mitchell and Captain Beefheart memorabilia)
and write out, by hand, which instruments they need for an upcoming tour.
Then Gordon-who has been married to Moore for a very im-roek & roll duration
of 18 years-prepares to head home to their 8-year-old daughter, Coco. Ranaldo
makes plans with his 17-year-old son, Cody. No groupies or music-biz types
are in sight-just musicians readjusting to life and family now that work is over.
"Everyone jokes that I joined the wrong band," says recent recruit O'Rourke,
33, on the topic of Sonic Youth versus Wilco (he worked on Yankee Hotel
Foxtrot with the latter). "On the Sonic Youth tour bus, they read.
"The guitars chosen, Moore prepares to leave for a club gig of his own, an
evening of experimental music. "It's just a bunch of the guys and a lot of noise,"
he tells Gordon. "It's cool if you want to go home." They exchange a quick,
rare public kiss, and he grabs a black vinyl guitar case and asks for directions
to the nearest subway. Gordon will return to the couple's center-hall colonial
house in the leafy college environs of Northampton, Mass.
"We're not the most organized group of people, which makes it even funnier that
we've lasted this long," Ranaldo says later with a bemused smile. "We're the
Rolling Stones or Grateful Dead of our generation. Or something. It's very weird."
Everyone remembers the first time they saw them; it's hard not to. Twenty years ago,
one's rock choices amounted to the oozy smarm of the Journey/REO bunch, the
song-oriented indie rock of R.E.M. and its ilk, and this: a stern-looking woman
in flip up shades serving up subterranean-dark bass lines and singing in an eerie
half whisper, and two men who didn't play their pawnshop guitars so much as
assault them, drilling them with screwdrivers and sliding drumsticks up and down
the strings.
Sonic Youth were part rock band, part art project, and 100 percent extraordinary.
"Whatever notion you may have had about loud rock & roll was torn apart,"
says Cosloy of witnessing an early show. "It was great. As a spectacle, it was a
lot to look at." Even their fellow screw-the-rules musicians of the day were taken
aback. "We were trying to be very adventurous," recalls Mike Watt, then bassist
in the Minutemen. "And when I heard Sonic Youth, I felt very old-fashioned.
And not very new at all." Nor traditional in any way whatsoever: The Sonic Youth
saga began as, of all things, a love story. "We sat down and were just talking abou
t music," Moore recalls of his first encounter with Gordon, at a New York club
in 1981.
"I don't remember that at all," Gordon, 49, replies with a frown. "Oh, I totally
remember that," Moore says, who at 44 still looks as if he never needs to shave.
The couple are breakfasting at a retro-vintage country club in Los Angeles,
where the band is performing; in another sign of their normalcy, the waiters
greet them warmly and ask where they've been. "We talked about how rhythm can
be utilized or not, and when it doesn't really matter."
"I don't remember any of this," Gordon again says. "I do," Moore continues.
"And then, I went to the Ear Inn and you chased me down. I was like,
'What are you doing here?' And you were like, 'I knew you'd be here.' And I was
like, 'Whoa.'"
Whatever the specifics, here are the facts: Both were children of academics,
both were out-of-towners (Moore from Connecticut, Gordon from Los Angeles),
and both had relocated to Manhattan, drawn to the no-wave music and art
community that reflected the city's scuzzedout, no-future mood of the early '80s.
Their musical experience was limited, but expertise was not the point; one day,
Moore ditched chords and began flailing away at his guitar. "It was, "What if we
just played anything'" he recalls. "It totally destroyed any preconceived idea of
rock & roll as a rhythm & blues-based music. It was totally liberating."

When Moore devised the name Sonic Youth- a tribute to both the MC5's
Fred "Sonic" Smith and reggae star Big Youth-a sensibility clicked. Gordon
then suggested they add Ranaldo, an art-school grad who, like Moore, was
disillusioned with stadium rock, and Sonic Youth launched. "To us, rock &
roll meant you had drums and electric guitars," says Ranaldo, 47. "It didn't
mean a whole lot more than that. It didn't mean you had to I play 'Louie,
Louie' or 'Paint It Black.

Starting with the 1982 EP Sonic Youth, and crystallizing on the following
year's a Confusion Is Sex, they stuck to their plan. "We wanted similar
things," recalls Ranaldo, "which didn't include the ego fantasy of being huge
stars or doing distasteful things for the sake of getting your music" heard."
They offset their imposing music (and visuals with sardonic, class-clown
humor, like wearing Springsteen T-shirts "just to f-with people," says Moore.
Creating deafening guitar avalanches one moment and offering up a grinding
take on Madonna's "Into the Groove" the next, they had it both ways-sincer
e and ironic, paving the way for a rock mind-set that would fully blossom
with newer bands in ' the '90s. (Keen networkers to this day, they survived
with the help of benefactors-a wealthy Swiss couple who lent the band
several thousand dollars.)

Then something funny began happening-little by little, they grew as musicians,
wrote more melodic songs, turned somewhat pro. "By Bad Moon Rising,"
recalls Moore of their pulverizing 1985 album, "I remember looking at the
guitar and actually playing it." Methodically, they moved from one indie
label to another, better one. In 1988, they spent an unheard-of amount-
$30,000-to record Daydream Nation, a sprawling double LP of longer,
snakier material and locked-in sonic blasts. "The idea of stretching out
on songs was a radical thing to do, so we decided to just let it flow,"
says Moore of the album, now considered a pivotal moment in indie rock.
"It made this statement at the end of the '80s, that we were ready to take
it to where it needed to go."

Where it also needed to go was bigger and wider. Tired of not seeing their
albums in stores-and wanting "to compete with, or be in the same market
as Prince and Madonna, whatever was happening at the time," says Shelley,
40-Sonic Youth began looking outward, to the major labels. After much
internal debate, they scrawled their names on the bottom of a Geffen contract
in 1989 for a modest $300,000 advance- but not before demanding
(and receiving) total control over their music, artwork, and all creative matters.
("These are not people who want to let anyone else tell them what to do,"
notes their attorney, Richard Grabel.) Geffen acquiesced because, for one,
it knew the band would attract other alternative acts, and two, the label felt
the band "could be much bigger and more commercial," in the words of onetime
Geffen A&R executive Mark Kates. With that, Sonic Youth left the underground
behind and aimed for the heart of America.

THE TIMING SEEMED PERFECT, OR SO EVERYONE THOUGHT.
During the first half of the '90s, a new breed of rock star-scruffy, tattered, and
playing raw, exposed-nerve rock with links to punk- was suddenly the standard.
Nirvana, a band Sonic Youth had championed when Kurt Cobain was barely
known outside Seattle, led that charge, and everyone assumed that Sonic
Youth, the founding figures of the newly coined alternative rock, would have
their own shot.

So they did what other bands would have done in such a situation. They made
videos they hoped MTV would play. They went into the studio with the same
producer who had overseen Nirvana's Nevermind. They accepted an invitation
to open for Neil Young on an arena tour. "All that stuff you read about your
heroes doing," recalls Ranaldo, "and all of a sudden we were doing it."

Unfortunately, they weren't always enjoying it. They rarely, if ever, saw their
videos on MTV. They liked producer Butch Vig (later in Garbage) and
enjoyed working with him on 1992's taut, snarling Dirty, but he kept asking
them to tune their guitars and do multiple takes. And Neil Young-don't get
them started. They revered Young for his iconoclasm, but his road crew
wouldn't even grant them sound checks, and his fans booed and mocked
them. "Instantly sobering," Moore recalls. After a particularly hostile show
in New York, they almost quit the tour. "If we ever second guessed what
was going on in our career, it was probably right around that time," says
Ranaldo. "The stakes got a bit higher, and we were having huge black clouds
of troubled moments."

There were bonuses, of course. Albums like Goo and Dirty demonstrated
they could make beefier, remotely radio-friendly records that still sounded
like no one but themselves. They took full advantage of that creative-control
clause and hired not only Spike Jonze but also cartoonist Raymond Pettibon
(the cartoon cover of Goo) and artist Mike Kelley (the found-art puppets on
Dirty).
"Kim was into this skateboarding tape this unknown kid named Spike had
directed," recalls Tamra Davis. "So we hired him for the video with another
unknown kid-[skater and future actor] Jason Lee. Sonic Youth never went
towards what was trendy, but what always ended up happening is that what
they were into became trendy." ft Still, they ultimately didn't like what they saw,
and they worried about preserving their integrity.
During the making of 1994's Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, Vig
recalls, "they'd do one take and go, 'That was the most perfect we've ever
played that,' and we'd all start laughing. But I could tell they were serious, too.
" Moore recalls rejecting Geffen's suggestion to do a trendy drum-'n'-bass
remix, saying it would be "really wrong, like an old lady in a miniskirt."
Dirty, the album Geffen hoped would sell a million, sold only about a third of that.
The label was "a little frustrated," recalls their former publicist Dennis Dennehy,
but the band was realistic enough to see that the MTV set wasn't for them and
that they were, in Moore's words, "a little too old" anyway. In 1995, they told
Kates, their liaison with Geffen, that they had written a potential hit, "The Diamond
Sea"-then added that it was, well, 20 minutes long.

"I thought the band could be huge if they were up for it," says Kates. "As it turns
out, I don't know if it was important to them." "We tried to play the game at first,"
says Ranaldo, "and then we reverted back to form and turned inward, started
making music solely for ourselves again." Adhering to the band's old contract,
Geffen had little choice but to comply. "With Sonic Youth, there's a different set
of conditions," admits Geffen president Jordan Schur. "And they're all on their
side, not ours." (It helps that the band is frugal, recording in its own studio and
never spending more than $200,000 per album.)

The records that followed, like 2000's NYC Ghosts & Flowers, marked a
return to the challenging, abrasive music of the band's past. "We're a really
selfish bunch of musicians," chuckles Shelley, who joined in 1985. "And
people either want to come along or they don't."
For this stance, which O'Rourke calls their "unswerving sense of what's right,"
the band has paid a certain price. They realize that more people know their
name than their music. Their record sales have dropped off; they can no longer
afford their own PA system on tour. Sometimes they wonder how long they'll
be part of Universal, even though two albums are left on their contract and
both Schur and Geffen A&M Interscope chairman Jimmy Lovine (whom the
band has never met) maintain they will stand by Sonic Youth as long as the
band wants to be on the label.

Schur still recalls his first career-strategy meeting with the band after he took
over Geffen in 1999. "I went to their studio and I made it clear: 'Look, I see
something building with you guys. You're moving toward something and I don't|
know if you want to go there, but I'm here for you and I really think it can work
.' And there was silence. Nobody said anything to me. And that's when I made
a decision that you have to adapt yourself to them."

ON THEIR SUMMER TOUR TO PROMOTE LAST YEAR'S MURRAY
Street, an album more lyrical than its two predecessors, the band seemed ready
to take Schur up on his offer; in an effort to raise their profile again, they even
visited radio stations and signed autographs at record stores. On stage for the
first of two sold-out shows at Hollywood's El Key Theater, with fan Keanu
Reeves in the audience, they are, on one hand, the same old Sonics. They barely
look at each other, and the songs build from slow, moody intros to frenzied
whirlwinds of feedback and space. (During such improvisatory moments,
Ranaldo's earlier quip comparing the Sonics to the Dead suddenly doesn't seem
so odd.) Gordon intensely hops in place, Ranaldo slams down his guitar neck
as if it were a hammer, and Shelley pummels his kit like an overexcited toddler.
But they are also tighter and less indulgent than in the past, playing ferocious
renditions of their college-radio standards. Several times Gordon sets aside
her bass and, for the first time with the band, dances, adding a newly erotic,
visceral element.

At the very end, Gordon addresses the crowd: "Demand to pay less than $12
for a CD," she tells them, a tweak at Universal for what the band feels is a high
list price for Murray Street. Then she adds, in a voice both seductive and taunting,
"But I just want the big guys to know we can still be friends."
As it turns out,
Sonic Youth do bow to something-their kids and their schedules. These days the
band tours only in the summer to accommodate school, so a few weeks after
the L.A. show, they have returned home. "We do school holidays," Gordon
quips in the book and instrument-filled living room of their Northampton home
while flipping through scrapbooks of band photos, fliers, and, oops, one of
Coco's sonograms ("That's what's fun about these-you never know what you're
going to find").
In this town, chosen for its anti-Manhattan, kid-friendly appeal,
non-mainstream rock and child rearing peacefully coexist: Coco's school schedule
is tacked onto a wall directly above a calendar sporting a Stooges photo.
The surfer-blond Coco, Gordon says, finds Sonic Youth music "noisy"; she
is taking piano lessons and prefers Vanessa Carlton. "I told her Britney Spears
can't really sing," Gordon says. "And I said older men write her songs. That was
a real turnoff for her."

"One thing we accomplished is that we were able to create a true working
model for how bands can conduct themselves for more than five years, playing
decidedly fringe music," Moore says, his lanky frame draped over a chair in a
study lined with Beat poetry journals. He pauses. "I think in the future we'll
probably become more of a pop band," he jokes; as always, he can't resist
deflecting serious comments with droll humor. "There's no alternative for us.
I'll deliver papers if I have to. It's not going to stop me from making records
and doing music on whatever level it is." Then he prepares to go upstairs
, where he will read to Coco before she falls asleep.

Sonic Youth In Guitar Player (nov 2002)

Sonic Youth Survives Ground Zero, Adds a Member,
and Refines the Art of Noise: Chaos Theorists

They say you have to know the rules before you can break them.
If that’s true, few bands know the rules better than Sonic Youth.
Step into Echo Canyon, Sonic Youth’s New York studio, and
broken rules litter the floor like so many snapped guitar strings
and shattered drumsticks. It is in this sound lab that Sonic Youth
pulls off the freakish.

Chaos Theorists experiments that most bands wouldn’t—and
probably shouldn’t—dare attempt. By weaving sheets of
feedback into symphonic passages, extending pop songs well
past the ten-minute mark with noisy epilogues, playing guitar
with random objects, rewiring stompboxes, and torturing
amps until the tubes melt, Sonic Youth has once again recorded
a mutant-rock masterpiece that reduces the rulebook to confetti.

The band’s new album, Murray Street [Geffen], is the second
in a trilogy for Sonic Youth—and it got off to an inspired start.
Producer, multi-instrumentalist, and self-confessed “noisenick”
Jim O’Rourke had just joined the band, expanding Sonic Youth
to a quintet for the first time since Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo,
and Kim Gordon formed the group in 1981. Everyone was eager
to start tracking, and O’Rourke was already putting in long hours
at Echo Canyon, often sleeping there after late nights of pre-production.
It wasn’t an alarm clock, however, that jarred him awake one sunny
September morning last year—it was the horrific cacophony created
when, nearly 100 stories above his head, the first jetliner slammed
into the World Trade Center.

“The studio was just two short blocks away,” recalls O’Rourke, still
too traumatized to speak about that day in anything above a whisper.
“A jet engine fell from the sky, and landed on Murray Street within
eyeshot of the studio’s front window.”

Soon thereafter, the towers came down. Lower Manhattan was closed
off and Murray Street was derailed indefinitely. But while O’Rourke
may need the rest of his life to process the terror he survived last
September 11, he and the rest of Sonic Youth were finally able to
get back into their studio. Here, Moore, Ranaldo, and O’Rourke
trace the evolution of one of the most exciting and inspired albums
in Sonic Youth’s 21-year career.

Why expand the Sonic Youth lineup?

Ranaldo: On the last few records, Kim has been playing more and
more guitar with Thurston and myself, and while we were really into
mining the three-guitar vein, we started to miss the bottom-end her
bass playing provided. Jim—whom we’ve worked with since the
early ’90s—mixed our last album, NYC Ghosts and Flowers, and
also tracked a few bass lines on it. His parts came out so great, we
invited him to go out on tour with us and play them live. When it
came time to do Murray Street, we decided to involve him entirely
as a band member.

Jim, how do you like being in one the most influential and well-respected
rock bands of the last two decades?

O’Rourke: I don’t really think about it. I just keep a respectful distance
from the other members [laughs]. It’s funny, when I was about 20
years old and was exploring prepared guitar approaches, people
would often tell me, “You’d love Sonic Youth—they use drumsticks
on their guitars!” Truth is, compared to the wild guitar players I was
into—such as Keith Rowe and Derek Bailey—Sonic Youth sounded
fairly normal to me! Keith Rowe, for example, doesn’t even play
notes—he plays sound. He uses the kitchen on his guitar. He’ll have
a hollowbody lying on a table full of brushes, sticks, fans, motors,
and magnets—all of which he’ll apply in various ways.

What was your role on Murray Street?

O’Rourke: I played bass on two-thirds of the songs and guitar on
almost all of them. Actually, Lee was laughing in rehearsal, because
I’m often playing bass live, which means he sometimes has to play
my guitar parts. It was the first time he has ever had to play parts
that weren’t his own. And although I’m credited as the album’s
producer, I actually acted more as an engineer. The album’s
production was a truly democratic effort by the band.

How did the events of September 11 effect the album?

Ranaldo: To tell you the truth, it was mostly logistical. Except
for the vocals, everything was already written, and we were
just about to start seriously tracking the songs. But after
September 11, we couldn’t get into our studio for two and a
half months. When we finally could go back, it was a matter
of getting past National Guardsmen on every corner. We had
to show paperwork and prove we worked in the building.
When we eventually got to the tracking process, however, we
had a bunch of electrical problems with our gear, so we didn’t
start tracking Murray Street until the first week of January 2002.

What is Echo Canyon like?

Moore: It has professional recording equipment, but any professional
engineer would go in there and say, “Forget this!” Echo Canyon is in
a building where other bands are crashing around above and below
you, and soundproofing is minimal. One time, Pavement was in the
building doing sessions with a producer who had worked with
Radiohead, and the guy was like, “Are you kidding me? I can’t work
here.” But it doesn’t bother us. Our last two records were entirely
recorded here, and with all those bands as our soundtrack. You can’t
actually hear them bleeding through our tracks, but that would be
something I’d like to try sometime. I think it could be hip.

How did you track Murray Street?

Ranaldo: We have an old 16-track, 2" Studer machine and a Pro Tools
rig that are pretty much integrated. We recorded about half the stuff
analog and the other half digital, and we mixed down to an old Ampex
half-inch machine. Pro Tools is an amazing editing tool, but we still do
plenty of editing where we’re physically cutting tape, which I love to
do because you arrive at things differently that way. Plus, the analog
domain is where our final masters end up, and if you’re mixing a song
to tape like we do—in sections using a vintage Neve console—it’s
sometimes actually more expedient to use a razor blade than it is to use
Pro Tools.

Are you guys still playing Fender Jazzmasters?

Moore: Yes, I primarily use a black one from the late ’60s. I bought it
on the road somewhere after we had all of our guitars—about 40 of
them—ripped off in Orange County, California. We also lost all of our
amps, drums, rack gear, and personal effects.

Ranaldo: Jazzmasters and Jaguars are still our favorite guitars in terms
of body length, shape, and whammy bar, but we often modify them.
We rip out most of the electronics, because, to our minds, all those
little switches and doodads are overly complicated and prone to breaking
down. We like our guitars to be as rigorous as possible, because we tend
to throw them around and beat them up quite a bit. So we often hardwire
the pickups directly to the output jack. I usually try to replace the pickups
with humbuckers from Telecaster Deluxes. Once I do that, I call the
guitars “Jazzblasters.” I also have a couple of custom-built guitars that
are modeled after Jazzmasters, but have odd little touches. There’s one
I used a lot on the new record that has a pickup installed behind the
bridge to get further amplification of those little short strings on the other side.

O’Rourke: I mostly played a Gibson Firebird. But to get interesting
sounds, you can’t rely on an amp, a guitar, or a pedal—you just gotta
do it. I’m one of those people who seems to be able to get noise out
of anything. Even if I picked up a clarinet, I’d be doing multi-phonics
before I could play a normal note—and multi-phonics are supposedly
much more difficult!

Describe your rigs.

Ranaldo: In the studio, I use a vintage Fender Super Reverb, but live
I run an old blackface Fender Bandmaster head into a Mesa/Boogie
4x12 cabinet. I prefer older Fender amps when I can get them, but I
do like the new blackface reissues. After a period when it seemed like
Fender had forgotten how to make a good amp, they’re finally
making great amps again. My pedals include a Hughes & Kettner
distortion, an old Ibanez analog delay, a Line 6 DL4 delay modeler,
and a Moogerfooger ring modulator.

O’Rourke: I keep things simple and stick to a Fender Twin Reverb .
When it comes to stompboxes, however, one thing I like to do is
rebuild them. For example, I once rewired a phase pedal so it made
unpredictable sounds somewhat like a ring modulator. I don’t always
know what I’m doing or why it works, but I know what it does sonically.

Moore: For me, it’s all about plugging a Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Octave
Fuzz into a Sovtek Big Muff and a vintage Mu-Tron Vol-Wah pedal
while my fist presses the strings against the pickups roughly. That’s
one of my favorite ways to play, and I do it on just about every song.
For amps, I like nothing more than playing a Jazzmaster through a
Peavey Road Master tube head driving a Marshall 4x12. I’ve been
using Road Masters for years, and I like the way they sound when
the tubes are perfectly matched and firing in a nice, juicy way.

Speaking of Road Masters, Thurston, you’re known for killing one
while tracking “Scooter & Jinx” on 1990’s Goo.

Moore: Yeah, those heads are fan-cooled, and the fan is on the top
of the amp’s cabinet, blowing downward. So I covered the fan
with my guitar and the amp started suffocating. I just maxed it out
and then toggled my pickup selector. It’s a great sound, but I try
to let up on it so the amp doesn’t completely blow, like it did on
“Scooter & Jinx.”

O’Rourke: You don’t always need processors or pedals to create
interesting effects in the studio. For example, in the middle section of
“Karen Revisited” from the new album, there were two or three guitar
feedback tracks that were really close in pitch, so I pumped them
loudly through a P.A. system and recorded that with room mics.
The result was natural ring modulation, which occurs whenever you
put frequencies together that are very close in pitch.

That song is over 11 minutes in length. In the vinyl age, it would
almost be an album side.

Moore: Eleven minutes is really not that long—at least not for us. In
a sense, it’s like cuts from great albums by Miles Davis, John Coltrane,
and the Grateful Dead, because at 11 minutes, the composition is really
just getting started. The head is sort of a structured pop thing, and then
it goes into this long improvisational section. We combined the studio
version with a live version recorded at a benefit for 9/11 victims at the
Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan.

Those long “noise” sections sound utterly chaotic, yet elaborately
composed. How do you orchestrate them?

Ranaldo: We build them like sculptures—from the ground up. Everybody
hacks away at it until it’s something. We’ll often just sit around in a room
with a tape recorder as a sketching tool and start generating sounds.
Ideas gradually expand and develop until we have a structure and a songscape.

Moore: It’s not noise improvisation, though it may have originated as such
when we first created it. Each of us is playing a distinct musical part that
intertwines with the others.

O’Rourke: The challenge is keeping it all together, and then, when it falls
apart, making sure it’s a good falling apart.

Early reviews of Murray Street have asserted that it features guitars
that are “more focused” than on other Sonic Youth records.

Ranaldo: I wouldn’t say that’s true at all. The guitars are focused
on all of our records. They’re focused on what we’re trying to achieve,
which from day one has been putting together interesting song
structures. Maybe the new album has more song-oriented stuff that
happens to be more palatable and familiar to their ears.

O’Rourke: It’s kind of ironic when a reviewer thinks that one or two
listens of a record can possibly equal the same amount of thought that
was put into it by the people who spent a year recording it. Some
albums don’t have everything shouting at you on the surface, and
they require several listens to see how the parts work together.

How are Murray Street and 2000’s NYC Ghosts and Flowers
part of a trilogy?

Moore: Like any band that has a decade or more of history, there
are a lot of times when our identity is dictated by the perceptions of
critics, writers, and listeners. It was music writer Byron Coley who
first made the claim that Sonic Youth was doing a trilogy about the
history and culture of lower Manhattan, and that Murray Street was
the second installment. Though we had never thought about it like
that, we realized he was really onto something. I found Coley’s
comment so completely valid I said, “Boy, that’s a great idea—I’m
glad I thought of it.” [Laughs.]

Sonic Youth in Interview magazine
( August 2002)

STILL SAYING YES TO ADVENTURE AND NO TO COMPROMISE

"What's that sound?" Thurston Moore asks of his band co-founder and co-parent,
Kim Gordon, intrigued by curious, somewhat atonal chimes ringing from the back
bedroom of their cozy downtown New York loft (they also reside in Massachusetts).
Turns our their seven year old daughter, Coco, is watching kids' cartoons on TV;
an alternative sonic youth, you might say, that oddly echoes the clangorous slashes,
grinds and tingles of their compelling new album, Murray Street.

Much is happening now, as ever, for Sonic Youth, whose indie roots mark them
as self starters. Talk of their 20 year history as lords and ladies of the underground
takes a back seat to tomorrow. Kim displays one of her new artworks for an
imminent exhibition, a sinuous flash of pink on fat silver laminate that evokes
1950s hot rods gleaming in the desert sun. In many media, Sonic Youth still rock on.

We're gathered together today because you have a new release, Murray Street.

TM: It's not necessarily to promote the record. I don't want to talk about promoting
the record. But I guess that's why we're doing it. I would like to do this at any time.

That's the spirit.

TM: Do you think Interview magazine would want to talk to us about nothing?

KG: Maybe if we were Jean Paul Sartre.

Murray Street is where you have your studio, right by the World Trade Center
site. Was 9/11 an important factor in the record?

TM: We were working on it beforehand, but it had a lot of resonance for us,
working creatively in an environment that had been [destroyed].

KG: It was strange to go down there to work and be huddled in that studio,
and there was nothing, just these empty buildings all around. But it's
comforting that when something like that happens, you can still feel good
about your work.

TM: Concurrent with us making this record, they would dig up the street,
then they would patch it; then they would dig it up again and they would
patch it. They kept changing and rearranging conduits of water and electricity.
To me, it was like they were working on their own record [laughs].

KG: And we were also recording a soundtrack for a French movie,
Demonlover, by Olivier Assayas. He wanted us to do a lotof sound
and noise to run parallel with his narrative.

TM: So we put the mikes out the window. When you see Demonlover,
you're going to literally hear Murray Street. That's really rock musique concrete!

TM: We do a lot of musical work outside of Sonic Youth, obviously. We had
been living in downtown New York since 1977. Back then bands existed as
an interdisciplinary kind of activity with filmmakers and visual artists, and that
certainly came out of Andy Warhol's world.

What made New York great back then?

TM: I remember living here in the '70s, on 13th Street and Avenue A. There
was a lot of filth and grime then. Homeless people were sleeping in the street.
It was such a zone of literal lawlessness! But you could live on the cheap. It
was a totally great breeding ground for anybody who could survive as a creative
person.

What about now?

KG: I think the music scene is still very uncommercial and vital. But the art
world has certainly changed, because it's always been aligned, or evolved
with, real estate in some way. It's very hard to find anyone doing really
interesting experimental stuff in the art world today.

TM: It's not that solid a theory, but in the late '60s and early '70s you really
had this divided line in the culture where youth was radical and adults were
square. But now there are radical adults, from Neil Young to Yoko Ono.
That's what the song "Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style" is about.
Radical youth culture is huge but completely hidden from the mainstream.
There is another demographic that is an alternate to MTV, which is totally
corny and square. And it's really exciting to me, because I love all these
great new bands like Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Erase Errata and Quixotic.
And you still feed off that energy.

After 20 years, what keeps the group fresh?

KG: It's fun to sing when Thurston writes for my point of view.
It really fools people.

TM: I like writing lyrics for Kim. Sometimes I write as I was Bush
Tetras' singer Pat Place in 1978. A lot of their lyrics were "No-no,
no-no-no," this kind of pop nihilism thing. It had a real effect on me
as an 18-year old. There's always this image I have of Pat Place
playing live. All she played was slide, grrwwhii, grwwhiiii, on this
guitar. With this ripped crotch, and she had blue panties on--it
was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

KG: You have a good memory.

TM: It was a striking image. It burned itself into in my brain.

The Fountain Of Sonic Youth

By Richard A Martin (Pulse) 2002

With the addition of a fifth recruit the art punk
god parents keep the focus on the future.

Kim Gordon walks into a, cultured guitar strewn
side room in Sonic Youth's New York City studio
looking fierce, in a low cut white blouse and striped
gray and white skirt. Then she spills a funny little secret:
she and her husband and bandmate Thurston Moore
sometimes review movies on the cable access channel
in their part-time hometown of Northhampton, Mass.
It's a strange sight to imagine, the rangy godfather and
fashionable godmother of art punk chatting away on TV
like a post-modern Siskel and Eibert.
But then, any one familiar with Sonic Youth has come to
expect the unexpected. After all this is the band that turned
on New York City and then the world with it's unself-
conscious merger of electric noise and razor edged rock
melodies. This is the band that tag-teamed with Nirvana
to unintentionally launch the alternative rock-era. This is
the band that breaks into side projects to push the boundaries
of avant-garde music and then comes back together to
craft albums that somehow, some way find fresh new angles
to further Sonic Youth's legacy. And this is the band that is
flexible enough to unceremoniously add it's first new member
Jim O'Rouke- since Steve Shelley joined the original line-up
of Gordon, Moore, and Lee Ranaldo on 1986's Evol.
There have been a dozen album since, and 16 studio albums
overall including the new, Murray Street (DGC). Yet when
Moore joins Gordon in the studio side room, the couple
resolves to talk about the present, rather then the past.
"When we listen to our old records, we think they're all shit",
snarls Gordon, still sounding like a punk, despite her other
career as a mother. Moore joins in, saying cryptically " This
is our first record". Then Gordon again: After 21 years we
finally - figured it out." Moore finishes.
The other three members of Sonic Youth aren't quite so cynical
about the band's storied past. Squeezed together in the same room
that Moore and Gordon later occupy, the three friends are also
adamant that Murray Street is another in a long line of Sonic Youth
albums and there's not much more to it.
"We joked all along that it was our attempt at a classic rock
record." Says Shelley. "We wanted it to be around 45 mins long.
That's about as far as we go in talking about this stuff. It's not as
though we look at the last album and think that that was untraditional
Sonic Youth writing. To us, there all songs, and I understand if
people say it's more like Day Dream Nation or Dirty or pick your
album from the past, but don't say that were going to try and write
like we did ten years ago."
Or two years ago. Murray Street sounds less like the follow up to
2000;s New Youk City Ghosts & Flowers- which was Moore's
Manhattanized take on his remembrances of things past- then it
does a Zen continuation of Sonic Youth oeuvre. It's filled with
balance: old abraisivness and new melodicism; youthful hardcore
freakouts and mature musical explorations; lyrics that seesaw
between depth and whimsy.
Murray Street is also the band's reflection of a process, which
is evident from the lived in environs of it's studio and practice
space on Murray Street, a few blocks away from where the
Twin Towers used to stand. (A photo that Moore took of the
Murray Street sign that sustained damage from the sept. 11th
terrorist attack is on the back cover of the album; he says that
Ranaldo suggested using it on the cover, but the band didn't
want to be exploitative.) The flat is narrow, long and dusty and
instruments and equipment crowd every corner of every room
and closet. Posters occupy walls; some old blues musicians or
avante friends' bands, others from old Sonic Youth shows
(one from 1992 reads " With punk superstars pavement and
The Pain Teens"). A computer
screen flickers with the bands equipment manifest- Gibson
and Fender guitars listed with worths between a few hundred
and $ 1,200- an essential insurance precaution after the well
publicized theft in 1999 of many of the band's customized
instruments. And CDs litter the floor and counters- Pet Sounds,
Love's De Capo, X's Las Angeles, Paul McCartney's Ram,
Miss Kitten, The Messuge Klezmer Band- a testament to the
band member's vast curiosities.
Sonic Youth's latest contribution to the proverbial CD pile
starts out with a trio of expansive, moody songs that are as
comfy and familiar to fans as the studio is to the band.
"The Empty Page" has a warm glow and clarity reminiscent
of 1987's Sister, Moore singing calmly over a slow burning
rhythm that unfolds into an epic jamboree of competing guitar
solos. "Disconnection Notice" flows out of this with an
ambiguous tempo, then settles into an emotional groove,
with Moore playing loose with metaphor as the band tugs at
threads of the simple, likable melody. Next comes "Rain On
Tin" a more dramatic eight- minute excursion that strikes at
the heart of the old VS. New Sonic Youth paradox. It single
handily disproves Gordon's statement about hating the sound
of their previous records and eloquently asserts that Sonic
Youth is every bit as vital as it was when the band's members
were actually youthful.
"I think it's the nicest opening we've had to record in a long time"
Shelley attests. Especially when you get to "Rain On Tin" it's
kind of like every stop in the Sonic Youth song book."
The albums other four songs represent the member's disparate
interests and their ability to rein them in as parts of a whole. They
include vocal contributions from Ranaldo and Gordon, a guest
bout with a bleating from two saxophonist friends (Jim Sauter
and Don Dirtrich) on the propulsive, "Radical Adults Lick God-
Head Style," and a lot oddball and/or soothing electronic noises
created by O'Rourke.
That the musicians are able to harmonize all their interests and
tastes is the beautiful mystery of Sonic Youth, and it's a harmony
they were willing to risk by inviting O'Rourke- the itinerant pro-
ducer, solo artist, former Gastr del Sol member. O'rourke worked
on NYC Ghosts & Flowers and several of the bands self-released
experimental records from the late 1990's, but Murray Street marks
his debut as one of the five song writers and producers in this self-
sustaining juggernaut.
Moore and Gordon credit O'Rourke with deciding the albums
sequence and twiddling the right knobs during recording. "Jim really
had such a technical wherewithal in the making of the record, to guide
us into a situation that was much more conducive to the way we
work.That really gave the record focus" pledges Moore.
Still, there is the question of how Sonic Youth will function with
yet another member who has an entire separate career away from
the nucleus of the band. Moore has his Estatic Peace label and
frequent duets with sundry horn and guitar experimentalists; Gordon's
side projects include Free Kitten and being an unofficial spokes
woman for an elder states woman of riot grrrl culture; Shelley runs
the ambitious Smells Like Records label and often drums for friends'
bands.; And Ranaldo frequently teams with New York free jazz
players and spoken-word artists.
"All the side stuff we've done, has a definite effect" Ranaldo says.
"Especially when we started going off and playing more freely with
other people. It allowed us to the one hand to take ideas that we
wanted to explore that maybe never got fully explored in the context
of Sonic Youth. And even more so to take things that happened
outside of the band and bring them back. With (1995's) Washing
Machine forward, the music started opening up, and that was
simultaneous with when we started doing more playing with other
people."
Moore points out that five of the songs from Murray Street started
as ideas he'd considered using for a second solo album. He weighed
a follow up to 1995's Psychic Hearts against the idea of shortening
the process of the next Sonic Youth album.(The band also had a
couple of soundtrack commitments to director Allison Anders for
Things Behind The Sun and another to Oliver Assayas for Demon-
Lover, and worked on them simultaneously with Murray Street." I
knew the songs as they were, would become much more interesting
if the band started taking them over", Moore recalls. "I'm so glad we
did because it really gave those songs the potential they had, and lived
up to it."
It also allowed Sonic Youth to open up a new chapter without closing
any of the previous ones. Moore and Gordon may seem jaded, or
perhaps mock-jaded, so it's better to go to the source of the groups
fresh blood. " Anyone who does something creative has a lot of things
there interested in." O'rourke declares." And there are there times when
they bring certain facets of what there interested in out so the public
can see it. It's not like things go away. It's just things go dormant under
the surface. People say somebody's reinventing themselves, or that
they're back , but it's not that they ever really went away."
Especially not Sonic Youth.

Decoding The Dirty Paste Of History
By Byron Coley

No one has come close to even approximating the ecstatic
crush of loud and disparate elements that exist inside of
SY's music. As evidenced once again with their new double
album Dirty (DGC), they blend absolute discord with ideo-
prissy mass-toung formulated pop impulse in a way that
makes all other bands' metaphoric pants fall down as soon
as they stand up. Listen to the catachrestic instrumental
break that happens amidst Kim Gordon's white bread vocal-
turn, "On The Strip" and give me a list of other bands capable
of even conceptualizing such a completely subverted commercial
move. There aren't many. If we amend the criteria to include
only those bands badgered by the A&R twits who infest major
labels, I don't see any one making the cut.

Kim: We may be unique, but everybody on a major label thinks
they're unique. Did you see that Penelope Spheeris documentary
on metal bands (The Decline Of Western Civilization part II:
The Metal Years)? Every one of them said their music was unique.
Of course, at the same time they'd really like to be every one else.
But the major labels are full of people who are unique. Look at Cher-
she's a total freak.

Sonic Youth, after a career that has already lasted longer than the
Beatles did, occupy a crucial and unique place- representing the
juncture between America's usually exclusive avante-garde and pop-
culture traditions. At this point, the fusion of these dogmas has be-
come so complete inside of SY's gestalt that it's bogus to even try
and pry them apart. It's no longer a question of weather they're self-
conscious experiementalists appropriating popular form and iconography
for their own ironic ends, or "mere" pop musicians attempting to market
their low-art product as something all together more hoity-toity. These
apparent contradictions resolve themselves inside the SY universe. By
passing through the bands creative flames, both art and crap are subject
to a process of transubstantiation that renders standard aesthetic cate-
gorization even more dumb-bellious then usual. If you examine the band's
history and roots, however the fact that they've ended up in just this
spot is not really all that unpredictable-and that they exist there by
them selves owes more to their incredible tenacity than anything else.
The only American bands with longer flows of continuous history are the
Beach Boys and The Greatful Dead-none of who's members ever fucked
Madonna.

Thurston: Let's get this straight, it wasn't any of us. A guy who was a
good friend of mine was going out with Madonna right before she really
hit the big time. And as far as I know he was only getting tounge-stick
anyway. I don't know that he ever went beyond that.

The NYC scene was pretty formless right at the dog end of the 70's.
Ignoring the great masses of impotent "new wave" musicians then
strutting their wanna-be-comercial turd choked "talent", there were two
hindsight-approximated, highly nebulous camps into which interesting
Noo Yawk artists can be lumped: post-no-wave-art-noise and pre-hard-
core-punk-shit. The later category, considered singularly declasse at the
time, included the Misfits, Stimulators, Bad Brains, various Heartbreak-
ers devolved combos and whatnot. The former category would include
all band connected with the original no-wave outfits (Contortions, Mars
teenage Jesus, Theoretical Girls, DNA ect.) Plus the weird Lower East
side bands who would become the lost records gang ( Chaingang, Blind-
ing Headache, information, mofungo), the confused (sometimes suberban)
bands who might owe equal debts to the no wave and The Talking Heads/
Television/Modern Lovers/Voidoids/assorted other Velvet-spawn (like
Flux, Coachmen, UT High Sheriffs Of Blue, et al) and a variety of other
losers. ( This is admittedly a bland generalization, but it's detailed as space
allows). SY guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, and bassist Kim
Gordon were all associated with the artsy wing in one manner or the other.
Drummer Steve Shelley was still a highschool student in the Midwest some-
where, but he shows up later so sit still.

Lee: All the bands were so self-conscious then. I was listening to some
old tapes of The Flux, and my vocals were so David Byrne-damaged, I
couldn't believe it. We did have one great, long song that had lot's of
extended guitar textures on it. Then Polurock put out that album (Polyrock
RCA '80) produced by Philip Glass, and they ripped us off totally. We were
really pissed.

The actual seeds of Sonic Youth's formation were sown somewhere in the
haze of 79/80. Thurston's band The Coachmen, shared a week night bill
at CB's with The Flux where he met Lee. At the Coachmen's penultimate
show, Thurston was introduced to Kim, who was impressed that The Coach-
men (artist JD King among them) were all 6"6 or better. She and Thurston
hooked up with keyboard player Ann Demartinas for a series of gigs under
a variety of names ( Red Milk, Male Bonding, The Arcadians). Simultan-
eously with this, Flux had ceased to exist and Lee began playing with Glen
Branca, who's chiors of massed/over-amped guitars were then starting to
make jaws drop and ears bleed on the edges of the art music scene. Anne
eventually Bowed out after a gig or two under the Sonic Youth banner, and
Kim and Thurston convinced Lee to join. They also talked Richard Edison,
(then of Konk, later an actor for Jim Jamusch) into serving as semi-permanent
guest drummer. The band began to develop the bulk of their early material
almost immediately, and Thurston started to perform alongside Lee in Branca's
six-guitar band.( Continuing their performing/recording relationship with Branca
through his first two symphonies.) Meanwhile, Sonic Youth- a name Thurston
had been aching to use since his days as a farmboy in the nutmeg state-turned
into a real band.

Thurston: At the time, I was really into Sonic Rendezvous Band's City
Slang single, and also Big Youth's Screaming Target LP. I kept wondering
how I could be true to both these geniuses, and finally arrived at Sonic Youth.
(Laughs) Sounded a lot better then the Arcadians.

Before 81 was out, Branca had started his own label, Neutral Records. He
wanted an SY record to be the labels first, so the band prepared to a 24 track
studio and layed down what they've since claimed were the only five they
knew. Released as Sonic Youth in March '82, it caused little ruckus outside
of the neighborhood- but heard in retrospect, it continues many of the sound
patterns upon which they would continue to ruminate. Lee and Thurston have
always used weird tunings on their guitars, the way Coltrain used weird and
abstract tunings on his saxophones. From the very first, they were getting
these incredible bonging choruses out of their sync-locked downstrokes
that set a rhythmic mood for a song much more clamorously then any kind
of regular-issue drum n bass hunch. The actual rhythm section set a second-
ary pulse beneath the foundation of the guitars pounding, giving the instru-
mental leads two different time signatures to play against. Vocals were
often tossed out with metric coefficients unrelated to the other stuff going on,
and guitar lines were blured in clouds of distortion-so what you ended up with
was a magnificently structure of jumbled rock n roll, that sounded spaced,
foreign, and even non-functional in simple rock-as-rock terms.
The few critics who even bothered to note the band were quick to dismiss
them as technicians applying the lessons of Branca's- and Rhys Cathyms-
messed up guitar harmonics to rock undergroundism. There are elements
of truth to this (which the band have long stubbornly denied), but it stops real
short of the actual situation: SY were beginning to create a totally new, totally
hep art/rock hibrid, infusing sophisticated conceptual and technical precepts
with the power of hard-core punk- a form that was about to hit its styilistic
high watermark with Black Flag's My War, Minor Threats's Out Of Step,
and the eponymous debuts by Die Kruzen and The Meat Puppets.

Thurston: We were caught right behind the so-called art sophisticates and
the hardcore kids. By the first time I saw a kid wearing a leather jacket that
said"Reagan Youth" on it, I thought he was making fun of us. We actually
preceded the NY hard-core thing by about a year. I can remember the first
flyer I saw for a NYC hardcore gig. It had this great line on it: THE SEX
PISTOLS WEREN'T ENOUGH. I told branca about it, and he just said;
"The sex pistols were more than enough". That's when I realized I had to
break away from the old men of the scene. (Laughs)

Almost immediately after Sonic Youth was recorded, Edison left. His re-
placement was the tom-rolling, cymbal pounding terror of Hoboken, Mr.
Bob Bert. Bob's first fiery trials with SY were comprised of brutal southern
and Midwestern tours in a van shared with the Swans. The few who turned
out for these shows assumed that the bands were both "hardcore units from
NYC" (as they were sometimes billed by especially idiotic promoters), and
SY did little to dissuade them. The songs that were floating and zoned on
that first record had coalesced into explosive nuggets of rock-hard shit. Lee
and Thurston had begun beating each other, their guitars, and drumkit into
pulp during some shows-jamming drumsticks and screwdrivers into the
bridges of their guitars, then plowing things into the stage. Negative vibes
hung over the band like a hot red blanket, and not every one was pleased
with the way things were turning out. Bob left soon after, replaced by Jim
"Voon" Scalavunos- as fine a man with a peckor and/or drumstick as you're
likely to meet. And veteran of Teenage Jesus, 8 Eyed Spy, Panther Burns,
and many more exciting situations. "Voon" stayed for part of '82 and '83,
exiting only after working on most of the band's second Neutral release,
Confusion Is Sex.

Kim: Scalavunos was great trashy drummer- but the day after he joined,
he fell in love with this Dutch woman who wanted him for her own band.
We could see from the very beginning that he was on his way out. But we
had started recording confusion, so we were sort of stuck with him.

Released in Feb '83 confusion is much more definably "rock" then it's
predecessor. Smudgy, crappy, diving- and far less pristine sounding-this
LP showed they were really on to something. Some people thought that
their smash em up cover of I Wanna Be Yr Dog was some sort of ironic
slummery, but people who breathe with all their holes open began to sus-
pect that a noisy parallel universe was being constructed right next door to
the that hardcore had erected earlier. Lyrics to songs like Making The
Nature Scene also seemed to indicate a radically philosophical base-
something borne out time and again since- contrasting with hardcore by
manifesting a kind of existential opacity in place of hardcore's connect-
the-dots moralizing. During a European tour they organized as an adjunct
to a Brancan excursion, SY found their message was being much more
clearly heard in Europe than at home. They also briefly aligned with the
German label Zenzor- netting them little in the way of remuneration, but
resulting in the release of the excellent Kill Yr Idols mini-LP in the fall of
"83.

Lee: Kill Yr Idols really was like the end of this backwards technological
progression we'd been making. The first record had been done in a full
twenty four track studio, Confusion had been done on eight tracks under
truly ridiculous conditions, and Kill Yr Idols was direct to two track.
(Laughs) We just felt like we were being unbelievably radical.

Back in NYC after the Euro tour, Thurston and Lee began to lose interest
in playing with Branca, and also became disenchanted with Neutral. Thour-
oughly tired of the whole damn she-bang, they decided to cool it with SY
shows for a while and went about their workaday tasks- painting apartments,
working in copy shops, and so on. At the same time they began to fuck
around with their guitars- physically damaging them, restringing them,
throwing them around a bit- so that they'd have to write new material to
match the tones their "revamped" instruments were spewing. The result
was the bands first "breakthrough" record, Bad Moon Rising.

Thurston: Actually, the first job I had after the tout was selling fruit on the
street. The bassist for Certain Generals told me I could make tons of money
selling this rotten fruit, I don't think I ever even made more than forty dollars
a day. It was a fucking drag, too, since you had to get up about four in the
morning . I remember one day I was selling the stuff and I saw Lenney Kaye.
We played the night before, and I knew he'd been there so I said "hey Lenney!"
I told him what band I was in and he said "Oh yeah, it's obvious you guys have
been into Radio Etheopia" so I said, "uh yeah... wanna by an apple or something?"

The material on Bad Moon was conceived and recorded as a set, complete with
complex segues designed to bridge the between song gaps that resulted from
Lee and Thurston having to switch guitars. Each tune was built around the sonic
profile of one particular guitar- a guitar that had been through so much trauma
at that point that attempting to recreate it's tormented voice would be all but
impossible. If a guitar broke or was lost, it meant that song died with it; it was
far easier to just write a new one than attempt the old one with the wrong guitar.
Recorded in the fall of '84 with their own funds, Bad Moon is still one of the band's
most beautiful listening experiences. Bert's Backbeat is absolute, Kim's bass
throbs like a Neu drum pattern, and the guitars alternately chug, chime, and squeal
like nitroglycerine charges set off inside a gargantuan metal pig-whistle buried
somewhere in California's deep dessert. Martin Bisi's production allowed the
vocals to have more space and focus then they'd previously had, making it possible
to really hear for the first time how good the band's words could be.

Thurston: By the time we recorded Bad Moon, we'd started to refine some of
our weird tunings. We'd really figured out chords and fingerings for them and stuff.

Kim: Yeah, but it took so long to get the guitars right between some songs that
it was completely ridiculous. That's when started playing cassettes through amps
as segues between the songs.

The English Label scheduled to release Bad Moon was Doublespeak- then
home of occasional SY collaborateuse, Lydia Lunch. One of the label's partners
decided that the whole NYC scene (as represented by the swans, Sonic Youth,
Live Skull, Rat R Rat, etc) was too ugly to support. Consequently, another partner
(a guy with exquisitely bad teeth named Paul Smith Bodden) split off to form a new
label specifically to present this ug to the English ear; Blast First ( The name
stems from the debut editorial of Wyndham Lewis's antimodernist, polemical
lit zine, Blast). In the US, the record was released in March '85 by Homestead
(Then the domain of displaced fanzine fatty from Massachusetts named Gerard X).
Just as BMR hit the shelves, Bob Bert was replaced by corn-fed Midwesterner
Steve Shelley. Steve's best known prior work had been with the Crusifucks ( a
photo hardcore joke band) and a weird college-poetry-gauze-psych collective
strange fruit. The lineage made him seem like he'd be a sorta doctrinaire polka-beat
lad, wheras Bert had really been pummeling those things- the spate of shows the
band did in the wake of Bad Moon made it clear that Steve wasn't that square.

Steve: I had been planning to move to San Francisco, but Thurston kept saying,"
The San Francisco scene sucks. New York's is happening, and everybody's
always looking for drummers." So I brought my drums to NY and sublet Kim
and Thurston's apt. while they went out touring. The tour got extended because
they were open- ing a bunch of shows for Nick Cave, and I was just sitting there
drooling. I wanted to play on a bill with Nick Cave so bad. I couldn't believe
they were so lucky.

With gigs subsiding at the end of '85 SY started thinking about a new batch
of songs. The guitars molecules were rearranged once again, and in march
of '86 the album EVOL was committed to tape. Concerned more overtly with
popular culture, EVOL included songs that deconstructed Hitchcock, questioned
the existence of Madonna's hymen, and equated Bridgot Bardot's menstrual
blood with that which poured from the wounds of Christ. But the songs had not
been allowed to expand and contract on stage before they were recorded. Con-
equently, old-time fans who'd hoped for world ending explosion from the band's
first then-hot SST label were surprised by it's relatively sedatedness. The rock-
as-rock and noise-as-husk elements weren't fully integrated. With songs seem-
ing to exist next to the noise-routines- thus relegating the non-linear gushing
to a kind of secondary status. Since it was the first album that critics seemed
to notice, EVOL is often tagged as SY's first classic- but it doesn't quite crunch
the way that Bad Moon did.

Steve: It's funny you don't rate EVOL, cause a lot of people still think it's
our best album. I know I really like it, since it was the first one I played on,
but I have often wished we'd recorded it later, once the songs had really de-
veloped.

Lee: Some of those songs got to be so amazing live....it really is unfortunate
that best versions of them aren't the ones most people have heard.

Kim:I just listened to it again for the first time in a long while, and I definitely
think it's our most pop album. Because of the way it's recorded, I think the
songs really stand out.

Immediately after EVOL, came a few side projects: Lee did a solo LP of
feedback loops while Thurston joined Mike Watt (of Minute Men and
Firehose) for a tribute band called Ciccone Youth. The group as a whole
wasted much time on working on music for a Movie called Made In The USA
that got released in Guam (with their sounds mostly on the cutting room floor),
played a host of groovy shows, and eventually started working on a batch of
new tunes. By bashing these around a bit and recording in an ancient NY
studio, they were able to create a monstrous pile of wax, called Sister (SST).
Ranging from a flat out cover called Hotwire My Heart (learned off of a
'76 scum rock single by Frisco's legendary gay art punks, Crime) to the
goergousness of Cotton Crown ( a love song that sounds like it was played
on a detuned carillon by an army of french hunchbacks), it was a brilliant
goddamned record that met with hails of kudos upon it's release in June '87.
Pen Jockeys viciously elbowed each other aside in their attempts to discover
this"hot new band" one former SST flak says that several big-time A&R
assholes requested copies of Sister, then called back, sure they'd been sent
the wrong thing. What a bunch of ponies.
But even deaf ponies have eyes, and Sonic Youth was becoming such a big
shebang in underground terms that major-labol turds that don't have a clue
began waddling around the band in ever tightening circles. But the band
refused to piss in their outstretched cups, even though they'd decided to
leave SST.

Lee: People from major labels kept making noises like they were interested,
but whenever we'd send tapes, they'd balk. No Matter how many times they
heard us, they'd read something somewhere and think that we must have
changed somehow in the meantime. Then they'd hear us again and feel like
they'd been duped.

Recorded in the stinking summer of '88, Daydream Nation (Blast First)
provides almost more great life soundtrackery than a stomach can hold.
Where the beatles capped the 60's with the dulling, fragmentary white album
(which basically shouted hippies suck) and The Clash capped the 70's with
the bloated louse-ridden London Calling ( which made it pretty obvious that
Joe Strummer had played punks for suckers), Sonic Youth capped the 80's a
year early with Day Dream Nation ( which tracked interior visions across the
cluttered post-potpunk landscape, and documented the band's true arrival at
workably syncretic pop/anti-pop form). Each element was now fully integrated
into the whole, and the thrust was so "rock" that the grinding and laceration-
which one seemed so inimical to song-form- had started to exude their own
scrambled pop imitations inside the context of SY's undeniable populism.

Teenage Riot was the record's hit: A perfect distillation of the MC5, jammed
up jelly tight inside a little glass figurine modeled after the videotape of Patty
"tanya" Hearst's world famous bank robbery. The song's hooks were so
big, it's lopped rhythms so addictive, even schmeedles were able to ignore
the unorthodox weevlings the guitars were making. After this, it became clear
that the band was gonna have to make the jump to the major label. The wind
was howling at their backs, and the alternative departments of all the majors
(most now gone the way of edible condoms) were braying at the front door.
Prevailing industry theory seemed to be that anyone who snagged SY would
be getting enough street credibility to float their ass for years to come, and
the bidding got so hot and moist that the band actually had to engage the
services of a manager. Sheesh.

Kim: There was a point wear I was trying to deal with the labels on a day-
today- basis, and it got incredibly frustrating. You end up talking to all
these people who will only have fake conversations with you because you're
an artist, which means that you're supposed to be incredibly fragile. It was
the most extreme because I'm a girl, and dealing with this on a daily basis
was making me hysterical. The song Kool Thing came out of that experience,
but it became obvious that we needed someone who was willing to spend their
time actually dealing with whatever label we signed with.

The battle of label creeps raged into the dawn of the 90's. Eventually some
dust cleared, and it was announced the band had signed to DGC/Geffen.
Whatever the other provisos might have been, the release of Goo made it
apparent that they'd retained control of their material. Not only was it on
vinyl (still the only format that makes since), it was packaged in a black
and white Raymond Pettibon jacket, that apparently gave running sores to
the label's art and promo departments. Ha! and it had none of the crabbed
sterility that makes virtually all major label muzak sound about as peppy as
big-assed lambs wearing satin tour jackets and chugging Geritol. The exsist-
ence of material as left-field as Tunic on a major label release ( about Karen
Carpenters entry into heaven with an instrumental break that represents her
head splitting open to let loose a river of bumblebees) is such a bodacious
contradiction of the presumed intent of the assholes who control the flow
of "mass entertainment," that it sounds like a stake being driven into the
heart of the beast. That Chuck D. did a guest spot on the big push single/video
Kool Thing probably got Goo into a lot of households that would have never
bothered with it otherwise, and I can only imagine that some little brains shorted
right the fuck out attempting to grapple with the adult-strength head-cheese
that packs the thing. Thirty years ago the critics derided Coltrain for producing
music that was "deliberately ugly". Now it seems unlikely that even the stodgy
white pucks who staff rolling stone would dare heap that kind of opprobrium here.

Steve: In a way it seems like we maybe made some concessions to the label,
at least in how we recorded the last two albums. But I think that dirty is easily
the best sounding thing we've done- you can really hear everything that's going
on. It's the first time I really felt like the album's musical base was as deep and
wide as it could be. So I'm Not sure I'd even consider that any kind of concession,
really.

Lee: And some of the songs on Dirty- Mostly ones that Kim ended up singing-
are as abstracted as anything we've done. As far as the difference in major and
indie labels.....it's really more in your head then anywhere else. You do a record
and give it to some people who try to sell it for you. Weather it's a major label
or any independent label doing the selling makes little difference to the way you
live your life. We're fortunate in the fact that we've not allowed anyone to take
much control out of our hands- but that's something we've never done. Maybe
other bands are just to willing to sign that away. I think we've all been pretty
happy with the way things have gone with our label, and I don't think we could've
made a record that's better than Dirty, regardless of wear we were.

Through fortitude, persistence of vision, and an all inclusive digestion of societal
ephemera, SY have succeeded in foisting their own unique view of the world-as-
hole onto the shoulders of the world itself. If they aren't your heroes, you don't
have very much imagination. In order to borrow some of theirs, purchase Dirty
and allow your soft head to sink slowly into the waves of ion-charged detritus
that will waft from your speakers. Maybe Neil Young will even take them on
the road with him again, and you'll be able to see see them at the stadium near-
est you. You Lucky Duck.

Keep Listening, Keep Changing -
Thurston Moore's Sonic Mantra

There's a scene in 1991: The Year Punk Broke, Sonic Youth's
documentary of fin de siècle, no-more-heroes rock and roll on
tour, where a European reporter sticks a microphone in Thurston
Moore's face and asks him something like "What are you going
to do onstage at the next show?" And Thurston, staring straight
ahead, not deigning to look at the guy, starts walking and spewing
a fantasy story which rapidly decends into non-sequitur: "I'm going
to take a machine gun and blow away...I'm going to defecate and
light my shit on fire and kick it into the audience..." The reporter
keeps up with him, nodding and smiling at every word, as Thurston
improvises lines like "And then the lie/ will get caught in my eye..."

1991 is a disturbing movie, a docu-Antonioni-style story of rock
and roll coming to decadant Europe and withering in tuneless,
meaningless noise and bored, self-consciously clichéd star behavior.
Cobain jumps into the drums and the crowd goes nuts; Dinosaur Jr.
and Babes In Toyland crank up carbon-copy walls of guitar solo
slop and the crowd goes nuts; elder punk icons Iggy and Joey
Ramone are held in neither reverence nor contempt, just kind of
mocked, like everything else. The feeling you're left with at the
end is a faint disgust that these people are your heroes.

The star of the show, the overriding personality behind it all, is
Thurston Moore. In addition to the scene just mentioned, we
see Thurston involved in various banalities: eating catered food,
flushing his shit down the toilet, and mooning the MTV playing
on his hotel television. He calls himself an over-thirty spoiled brat.

Subwaying up to Thurston and Kim Gordon's apartment in Soho,
the movie was haunting me. I knew at some level it was a goof
on rock stardom--that Thurston and Sonic Yuth have in reality
always prided themselves on their levelheadedness and normalcy.
But I was nervous. This was a rare chance to interview a musician
who also possessed a critical/intellectual view of his music--who
had the potential to say more than, "We just do what we do". I
had something like the chance Lester Bangs had with Lou Reed
20 yers ago, to do battle with "the one hero left worth battling",
or some much. There was also the chance I'd end up like the
European journalist in the movie, listening eagerly to how punk
rock as rebellion had become a non-sequitur. In other words,
I might get mooned.

But that didn't happen. The encounter wasn't exactly Lester and
Lou: the 90's version of a battle between star and critic is more
of an earnest discussion over tea than a struggle between a drunk
and a speed freak. My first reaction on meeting Thurston
(and Kim, briefly) was amazemznt that this was the same guy
I'd seen rolling around onstage shrieking and bludgeoning his
guitars all these years. I couldn't beleive this person could put on
a rock-and-roll pose at all.

He was very nice-- no attitude, totally cool, the whole nine. He
was so lacking in edge, in fact, that I began to see 1991 and Sonic
Youth's recent career in a new light: the bored-star trip hadn't been
just mockery or demythologizing, but an attempt to kill off for good
the already dying concept of rock and roll as fantasy-- putting the
music in its place within '90s corporate pop culture, changing the
standards of success for rock musicians. But I'll get to that later.

I misremembered the address and walked first into a building with
an auto-parts store on its first floor. No "T. Moore/K. Gordon"
on the apartment list. Next door, a hip/kitsch accessory shop
flashed neon at me. That was the place. Had I imagined Sonic
Youth would live above anyhing but a hip/kitsch accessory shop?

Thurston was in domestic mode when I walked in: coffee, wet hair,
shoes off, year-old baby Coco playing on the floor. I felt stupid
remembering my friends and me listening to EVOL and Sister in
high school. On a tree-lined smalltown street, that music frightened
us to death. More than just a horror-movie soundtrack, it was
American gothic come to life, music to be murdered by. Checking
out he Sonic digs, a decent-sized loft with two booklined studies
framing a living room cluttered with baby toys and a big pink doll,
I decided the whole Sonic Youth thing wasn't made for 11 a.m.
Tuesday. I was disappointed that I wouldn't get to use the description
I always thought suited Thurston onstage: John Cage meets Dennis
the Menace. He wasn't either of those; more a gawky big brother
with mop top, baritone surfer drawl, a bit of an absent mind, and
a willingness to spiel.

We fell into conversation about his recent solo record, Psychic
Hearts (Geffen). If early Sonic Youth deconstructed punk by
spraying it into chaos, this does the opposite, reducing it to riffs
without momentum. Thurston didn't seem particulary interested
in it. "I don't really care" was his definitive comment.

"I wanted to do something where I called the shots. Sonic Youth
is such a democratic process, which is good and bad. I originally
thought I would just do these basic tracks on our basement and
put it out myself. It wasn't suonding too good down there, just
these repetitive riffs. We got some good feedback on a tour of
the South, and then Lee [Ranaldo] said I should take the songs
to Sear Sound and do them on a 16-track. I talked to the guy at
Geffen and said I had some damaged pop tunes I want to put out.
He'd seen us do them live and was like 'Yeah, we'll do it'. It costs
them nothing. I mean, they're used to blowing out huge production
budgets for White Zombie or whatever."

"I didn't finesse it too much. I don't like being locked in a studio,
I go stir-crazy with the anxiety of having to capture a sound. All
the records I've done, half the quality is lost in the studio. During
the period we were on SST, when we toured, our songs would
be amazing... We'd be so focussed every night; then we'd go back
and listen to the studio recording and it would be kind of plodding."

"I'm pretty sick of these song already. Geffen wants me to tour and
suport it, but I think I'll just play totally different stuff. It's not a career
move, anyway. It's not as interesting to me as Sonic Youth -- that's
mysterious because it can go different ways. This stuff is pretty etched.
The best reason for doing the record was probably to get Rita
Ackerman's art on the cover."

At this point Kim walks out of a back room and says hello. There's
some talk about the baby, who's ready for a nap, then Kim starts
making phone calls. While I'm talking to Thurston I hear her involved
in some gossip -- "So what happened last night?" etc. I must've
expected a Satanic ritual or something scary, but she too was normal,
stopping us to ask Thurston how to spell "savor". They agreed on the
Brit "ou" style. Not jet-set axactly, but worldly enough.

Sonic Youth had just finished laying down basic tracks for a new
record in Memphis. Thay stayed an extra day to see Al Green preach
on Easter Sunday. "Al was amazing. He ran up to us and asked us
where we were from. I said New York City, and he yelled 'Praise
Jesus, New York City is here!' Then he asked my friend who was
like 'Uh, New Jersey' , and he yelled 'Praise Jesus, New Jersey's here!'.
He did spirituals and pop tunes, Burt Bacharach, all that. At the end he
collapsed and his deacons had to carry him off -- like James Brown.
I had some shit to say to him, because I saw him on that show Night
Music once, and he was making fun of Sun Ra. I remember saying,
'Fuck that guy!'. So I wanted to walk into the church and say,
'You dissed Sun Ra!' But it didn't happen."

"We went to Memphis so we could make a record outside New
York, to try something different. We had never recorded a full
album away from here. The studio was a relaxed, homey place
where Pavement had recorded, and we just went down for two
weeks. I think we're going to call it Washing Machine. For a
while we were thinking of changing the band's name to Washing
Machine. Because Sonic Youth has become a brand name."

"I mean, I like the fact that we're nearing 40 and we're called Sonic
Youth. It's the best thing about our name. But it's gotten so it
carries so much baggage. In the end we thought our management
wouldn't be too happy with the change [laughs]."

"The last record we did [Experimental...] was pretty conceptual:
each of us brought in an idea and we would elaborate on it, put
tracks over it. That can be rewarding musically. This time, we
sat down together and improvised organically. We taped these
long-ass instrumentals, then went back and rifled through the tapes.
Experimental had truncated song structures, which was inspired by
bands like Guided By Voices, where it's just a great fucking chorus
and a great fucking verse and that's it, what else do you want?"

"The new Sonic Youth record will be a product -- I guess for the
first time -- not so much of our influences, but of what each of us
had been doing outside the group. We had been on our own for so
long last year that it made this recording friendlier, less tense, as
we came together from our other projects."

"For me it was playing with Japanese noise guitarists and listening
to avant-garde stuff on underground cassette labels like Apraxia
[in Seattle] and Chocolate Monk [in Scotland]. They're fascinating --
kids throwing away their Pavement records and listening to Blowhole.
Punk is like disco to them, like bubblegum. They're into free-form jazz
and German avant-garde composers, the whole FMP catalog. I went
through a heavy period with that stuff, but there wasn't a big scene then,
just No Wave really, and now John Zorn. Now it's coming full force,
and I'm sitting back wondering what's going to happen with it. Is it going
to get big? I saw the Clash sell out the Palladium and I thought that was
as big as punk would ever get. I thought that was totally nuts, and now
Green Day are selling millions of records. It's amusing to see this whole
avant-garde underground growing up in reaction against punk."

"The new Sonic Youth record takes in some of that stuff, but it'll be
weird because most people are unfamiliar with these cassette labels.
They'll hear us and say 'What the fuck is this?' The people who are
familiar with it will think we're obnoxious, like we're ripping it off,
making it mainstream. They'll say 'How much did it cost to put that
hiss on there?' " "I guess they have a point, but we're not trying to
steal their underground." I confess I've only heard about this cassette
underground by word of mouth. Thurston shows me a copy of Woolly
Bugger, a paper which documents a scene he has moved to assimlilate
before it even becomes the new thing.

It makes sense, though, that Sonic Youth would need to leave straight
punk behind. The current alternative-rock world, from Nirvana to
Pavement, is something SY essentially created. Keeping on with it
would be merely devising new tricks on old themes. It would mean
becoming mannered or miniature versions of themselves -- something
that often happens to artists as they age, and the expansive possibilities
of their life and art begin to shrink.

At the risk of coming off trendy, the band have got to keep their ears
open, and to incorporate new sounds. Up to this point, Sonic Youth
have been successful at transforming themselves without sacrificing
the gestalt that runs through their work. Their devotion to the new,
and their musical egalitarianism, have kept the work consistently
opened, allowing it to form a question about the nature of art vs.
rock, noise vs. tune, artist vs. star, etc., rather than forcing it to
make a definitive, and limiting, statement about any of those paradoxes.

Thurston puts baby Coco to bed, with blues guitarist Tommy Johnson
on the stereo singing her to sleep. Politics comes up in our conversation,
and I ask him why the band have retreated somewhat from Dirty's
explicitly activist lyrics -- and what he thinks of the Gingrich regime
and the way it could affect rock music.

"Getting more political wasn't really a call to activism as much as it
was an artsy thing. I thought using those words could be interesting
poetically. I'm intrigued by politics because it's so absurd, but I learn
more towards spiritual or social matters. With Gingrich in power it's
like Reagan again, which is a nightmare. On the other hand, fascist
politics can make for excited liberal art... With Reagan you got the
hardcore movement. It's hard to figure the '80s musically, because
so many great bands never got documented. Now people make
cassettes before they even have a band together."

"I don't think the new politics will affect alternative rock's popularity.
The stuff that's big now, after Nirvana, is just a more alienated
generation coming in. The only thing corporate record companies
have done to rock is change perceptions of the creative scene .
It hasn't much changed the actual musical product. Yeah, Nirvana
were important, because there was this forceful message, and it was
sexual. But Green Day aren't like that. They're pretty blank. Billie
Joe seems like a nice guy, but..."

"I guess playing for a major is good and bad. We've always wanted
to make money, if only so we can financeother projects. Look at
Eddie Vedder. He has millions, but he uses it in a way that's cool.
He finances projects without making a big deal out of it. The bad
side of a major is obviously that it isn't DIY. There's no shared
sensibility. Unless you keep tight control over what's going on,
they'll promote your product in a corny way. Geffen's offices
have Cher posters up, it's silly. But we have people we trust
there-- Mark Kates, the alternative A&R guy, and Ray Farrell,
who was at SST. For us, when we broke with SST, there was
nowhere to go unless we did it ourselves. I think we've carved
out a place at Geffen. At this point, I'm older than most of the
workers there anyhow, so I can get my ways [laughs]."

The niche Sonic Youth have carved at Geffen is an important
one, I think. 1991 was not only about how punk's meaning as
rebellion had been broken, but also about how punk's insular
scene had inherited a rock-star tradition it wanted nothing to
do with. Musicians acted bored because the roles they were
supposed to be playing were boring. If rock were to keep up
its pretentions to personal, honest expression (which is what
sets it apart from other forms of pop music to start with), yet
extend its reach beyond the indie cul-de-sac, it had to forge
a middle ground.

Pop culture in the '80s had outgrown rock, overwhelmed it.
Michael Jackson's fame made Elvis's seem quaint, almost human
by comparison. Madonna's Warholian sense of commerce as
art, and the endless ironies that idea produced, made rock's
claims to authenticity seem old-fashioned. Sonic Youth were
the first to realize this, in their mid-'80s "Madonna, Sean, and
Me"/ Ciccone Youth phase. I asked Thurston about that time.

"I guess celebrities then had gotten so huge they became like
part of your family. We saw Madonna as a big sister, almost;
we kind of embraced the human side of celebrity idea."

That human side is what they've brought to corporate popular
music. It's where Matador an Sub Pop, with commitments to
marketing quality music with major-label dollars, have followed;
it has allowed eccentric artists like Pavement, Beck, Hole, and
Liz Phair to have mass impact without necessarily aiming for
mass sales; ant it led the most popular rockers, Cobain and
Vedder, to call into question the concept of celebrity. That's
Sonic Youth's legacy-- the stubborn endurance of personal
expression despite the efforts of popular music to silence it.
Sitting in the domestic calm of Thurston and Kim's apartment,
I turn over an idea of them as people who make rock safe for
adults. They've scrapped celebrity, taken the music seriously,
and turned it once and