The Sonic Youth thread - what happened?

[Buick6]

Dunno. Bit SY fan here, ever since I heard 'sister' in form 6 back in 1987 under the influence of sinsemella before skunk fucked everything up. ANYWAY, SONIC YOUTH. Where do I start? I guess with 'Sister' an album I HATED first time I heard it, and only 'understood' it under the influence. and album that became like my Koran in 1st year Uni. An album so abstracted and rock and psychadelic and experimental and scuzzy cheap, I mean Sy pretty much ADDED to the Velvets explosion. Then of course came DAYDREAM NATION, a real 'grower' of an album and of course the 'greatest modernist guitar of all time' amongst some scribes. I remember back in the day Reynolds giving some deep analysis of 'Daydream nation' in his Blissed Out book, lots of sexy 'enigmatic' press, references to art-rock, free-jazz and this completely liberated(ing) type of art-drone-life philosophy. Personally i reckon Sonic youth were peerless for 80s expansive-noise-rock, and then you have the whole My Bloody Valentine, shoegazer dream pop that wouldn't have existed at if Sonic Youth were blowing UK indie minds in the mid to late 80s.

BUT THEN things went, I dunno, I think SY became CONSERVATIVE. OK, first they got signed to Geffen and subsequently became this pre-grunge alt-glam-type band. I dunno they lost the murk and psychadelic enigma. They lost that sorta deal where their lyrics were so cryptic you could project yr own utopia onto them. Their literary reference started going out the toilet and they started becoming just another dull agit-prop band, with an ever duller and more obvious sound, and started influencing really rubbishy agit-prop artcore type bands that couldn't play for shit. Kim Gordon evolved from downtown sex-goddess to bitter old-femmo who couldn't sing for shit. I liked bits of 'Washing Machine' but their albums of the 90s are truly horrible. The better production values brought out Sonic Youth inherent LACKING of decent musical chops, all their songs/tracks/pieces became these plodding big-fuzz slow-bit-jangly bit-fast strummy bit distortion fests. You smoke a spliff and the layers of timbre, drone, and pure-noise wash that made their catalogue up to DAYDREAM NATIOn so amazing, would be be gone...

I saw them a few time in the 90s and was underwhelmed, in fact they became predictable. One of the things about the great bands is live they're always a bit different, Sonic youth useta be good at that, but once they became a tourng rock band they became just that.

I reckon in the late 90s they tried to get their mojo back with the SYR records and involving themselves with elements of the IllBient scene and I *liked' bits of 'Murray Street' especially the track 'empty page', but it's all too-little too late for them as a BAND. HOWEVEr, I do find their support of this 'new' noise-core scene very interesting and exciting and the EcstaticPeace website is a fantastic lo-fi cyber usage of technology to help globalise new-avant music. so maybe the band are irrelevant but the philosphy remains....

 

[soso]

I have a great deal to say about this, but it's late and will check in later to see if there's any truck on this thread. Part of me wants to say, hey, they're pretty old, give em a break. It's truly amazing that they're as on top of it as they are. (There are obvious arguments against this, but look, they've disappointed you less than a lot of other people.) My other remark for the moment is that I have never understood why NYC Ghosts and Flowers is such a pilloried record. I think it's their best since Daydream Nation and all of my crew was completely blown away by it when it came out. I blame the whole Pitchfork hegemony for that one.

As to their literary aspirations, I've always felt that, as is true with Prince, you just have to get behind their silliness if you're going to be into them. That's not to say that they don't know their downtown literature. But it is to say that, for example, "Stretch me to the point where I stop / Run 10,000 miles and then think of me" is some pretty silly poetry. But it is still quite excellent in the context of what SY is all about, and although I'm not expressing it very eloquently, you have to take both the experimentation and the goofiness if you're going to dig them.

Dirty is by far the worst album, I think, and precisely because of the whole 90s Butch Vig paradigm they momentarily were seduced by. (Seduced is undoubtedly too strong a phrase.)

 

[mms]

i dunno their grungiest album dirty is one if my faves - big passages of raw rumbling feedback thats fun to get into on headphones. i actually prefer this to alot of their earlier stuff, its bitterly angry too which is always good.
i do worry that they are alt cannon - after the velvet underground, they're revered and unblemished in the eyes of alot of people who like us indie and that sort of thing, surely this was never mean't to happen to them, esp as their thign seems to be to use their position to turn people on to other things, which is why you can't really get all indie shmindie and say they fucked up to signing to a major as they didn't, us guitar rock, some more avant guarde stuff etc actually came up with them .

 

[In Moll]

I thought Washing Machine was one of their best albums, and rather liked Experimental Jet Set. I haven't heard anything after Washing Machine though, the interest just isn't there.

 

[Rambler]

Daydream Nation was my entry point into SY fandom (I'd read about Dirty, thought I'd like it, but my local mainstream record shop had sold out, ended up with DN instead, hated it first time, persisted, loved it passionately more or less since), but I find I'm listening to the more recent stuff more often these days. Couldn't disagree more with a lot of what Buick6 said about their later stuff. I think their chops have just got better and better - Sonic Youth live these days is a band absolutely on top of their game, very tight, really strong group understanding. Outside classical and improv, few acts can do that. I agree that there's a certain saminess to a lot of their recent albums (I get most tracks off the last four or five confused with each other), but I don't necessarily have a problem with that. It's simply a symptom of the fact that they have defined their own territory so well. And there isn't really anyone who sounds like post-Washing Machine SY is there? (No one on my radar, anyway.) But there are tons of bad Sister/Daydream Nation imitators. Frankly, I'm glad they chose to distance themselves from all that.

Also, characterising Kim as 'bitter old femmo' is way off the mark. She's a smart, talented, sexy, powerful woman. Of course she thinks about how the industry she works in is so male that it still struggles to take her, and other women, seriously. Go back and listen to Swimsuit Issue, Kissability, songs like that - they're much more complex than 'Men are shits - girl power!'.

 

[dHarry]

Funny, everyone's got a different take on this... is it that anyone who lived through the period from Daydream Nation-->Experimental Jet Set grew disenfranchised, while younger folks just getting into them in the 90's are more enthusiastic about recent stuff?

I liked Evol & Bad Moon Rising, ADORED Sister & Daydream Nation (predictably), loved Goo, liked Dirty less, then Experimental Jet Set I couldn't even to all the way through... just lost heart with the diminishing returns of their ironic re-treads of too-familiar ground (and with rock music in general!). I heard 1000 Leaves once, thought it was a return to form, then heard it again years later... tired and boring, I tried to like NYC Ghosts & Flowers, failed, I tried to dredge up some interest in hearing Murray St, but forgot about it again, and never heard a note from them since.

I did like their Goodbye 20th Century (interpretations of contemporary classical/composition), though it's not really SY proper.

 

[owen]

my favourite of their LPs by far is this un-

i love it's poppiness and indistinctness- one of the things that mark out SY at this point from indie, and all that hideous Our Band Could Be Your Life earnestness, is the combination of literacy and importantly, sexiness, which is most fully explored here- the way that all three singers smoulder, they measure out their words perfectly- and it never crosses your mind to think, 'obviously these callow middle class youngsters aren't really on the run/killing their lovers/living in a ditch/etc' as the roles are so perfectly played- like archetypes gone slightly awry. 'shadow of a doubt' is absolutely key here, the whispered vocal, the icy, crystalline chimes (is that a guitar or a synth, i wonder...) the sense of eroticism and danger- you just don't get that with The Replacements.

as for their recent work--well i haven't heard the last two, but i think at the very least an excellent compilation could be made of their late 90s stuff- wonderful little singles like 'little trouble girl' and 'sunday'...

 

[soso]

'shadow of a doubt' is absolutely key here, the whispered vocal, the icy, crystalline chimes (is that a guitar or a synth, i wonder...) the sense of eroticism and danger- you just don't get that with The Replacements.

I love the Replacements, but you're absolutely right. Shadow of a Doubt shows why it doesn't even make a lot of sense to call them a "rock band," even though the move to Geffen originally seemed to be moving them that way.

It's a guitar, by the way, strings picked below the bridge -- a great old SY trick.

 

[tate]

It may be worth mentioning that in the mid 1980s, as a kid trapped in the US midwest, my awareness of Sonic Youth came from the occasional guitar or jazz magazine doing a feature on the downtown NYC experimental/avant scene. Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Eugene Chadbourne, Elliot Sharp, that kind of thing. Sonic Youth always got a kind of footnote as an actual 'band' with vocals and detuned guitars who were bringing NYC 'skronk' to bear on a more rock or punk approach (sometimes you'd also get the Swans, Uzi, and other bands mentioned, along with the no wave influences). I am talking about a time before Sister and before Daydream nation existed. Hence I always understood them as an outgrowth of an NYC skronk/noise scene -- the later attempt to map them onto a college rock>grunge>alternative>progressively-more-sonically-conservative story has always struck me as historically skewed and somewhat reductive. I mean, of course it is obvious why they are also a part of the grunge/alternative/whatever story, I'm just suggesting that it slightly disfigures a more nuanced understanding of their entire trajectory as a band.

Obviously the success of Daydream Nation and the move to Geffen changed things significantly.

But the standard view, namely, that Dirty was the record where they erred, where they strayed too far under the influence of 'grunge', has always seemed completely wrong to me. Yes Butch Vig recorded the record and yes, perhaps even more significantly, Andy Wallace mixed it, but for any longterm fan of Sonic Youth's noise sections and abstract experimental tendencies, Dirty is one of the best, and most radical, records that they ever made. So many of the songs on it are relentlessly dissonant and cubist-like: Swimsuit Issue, Theresa's Soundworld, Drunken Butterfly, Shoot, On the Strip, JC -- all very abstract in terms of note selection and musical execution. The noise section in 'On The Strip,' for example, is one of my favorites, all mutating clouds of sound and atmosphere, the way the drums emerge out of chaos to slip effortlessly back into the verse . . . and the song about the death of their friend Joe Cole, composed entirely of sliding slabs of heartbreaking dissonance (called 'JC') still sounds gorgeous to this day.

In my opinion, the record that shows the effects of 'grunge' is the follow-up, Experimental Jet Set No Star and Trash -- what I mean by this is that on this record, like so many bands who were pulling back from the grunge template at the time, they stripped down their sound to the point of expelling all noise sections, scaling back Shelley's drum sound, and letting Thurston do his punk rock anthemic vocal thing waaay too much (that SST song, ugh).

As for later Sonic Youth, while I do agree that the records may have failed to inspire in the same way as the early ones, I do also think that they remained true to their own aesthetic, and continued where possible to explore the sonic vocabulary that they pioneered a decade before. People seem especially to hate NY Ghosts & Flowers, but it struck me as a perfectly logical direction for them: more on the spoken word, free improv, homage-to-New York, Jim O'Rourke-adding-electronics tip than an attempt to write memorable songs, but still filled with loads of dissonant nooks and noisy crannies.

 

[Buick6]

I'm gunna get their latest 'Brakhage Instrumental' disc, simply coz it'll make a FANTASTIC soundtrack to my Brakhage DVD..Not sure what I'm gunna play it on since my DVD player is my CD player as well, but thats another story...

 

[Russell]

I myself went through that period of disappointment around Goo, Dirty, Exp... but now love those albums ... if only as necessary chapters in their epic story. the last few albums have been a superb return to form, albeit in a very different vein to their pre-Geffen material. This is their 25th year and lets face it, not many bands that last that long warrant any kind of attention. The fact that they still matter is surely testament to their lasting greatness.

 

[Buick6]

TO be honerst I really like the new Stan Brakhage Benefit disc, but maybe because I like Stan brakhage so much and I needed a decent 'soundtrack' disc to play along with the predominantely silent DVD> Not sure how well the SY muzak plays tho'...