Sonic Youth and I have had a difficult relationship for quite some time now. I was first introduced to them via their Dirty record (wasn't everybody?) - but due to my being a generation after the siring of the Grunge nation, I didn't hear it until much later at the age of 17 from an old band mate of mine. Compared to alot of the other stuff we were listening to at the time, perhaps I was looking for something more straightforward - Sonic Youth were too abstract. Too arty for even my tastes. Through the next few years though, Kim Gordon's repeated motifs in the record's 'Drunken Butterfly' stuck with me and I would occasionally go back to them finding increasingly more and more enjoyable stuff - just never enough to make me fall in love.
When Melissa and I got married, we combined our cd collections (but not our vinyl, her only contributions at that point were a few pop punk seven inches). One of the cd's now available to me - SY's 1995 effort Washing Machine - beckoned me to give the group another try. This time I got it. By this point, I had also been into avant garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and early German bands such as Can and Neu!. I had also by this point fallen in love with the early 70's electronic punk band Suicide as well as their late 70's No Wave descendents such as James Chance, Teenage Jesus and The Jerks and my absolute favorite - D.N.A.. Hearing them through the filtered ears of having subjected myself to these bands and their recordings, Sonic Youth seemed almost down right poppy in comparison. Growing up with an older sister who worshipped the alt gods of the 90's, Melissa professed that one of her favorite singles ever was the band's "Bull In The Heather" due to the song's accompanying video clip featuring a prancing Kathleen Hannah of Bikini Kill and later Julie Ruin/Le Tigre fame.
Upon hearing Washing Machine in its entirety, I went to the record store a while later and purchased their b-sides record The Destroyed Room. All four sides of the record poured brilliance from the speakers and I couldn't stop - one of my vices since has been collecting all of their recordings on vinyl (so far I have 10 out of the 16 studio records, 4 out of the 6 vinyl releases in their experimental SYR series, etc). For quite some time now, Sonic Youth have been takers of my life's soundtrack.
No strangers to pop culture themselves, Sonic Youth were actually some of the original pack who embraced it openly - 1990's Goo featured a Kim Gordon penned tune ruminating on the life of Carpenter's singer Karen while most recently, they performed an acoustic version of their 1986 tune Starpower on the wildly chastised by some and obsessed with by others television program Gossip Girl. Having been released from their contract with mainstream label clowns Geffen Records some years back and in turn, now creating without the pressure of mass audience success, they've released this year's The Eternal on Matador - is it irony or natural progression that the record boosts some of the 'poppiest' songs of their career? Sonic Youth have been around for nearly 30 years and in that time have been the architects for 75% or more of what every other underground, indie or 'alt' band has drawn from - they've got nothing to prove.
Here's to 30 more....
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