Sonic Youth Murray Street (DGC)
I’m not suggesting the letter writers were jumping on the bandwagon–on the contrary. The Onion bit springs to mind because I’ve been thinking about how soundly the faithful sleep until the sirens wake them up. I mean, how did Phillips get through? Why is New York letting the rest of the world write her history? Why do we think Sonic Youth will always be here? What is theory without praxis?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Why retune the whole darn guitar? (The Beatles didn’t do that. Did they?) Try this: Tune a few strings to one note and the remaining strings to another note (forget the niceties of Western intonation while you’re at it). Hit the guitar. Big, beautiful stuff happens. Resonances bloom and overtones spread like gas. (Nice gas. Piña colada-flavored laughing gas. Not bad gas.) Bob Christgau’s line about the electric guitar “bestow[ing] on a single, barely trained player the aural power of a symphony orchestra,” becomes suddenly, precisely descriptive, but it’s a good bet Sonic Youth weren’t chasing a classical kick when they made it true. Pawnshop guitars porcupined with screwdrivers are an art school move straight out of the Situationist Repurposing Handbook and the search for accidental beauty is traceable directly to avant-guardians like John Cage. (Sonic Youth made this link to the institutionalized avant-garde explicit with their covers of composers like Cage and Yoko Ono on 2000’s Goodbye 20th Century.)
“And punk,” many cried, “punk changed, too!” But when I saw the band name in 1983, punk and Sonic Youth were linked by nothing more than a bad joke. My friend Garret and I were leaving his loft on Stanton and Bowery when we saw a Sonic Youth flyer pasted up next to his building. A high school junior in thrall to NY HC, I got a buzz. Were they like Reagan Youth?
It still hadn’t occurred to me that they were punks. They rarely played fast and some songs lasted, like, forever. The hectic parts of Confusion reminded me of bands in the Brown/RISD orbit like Shithaus (with Jon Spencer and Tod Ashley) and the rest sounded like the stuff you hear in art galleries. Admittedly, the graphics aped punk rock flyers and covering the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was already a punk-rock bar mitzvah, but SY sounded, from day one, like a sui generis blend of hippie, avant-crap, psych, and, sure, punk, because that’s where you get the screaming, right? And they were kinda punk to make fun of punk names, right?
Date: Tuesday, June 17, 1986
In June of 1987, Sonic Youth released Sister, which imprinted on me so heavily (was it the acid or the actual Rhode Island sunshine?) that 4.5 days out of 7 I still think it’s the greatest album ever recorded. I left college without a degree, interned at Sonic Youth’s new home, Blast First, got an advance cassette of Daydream Nation and found out acid was unnecessary, met the band once but only shook Lee Ranaldo’s hand. When my girlfriend left me for a woman, she left behind Madonna but took Sonic Youth. The band signed to Geffen and the 80s were over.
