Youth!
Sonic Youth – Schizophrenia
Currently on perhaps-permanent hiatus following the split of two of its founding members (and with a bandname ever more inapt for a band formed in 1981), Sonic Youth are often a “love ’em or hate ’em” proposition, for those who’ve heard ’em.
Not me, though.
I love ’em, AND I hate ’em.
Sometimes even on the same song.
See, Sonic Youth are (sniff – were) unapologetically interested in capital-A Art. Not just rock and roll, man.
Dissonant harmonics. Structural subversions. Apathetically-delivered pretentious beat poetry for lyrics. Confrontational, atonal noise. They had these things and were not afraid to use them.
And these things, well, they can try your patience if you’re not in the mood; and sometimes even if you are. Inevitably, anyone that sets out to make ‘experimental’ music will end up with some half-baked experiments that just…don’t…work.
But when they wanted to, they could also be a roaring, propulsive, world-class rock band, able to wipe the floor with most anybody.
Here are some tracks that show them at their rockin’ best, where their more experimental side concedes some ground to pop/rock conventions, and the alchemy results in something thrillingly distinctive and undeniably influential.
Up top is “Schizophrenia”, from Sister, probably my favorite album of theirs; the addition of drummer Steve Shelley on their prior album (EVOL) added a lot of structure. For the first time, they were capable of solidly anchoring their more avant-garde tendencies in something more recognizable as rock.
Like this: a breezy vocal melody, a goofy video, and a live-wire riff that should kick off every roadtrip:
Sonic Youth – Teenage Riot
I’m ashamed to admit that for many years, I just assumed that this was LL Cool J on this next track; I guess the title and the lyrical references to his songs threw me off. Once someone incredulously pointed out to me that no, it’s Chuck D. (who, in my defense, DOES seem to be totally phoning it in) it was blindingly obvious.
The song is actually kind of a dis to LL Cool J, apparently in response to a fractious magazine interview he’d had with bandmember Kim Gordon.
Still, that snarling, sneering riff don’t stop:
Sonic Youth – Kool Thing
Ain’t THIS the most ’90’s video you’ve ever seen. But that is one explosive chorus and chiming, lovely song ending:
Sonic Youth – Dirty Boots
This next track is maybe my favorite thing they ever did. The rubbery bass riff, the way the guitar just sort of flutters around like a drunken butterfly on the chorus, the molten middle section that first pummels, then shifts to a ghostly drift and clang before (re)building steam and bringing us right back in (dig the little victory lap starting at 4:55 until the bass riff returns). The whole thing is just tension and release and sex:
Sonic Youth – Sugar Kane
2006’s Rather Ripped is not just a really good record for them to have made that late in their career, it’s IMO one of the best ones they ever did, and accessible to boot. Kim’s songs are much more consistent than usual. I’d recommend it as a good starting point for interested newcomers.
I always sing the chorus to this one in J Mascis’ voice:
Sonic Youth – Incinerate
One thing that’s somewhat missing here, due to the focus on their more-digestible songs, is the huge range of sounds & textures they have wrung out of their custom-modified-and-tuned guitars over the years, ranging from genuinely-unsettling shadowy shards sparked against one another, to impossibly-warm glowing tones. Their songs are capable of violence and menace, but also a real delicacy:
Sonic Youth – The Diamond Sea
Sonic Youth – Shadow of a Doubt
More than almost any other band, Sonic Youth literalize for me the “electric” in “electric guitar” – some of the sounds make me feel like there’s a live current humming from their strings and snaking through cords and arcing through tubes and amps, sizzling straight into my skull.
I love the cover of their video collection, though I don’t own it and have never seen it. It’s a very apt image for what they do. Don’t know if I can embed an image, but here goes.
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Well, here’s a link to it.Report
That is cool.
I think I mentioned that the first GbV album I ever got was Under the Bushes. When I was trying to wrap my head around what I was hearing, I was doing that thing where I would be putting songs in terms of precedents I was familiar with.
Anyway, “Cut Out Witch” made me think of SY. Something about the way the riff is just…off. I’m not a musician, so I guess it’s in a minor key or something? But I could hear it as a (tinny) Thurston/Lee riff. Kim would have intoned the verses in a bored voice.
“Do you suppose…she could save…my life”Report
Hmm, I would not have made that connection.Report
That’s such a polite way of saying “you crazy”. 😉Report
Unsurprisingly I like Sonic Youth for the reasons you mention you hate them. What’s wrong with crossing capital-A Art with Rock?
Here is all Hartley paying homage to Jean-Luc Goddard using Kool Thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqUSTpL8RHoReport
And the original dance scene from Goddard’s Band of Outsiders:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1MKUJN7vUkReport
On this tangent, I was a big Hal Hartley fan in my own youth. I admired him in part because he wasn’t afraid of going big and risking failure. I was big into what I saw as his quirks, like the “inexplicable” dance sequences that popped up in his movies. Somehow it disappoints me immensely to learn they’re homages to Godard. It’s like when someone explains a joke to you and it turns out it’s not as funny as your own interpretation.Report
@krogerfoot
Amateur was the first indie movie I saw. I was 14 and it kind of changed my life as to what cinema could be.
Hartley has been compared to a kind of lo-fi American Goddard. He isn’t a complete Goddard, Hartley is seemingly unable to abandon narrative completely but there are hints and pieces of Goddard in his films always.Report
Heh, I would have thought that the fact that I was posting about them might mean I don’t truly hate them. But I will admit to sometimes getting frustrated with them, and it’s not because of their dedication to “art” per se, more that they (IMO) didn’t always get the balance right. Like, I hear the rock stuff and I love it SO MUCH that I get annoyed when they spend the next song farting around with Kim doing some stream of consciousness thing. Dammit, guys, don’t forget you’re a rock band!
I’m reading a VU biography right now (Up-Tight) and obviously they were intimately intertwined with the art scene of their day.Report
That’s part of what I like about Sonic Youth records, the stretches of artsy-fartsiness that try my patience. They whet the listener’s appetite for the cool stuff.
No, really. A Sonic Youth record with all the bad capital-A Art clipped out might not be all that great of an album. The now-is-the-time-on-Schprockets-ven-ve-dance plinkety poetry readings alter the angle from which you hear the catchier stuff. On their own, the catchy songs might come off like (for example) Jesus and Mary Chain-type elemental slabs of streamlined pop encrusted with lots of art gestures. Within the context of a Sonic Youth record, the poppier songs sound more like they started off as unwieldy, clanking tanks, but were mercilessly beaten and pounded into a more aerodynamic shape.Report
VU were very much connected to Warhol’s scene and the rest of 1960s New York Art.
I think that the artiness of songs like Tom Violence are what make Sonic Youth great. Perhaps I am just not part of the Van Halen mind set of Rock n’Roll. I like the idea of rock being turned into something more abstract. To me Sonic Youth goes along great with artists like Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, Sol LeWit, etc. Sonic Youth purposefully challenges our notion of what art should be like.
I am also sort of fascinated with NY in the early 80s because it seems like one of the last great bohemias.Report
Well, you’ll get no argument from me that SY hugely expanded the territory.
And I will admit to being a bit of a SY album contrarian – I don’t even like Daydream Nation all that much, aside from a few songs. Too formless and meandering and long. Give me Sister or EVOL or even Goo or Ripped.
@newdealer – I know you’ve complained before about, for lack of a better word, “anti-snobbiness” – that is, you commonly argue that the avant-garde should be valued for its own sake (apologies if I am mischaracterizing you here).
Assuming I have characterized your position adequately, do you think there are ever grounds to criticize the avant-garde for pretension or for its reach exceeding its grasp?
Or if they are out there trying something new/different, is that in and of itself good enough?
Is it possible to be experimental, and also a failure (to me, this would be the self-evident risk implied in the word “experimental”?)
If not SY, is there any band that makes you roll your eyes, at least sometimes, and say, “oh, come ON?”Report
And in no way am I calling SY a failure. But I do occasionally feel like Beavis & Butthead in re: Pavement.Report
@glyph
Good and fair question.
I don’t think everyone is required to like modern, abstract, or avant-garde art but I strongly react (and in a very negative way) to people who dismiss it out of hand.
Let’s start with painting. A lot of people dismiss Picasso’s cubism or the work of Jackson Pollack. The common complaint about Jackson Pollock and most modern/abstract art is “my kid could paint that”. This is not true. Picasso trained in classical art and it took him a long time to figure out what he was doing in cubism. If you look up close at a Pollock painting, you will see that it is really detail and incorporates nails and things to give it texture and depth. Dan Flavin worked really hard on his neon sculptures and Richard Serra works hard on his site-specific sculptures of corrugated steel.
In my mind, Sonic Youth was taking the innovations of the NYC art and experimental lit scenes and incorporating it into rock n’roll. Visual art can have JMW Turner and Sol LeWit. Dance can have Ballet and Martha Graham. Writing can have Charles Dickens and William S. Burroghs. Why can’t rock music be the same? Why can’t it have Chuck Berry and Sonic Youth?
In my mind, Sonic Youth is more rock n’roll than Van Halen because their transgressions were more serious and off-putting to the general public. Hot for Teacher is a fun song but there is nothing that shocking or controversial about it when compared to the scope of rock history. EVOL has more anti-establishment creed, just like people were shocked at early Chuck Berry. By the time Hot for Teacher came out, songs like that had been on commercial radio for a while.
There are plenty of bands I dislike but very few make me think “Oh Come On.” My “oh come ons” are more about socio-economics like upper-middle class suburban kids trying to be gangsta or Young Republicans jamming away with Tupac and then blasting the welfare state the next day in class. Our Conor called these cognitive dissonance conservatives.
Maybe Goth Rock like Christian Death or the Virgin Prunes or Rosetta Stone or Nosferatu or heavy metal produces produces the “oh come on” reaction in me the most as genres though but I also come from the a very secular background. I just find gothic rock pompous but some songs are catchy. Sonic Youth feels like the William S. Burroughs of rock to me.
Make sense?Report
@glyph
My main argument is against the Kim’s of the world who argue that against non-representational art and/or think that much of non pop culture is just artist whoring for the rich.
This is a anti-intellectual point of view.Report
@glyph
By heavy metal, I mean stuff that has Tolkien esque lyrics about elves and dwarves and battles as a sign of being serious. Though some Led Zepplin can get away with it.Report
sonic youth is pretty middle of the road at this point, no?Report
@dhex
Maybe but I imagine not. William S. Borroughs was respected in his later years but I don’t think he ever became middle of the road.Report
@dhex
Er, yeah, I was about to say. I’m not sure ND and Glyph are having the same conversation at this point.Report
SY certainly mellowed (seriously, Ripped is downright catchy) but the middle of the road also came to meet them – stick around long enough and influence enough bands (and get props from Neil Young and Nirvana) and that happens.Report
To elaborate, I think one would have to retreat pretty far from this site and pretty deeply into a mall somewhere to find someone to engage with a “my kid could make that ‘Art'” argument.
With regard to Sonic Youth, you know, there were dozens and dozens of bands doing what they were doing at that time. It was hardly like they burst out of the scene with a radical melding of Art and Rock. In fact, they were kind of dreary and derivative at first, if I remember correctly. They eventually turned into something different and better, and their longevity is partly the result of having more glamor and savvy than a lot of their more uncompromising peers.Report
speaking as a burroughs fanatic, i don’t think he’s going to particularly blow minds at this stage in the game beyond historically; and a lot of his sexual politics would (and have) been deeply criticized (often unfairly, i feel) from a queer lit pov.
but i mean i don’t think you could seriously call sy particularly “difficult” at this point in the game, outside of their historical context. there’s nothing wrong with being good at what you did, but their fanbase is pretty solidly park slope and pushing 50 in a lot of cases. they’re very respectable.
the strongest parallel that comes to mind is napalm death – incredibly influential but not particularly compelling as a “groundbreaking” act at this stage.Report
@glyph
“SY certainly mellowed (seriously, Ripped is downright catchy) but the middle of the road also came to meet them – stick around long enough and influence enough bands (and get props from Neil Young and Nirvana) and that happens.”
yeah, definitely. for whatever reasons the public’s tolerance and acceptance of what constitutes “music” versus “noise” shifted pretty hard in the past 15 years in particular, and bands like sy were probably a big part of that.Report
@krogerfoot @dhex
I was 1 years old when Sonic Youth debuted in 1981 so I know them as survivors.
It is also difficult for me to establish what people mean by “middle of the road”. I still think SY are too off-putting to too many people to be considered middle of the road. Same with Burroughs. Dhex, I think your observations are spot on but I still think but that does not make him middle of the road. A middle of the road rock band would not be as loud. How do you call Sonic Youth middle of the road when they are still not being played on stations like Z100 or much commercial radio at all? It seems like Wilco is a better contender by being more for the public radio set but maybe still too edgy for Z100.Report
@krogerfoot
I know plenty of very intelligent people whose tastes in art seem to have stopped around the pre-Raphaelites.Report
middle of the road in the context of noisy american indie rock, of course. there’s no middle of the road anymore as far as a broad base that everyone on earth understands. which is as it should be! long live taste tribes.
besides, we live in a world where skrillex get played on the radio and gets featured in big movie soundtracks. it’s a mighty wide road these days.Report
Interestingly Kim Gordon is only 7 years younger than my mom. I find this odd for some reason.Report
sonic youth is one of those “some of my best friends are sonic youth fans” things. i just kinda hold up my hands and slowly back away.Report
When you still lived in NY, I would imagine not liking Ramones or SY could cause you some problems. They’re like the home team.Report
There are probably plenty of New Yorkers who dislike both the Ramones and Sonic Youth but would be all about Billy Joel and Mariah Carey as the home team.Report
the ramones, yeah, because people love them to death and i dislike them pretty intensely. but outside of the odd evening at grassroots or mars bar it was never that bad because god invented headphones.
with sy i’m generally not going to go ugh turn that off, but i will roll my eyes at the plodding spoken word stuff. i would not deny that they’re hugely influential in a number of areas, but if i’m going to roll no wave style, i’d rather hear early swans by a factor of a lot.
random no wave factoid – i met bliss blood once at a friend’s barbecue.Report
I know people who don’t call him Billy Joel, they call him Long Island’s Own Billy Joel.
And the Ramones are a t-shirt, right? And The Misfits are shoe laces.
Sonic Youth had moments of awesomeness punctuated by moments of “who are they fucking kidding?”Report
“Long Island’s Own Billy Joel”
this would make THE BEST stupid tattoo.
but yeah long island is like that. it’s pretty awful.Report
@chris
There are Misfits have shoe laces? Okay….when did that become a thing. Do they sell them at Hot Topic?
T-shirts for the Ramones and CBGB’s are an interesting case. Every band or almost every band has t-shirts but the t-shirts for the Ramones and CBGBs have achieved an iconic status in our cultural zeitgeist.
Then again, corporations have learned to co-opt everything or almost everything as is the case with Misfit shoelaces it seems.
I am not arguing that everything SY did is golden but I think some of their artier stuff like Tom Violence and Bubblegum is really good and worth defending.Report
http://m.ebay.ca/itm?itemId=251444919987Report
i’m pretty sure you can buy misfits tampons at this point. shoes have been a thing for at least a decade:
http://misfits.cinderblock.com/
and puhleeze this is not “the man” co-opting anything. it’s a band (which is basically “the slightly elderly man” at this point) making money on their thing. merch is a thing you do to if you like eating, cause records ain’t gonna cut it. or in this case, if you like paying off your refi in lodi.
fun random misfits fact: glen danzig came to one of my football practices in hs. he was very short and insanely built. like a cube of meat.Report
My only conclusion is that the concept of selling out died long ago and I don’t understand the taste tribe of a Misfits Christmas ornament.Report
the concept of selling out has always been stupid.
anyway, the band started 36 years ago in new jersey. 36 years ago! new jersey!
their youngest fans OG would be nearly 50. a lot of them have perfectly normal lives of, like, doing normal stuff like christmas, but they also like the misfits. which is a perfectly normal, if kinda bleh, thing to be into. i mean, it’s the misfits. maybe they give it to their grandkid, who has a terrible skrillex haircut and a bullets for my valentine t shirt, thinking “i used to be like that when i was his age”. which is true but jimmy carter was president and things have changed a bit.
i mean right now there’s a bunch of 16 year olds shredding really hard in a basement or a garage*, and some of them may become mildly famous one day. and then nearly four decades from now they’ll have holographic mindjack christmas ornaments with their logo on the side, and other folks who were 16 in 2014 will think this is a neat gift for their grandkids, who are into stuff so heavy and weird that it makes autechre sound like yanni.
*i rather like the idea of a noisem christmas ornament 20 years from now. they’re adorable.Report
My t-shirt and shoelaces comment wasn’t meant to imply that either band had “sold out,” only that more people now know them from their merchandise than from their music. Except maybe “Sedated.”Report
So your saying that Sonic Youth is like prog rock for the down and out set?Report
Or the rock musician as modern, abstract artist?Report
So your saying that Sonic Youth is like prog rock for the down and out set?
Well, I didn’t SAY that…but there’s definitely a person* who would turn his nose up at, say, Tarkus, but will happily listen to Lee & Thurston whack at their strings with egg whisks while Kim reads phonebook listings.
Because it’s “art”.
* maybe even me!Report
Didn’t you marry a blonde?
Coincidence? Or not?
🙂Report