Youth Culture

THERE ARE only a few groups who mattered to me in the Eighties and there are only a few who matter now. Sonic Youth are one of them They matter because their music is an experience full of exciting and unexpected possibilities. They create a landscape that is varied and fresh out of the oven of our times. They are - in the best sense of the word - different.
I remember seeing them in London some years back. I had come with my expectations but nothing could have prepared me for what I got. I was so sucked into their body and mind crunching force that I literally pinned myself to a pillar, afraid to move in case I'd be churned up. It was rock 'n' roll at its most intense and frighteningly beautiful. It was like nothing I've heard since.
Sonic Youth make Sonic Youth music. They have to be interesting people because only true intelligence could create what they have created. Don't be put off by the word 'intelligence'. I'm not talking about avant gardists who think that because music involves technique, technique is music. No, Sonic Youth are down here with the animal in all of us. They search for the switches of the machine in all of us too. The twin guitars of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo and the bass of Kim Gordon have the melodies of robots making love; the metal, the plastic, the rubber, the heat and the oil vibrating and gushing as the electricity dances through.
I believe that the homo sapien is but another rung on the ladder of evolution. Why should we be it, the final level? Because there's no logical reason why evolution should end with us. There is a substantial and ever expanding body of information, spanning thousands of years, which indicates that we are preparing ourselves for the new species. The new species will be initially part-human, part-machine; a cyborg. As time progresses it will become more and more synthetic until one day we will be a lower species, like today the apes are a lower species to us.
If there is a film documenting the progress from homo sapien to cyborg to machina sapien, then Sonic Youth's music will be the perfect soundscape. A while back I was reading a book on cyberpunk, the science fiction writing of a new generation. It detailed the essential tools a cyberpunk writer needs and one of those tools was Sonic Youth music.
Some of the music of the last fifteen years has been described as industrial. Jack hammers and other such tools were used in an attempt to articulate the time, the place, the need and the rhythm. Industrial music can be a bruising experience but it is necessary and refreshing. Sonic Youth don't use arc welders, jack hammers and the like. Instead, they have managed to tune their guitars so that they can imitate the hum of modern living.
There is a sense of the factory and the production line, a surge of massive power cables, and a feel of the rush of heavy traffic in their sound. They are city people and they have eyes and ears for their city. A large and sprawling city like New York could have no better expression than in their music. Perhaps Lou Reed sees its individual characters better but there are few who can map the sensation of a thousand noises and millions of bodies speeding past.
They chart their way through this big animal, this big machine and they detail the chaotic swell of energy that somehow manages to bounce off and around itself without exploding too often in its own face.

In 1982 the self-titled debut *Sonic Youth* (7/12) appeared. It was far from ground breaking and was, in reality, not much more than an ep. The guitars were having a difficult and exciting birth but the bongo drumming gave a disparate feeling to things.
Richard Edson was a great drummer but he led things too much and it often sounded like the guitars were busy just keeping up. It was, in fact, the beginning of drummeritis: not until 1986's *Evol*, when Steve Shelley arrived, did they find a permanent drummer.
Running at around twenty four minutes, this is by no means essential. However, *I Don't Want To Push It* and *I Dreamed I Dream* are worthy.

1985's *Bad Moon Rising* (12/12) was to lay down the wiring that Sonic Youth would plug into for the rest of the Eighties. Bob Bert's drumming was much more appropriate and the guitars spoke up and were heard.
The cover is of a scarecrow with a flaming pumpkin head. The background is a glowing dusk sky with skyscrapers reaching their light-speckled arms up. The album title pays respect to a Creedence Clearwater Revival song. But there is more than homage happening here. If you listen closely to the album as it progresses you will hear samples of Lou Reed's (in)famous *Metal Machine Music* and some Jimi Hendrix. However, these samples do not dictate in any sense. They are merely used to lay down markers as Sonic Youth tread out into brand new territory.
There is a desperation and foreboding on this album; there are threats in its every groove. The lyrics are an attempted articulation of fears which lie behind the threshold of everyday living. With titles like *Society Is A Hole*, *Ghost Bitch*, *I'm Insane* and *Justice Is Might*, an immediate sense of something crumbling, something crushing in, is created. Particularly on *Ghost Bitch*, Sonic Youth lay down the agenda for what they are trying to achieve; an understanding of their birthplace, an understanding of the place which rules us with its images, and its tattered, torn, degraded but sometimes glorious dreams - America. *I had no belief before/Until I had this dream last night/I still remember their savage cries/So serious in their rite/Faces painted in joyous fright/In the dawns of early light/Oh say did you see/The colour of my eternity/And the sweat on my skin/Our Founding Fathers laid right down/And Indian ghosts from long ago/They gave birth to my bastard kin/America it is called.*
*Death Valley '69* - perhaps the stand-out track - attempts an understanding of Manson America, the country where in some States you can buy a gun before you can buy a drink. It starts with a Lydia Lunch scream and ends up in a tangled wreck , but not before the rationale of the killer is explored, *She started to holler/I didn't wanna/I didn't wanna/I didn't wanna/ But she started to holler so I had to hit it.* If you can, buy the *Death Valley '69* 12-inch. It has two brilliant, non-album tracks, *Inhuman* and *Brother James*.
1985 was a busy year for Sonic Youth. They also released the mesmerising 12-inch *Halloween* (Rough Trade), a must-buy if you can get it. On its cover was a black and white, tatty-looking picture of a nude woman. The picture is about as sexually exciting as a Superser is useful on a hot summer's day. Written beside the nude were the following lines, which they seemingly discovered on a wall in some Spanish holiday resort, and were in fact the inspiration for the 12-inch: *Support the power of women/Use the power of man/Support the flower of women/Use the word fuck/The word is love.*
This 12* was heavily censored, with the band's British distributor refusing to stock it. They courted more controversy in 1985 too, with a 7-inch entitled *(Over)Kill Yr Idols* (Forced Exposure). It's B-side was a track called *I Killed Christgau With My Big Fucking Dick* - a reference to Robert Christgau, the Village Voice rock critic who Lou Reed once described as a *toe fucker*. With these two down-payments on commercial suicide, Sonic Youth made it clear that, whatever they were after, it wasn't financial reward.

*Sound asleep 'till night until day/Frustrated desires turns you away/And turns you insane/Over and over/You get to a point/To make it disappear/And you're always believing and believing in fear.* (Marilyn Moore)
*Evol* (12/12) is my favourite Sonic Youth album. It floats in like a dream. Its melodies are subterranean as the guitars trace their way across disturbed soil, digging occasionally to find the elusive cause of the disturbance. Kim Gordon whispers her way through *Shadow Of A Doubt* where her character *Met a stranger on a train/He bumped right into me.* From there things take on their own dimension, as the stranger says: *You take me and I'll be you/You kill him and I'll kill her/Kiss me.*
The entire album is a journey, back and forth, in search of light and darkness. *In The Kingdom No. 19 (Take The Wheel Of The World and Drive)* is a spoken story of the machine crashing into the animal. A car hits a small mammal on a slippery highway and careens against the guard rail. Everywhere is the smell of death. *The car still rattling and shaking as if with a mind of its own, unwilling to die. The man, 40-ish, after a time, and agonisingly painful unfathomable period of time - time beyond terror to the dream of reality - is also unwilling to die.*
It is a tale of the ancient and the new, the past shooting into the present and shooting off somewhere else. And as it comes to its finale, there is a sense that the accident and the pain has brought everything into a new oneness, as the man *Strode off into the woods with the animal (it still lived); didn't glance back at all.*
I often wonder if there's something really dark lurking inside me, because, it's nearly always the dangerous and disturbing which attracts me. I don't skin cats or beat up pensioners. Red is not a colour which attracts me unless it's coming out of a bottle. And yet... And yet I detest the idea of heaven and hippy dippy love songs with flowers in their hair and heads up their arses. I don't relate.
I understand much better what W.B. Yeats was getting at in his poem 'The Second Coming': *Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.*
I think Sonic Youth understand too, that the worst is the best place to find ideas and energy, and perhaps a way out.
*It's always a headache the size of tow truck/She's full of disorders, depends what you're used to/She's talking of trances, of truncheons in battle/Of bruises from bottles which never get better/Bad baby bitching she croons at the door/Hammer in hand and head to the floor/Marilyn Moore.*

My next favourite Sonic Youth album, 1987's *Sister* (12/12) shares many of the themes and structures of 1986's *Evol*. It contains one of my favourite tracks, 'Catholic Block': *I've got a Catholic block inside my head/And it's blood orange red/Do you like to fuck?/Guess I'm out of luck*.
The truly extraordinary thing about Sonic Youth is that they mange to combine brilliant, refreshing and new angles on music creation, with great, great poetry. Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo are among the best poets I have ever heard. Poetry has got a bad name in recent years because of totally irrelevant establishment gobshites, wanking about for an academic Arts Council funded pat on the groin.
Pop lyrics often drive me to distraction with their cliché-riddled diarrhoea. But popular music still manages to produce artists who redeem the poetic form: Johnson, Hooker, Berry, Brown, Dylan, Reed, Waits, Young, Morrison, Newman, Smith, Springsteen, Cave, MacGowan, Chuck D, Ice T, KRS One, to name a few. And of course, Sonic Youth.
Taste this: *Stretch me to the point where I stop?/Run ten thousand miles and then think of me/I think I know the place where we should meet/Don't worry if it's dark and I'm late/Run me out a thin wire/Help me to kill this, love/I'll meet you tonight at the bottom of the well/Just feel around in the dark until you get the idea/I'm not moving; doesn't mean I can't/Flame on in my head/My best friend sucked his wife's blood and shrivelled up/He was mistaken for sane/We move and groove and cut loose from fear/We should kill time, we just shut it down/I've got a pipeline straight to the very heart of you/Opening in my head.*
*Sister* is an album fraught with confusion and insane feelings and a constant dreaming of a time and a place where everything stands still and where something, at least something, can be understood, truly understood.

In the manual on cyberpunk I mentioned earlier, the specific album recommended was the double. *Daydream Nation* (11/12). The year is 1988 and there's a candle on the front and back cover. I still can't figure whether the image works or not. But that's the thing with Sonic Youth; they will never fit into your expectations. They will always be doing things which are quirky and off-centre and which will easily collapse any frame you've built for them.
*Daydream Nation* is a turning point of sorts for the band. It showed definite signs that Sonic Youth were beginning to look outwards in an attempt to find the building blocks of decay and the reasons behind the unreality of things in the fast-food chain. *Get it before it gets you,* Thurston Moore advises, before he goes on to add that it's *Getting pretty quiet in my city head/It takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed.*
*Daydream Nation* says it all in its title. Sonic Youth are angry that the youth are apathetic. They're trying to find the source of the disease by using a broader lens. It's an album thought out from the top of a skyscraper; the closest thing to a mountain for city prophets. Things are falling apart at the seams of the tore-these-new-jeans-at-the-knee-so-I-can-look-worn-and-street-wise generation. Lee Ranaldo articulates this cuddled and haircut-gazing mind best on *Eric's Trip*. *I can't see anything at all/All I can see is me/That's clear enough/That's what's important/To see me/My eyes can focus/My brain is talking/It looks pretty good to me/My head's on straight/My girlfriend's beautiful/It looks pretty good to me.*
Many would regard *Daydream Nation* as Sonic Youth's best album. Not me. I find its sound that bit too hyper, that bit to straight-up rocking, with many of the riffs verging close to the predictable. Also, I think that the lyrical move from the personal focus to the broader landscape was not a total success. On songs like *The Sprawl* with lines like: *Come on down to the store/You can buy some more, more*, the message gets that little bit too obvious and lacking in style. Nevertheless, *Daydream Nation* is still a great album, one that most other groups would give the right side of their brain for - if they had one to give, that is.

Kitsch and chewing gum, *Goo* (10/12) strolled into the record stores in 1990. A big change had occurred; Sonic Youth were no longer an Indie lover's dream - they had gone David Geffen major. Time for the little Indie people to come down heavy, screaming *sell-out*. Plip.
'Money' and 'Major' go together and Sonic Youth got lots and spent lots on the production side. They wallowed in this new freedom, spending far longer in the studio than for any previous album. Alas, if you wallow too much in technology you're bound to come up a bit clean. And *Goo* simply sounds too clean.
In trying to deal with the disposable society from the cocooned perspective of its most advanced technologies, Sonic Youth unfortunately created some close-to-disposable tracks like *Mary-Christ*, *Scooter And Jinx* and *Cinderella's Big Score*, in the process. I still can't figure whether I kinda like or absolutely detest *My Friend Goo*. It's deliberately camp, deliberately stupid, with a teenage riff and a chorus which goes; *Goo, goo, goo*. Let's just say it'll never be in my top twenty.
However, there are still lots of great tracks: *Dirty Boots*, *Disappearer*, *Kool Thing* *Mote* and *Tunic*, where Sonic Youth manage to draw in breath and expand. *Tunic* is dedicated to Karen Carpenter, who starved herself to death. It is poignant and detailed lyric, in which the conflict between mother and daughter is approached with a sympathy and style only the great artist can achieve.
A fellow New Yorker appears on *Kool Thing*. He's a member of one of the greatest groups ever to stride the face of the earth. He's Chuck D from Public Enemy. Kim sings/speaks the song, and whether she gave him this line, or whether he decided on it himself, it makes for interesting thinking. It's a play on one of Public Enemy's raps, *Fear Of A Black Planet*. And for some, I'm sure, it's even more scary than becoming less white: *Fear of a female planet*.

*Dirty* (11/12) is Sonic Youth's most directly political album to date. It is also their most directly rock 'n' roll. It is also the first time an outside producer, in the shape of Butch Vig (Nirvana's *Nevermind* producer), was given primary production credit. It contains some of their best work and some dodgy stuff too. Overall, it is a splendid achievement.
It would be hard to describe Kim Gordon as anything other than an ardent feminist - aside, of course, from being a wonderful poet, a superb bassist and great singer. I suppose some might call her an original Riot Grrrl. And why not? I mean, don't women have every right to rail against a world which is almost totally dominated by us men and our muscles?
Maybe some people expect women to sit subserviently on their arses and smile sheepishly and wait for the facile promises of equality to materialise. Nothing comes to those who wait, except the grave, I suppose. And no liberty of any worth has ever been gained that hasn't been earned by sweat and risk and much pain. And be certain, Kim Gordon wants her liberty and is not prepared to wait. *Swimsuit Issue* zeroes in on the cavemen in suits who slap and tickle women's behinds in the course of their perverted business dealings. Kim's character makes it clear that *I ain't giving you head in some suburban bungalow.*
*Shoot*, examines the mind of a woman who has been beaten once too often. It rides along on a prowler bass riff, telling the story of a man who has made a virtual slave of his wife, making her ask for everything. He wants her to have another child against her will. She's not having it and with this decision she begins to see him in his real light. She's getting away for good and will shoot if she has to. At last, she is coming of age: *I'm not a little girl and you sure are not my Dad/You don't even know what you almost had.*
Nearly an hour long, *Dirty* is full of enough depth to sink a couple of ships in. Some pruning would have made it well nigh perfect. *Drunken Butterfly*, *Orange Rolls, Angel's Spit*, *Youth Against Fascism* and *Nic Fit* are worthy but could have been dropped without anyone noticing too much.
However, with masterpieces like *Theresa's Sound World* and *On The Strip* floating around we can live with such minor flaws. As I have said, *Dirty* is a highly political work. The wonder is that it manages to meld the politics and the art together so well. It is political and it is hopeful, even though it is very aware that any fight for equality and liberty will be a hard one. But *Chapel Hill* makes it clear that it is always better to try: *So why should we run when we cannot hide?/And my flag is burning/We could be wrong but that's all right/We'll rise again.*
Sonic Youth are on time. They embody the science, the fiction, the chaos, the friction and some of the truth. *Dirty* brings them a step further and maintains their position on that other level where only a precious few artists reside. What they will do next is anyone's guess. And that is the truly great thing about them; they keep you guessing.
They have kept me thrilled for some eight years now and they have renewed and nourished my belief that rock 'n' roll is a prime, energetic and vital art form, capable of endless possibilities, endless dreams and endless beauty. May they be forever young.