CucosBlog

Something happened with Sonic Youth. Something that for many years made me feel very sad about Sonic Youth, that made me think that, contrary to what Glenn Branca states in the liner notes to last year’s reissue of their first EP, Sonic Youth did artistically sell out.

After the album Sister, each member of the band started getting more involved with (usually) experimental side projects and free improvised music collaborations with musicians outside the band. And at the same time the musical output of the Sonic Youth project - the music they put out under that name - got more and more straight-laced. Isn’t it fair to say (Your Honour) that the experimental intensity of Sonic Youth leaked out of the band through their individual (sometimes they collaborate with each other) side projects, leaving Sonic Youth as a band far less rich in ideas than thay were in their 80s heyday.

The clearest proof of this is with the release of their SYR series, which apparently was an attempt by Sonic Youth to get back to “the good shit”. Though some fans rave about these discs, for me they are either obscure or mere noodling. I haven’t heard them all, to be honest. But why should there be a need to release a series of records on an indie label in parallel to the official Sonic Youth records coming out on Geffen – if the band had not sold out in the first place? Doesn’t the very existence of the SYR series prove that the band weren’t satisfied with their Geffen records?

OK. Now you should know that Sonic Youth, for me at least, are in their own category, because with records like EVOL and SISTER they achieved the balance of pop and experimentalism with an intensity unmatched by any other band. So I am very harsh on them as artists. Not as people. I have heard at least one member of the band say that they just simply wanted to carry on as a working band. I can’t take that right away from them and have no wish to. Of course they must change as they age. And why would they want to repeat their former glories year after year after year. Their old instruments were stolen. There are a lot of factors involved in this. I am realising that I have spent the last 20 years stuck in their glory years, wanting to remain there forever, putting the band on a pedestal and cursing them for not being able to make greater records since then. How sad. Everything changes.

I read something very revealing in Lee Ranaldo’s diaries, published a few years ago by Soft Skull Press. In the last entry in that book, as far as I remember, Lee writes that, having completed Daydream Nation, the band had achieved everything it had set out to do, and that everything from then on was ‘gravy’. [Is he talking about money?] That they had proved everything they needed to and had completed their mission underground, so to speak. They were then to turn their sights on the mainstream.

Taking this to be their true modus operandi after Daydream Nation, we can see Sonic Youth as having sought to take underground rock to the masses - which meant promoting not just themselves, but any bands they wanted people to hear.