AN IMAGINARY COMPILATION ALBUM : #331: SONIC YOUTH (2)

A GUEST POSTING by HYBRID SOC. PROF

SONIC YOUTH: NOT FOR EVERYONE BUT THEY CAN GET YOU WHAT YOU NEED

Your Happily a Bit More Grown Up Michigan Correspondent

Hybrid Soc Prof

This is long, if you want to jump to the point where things really get started, skip the first four paragraphs…

My first experience as a radio programmer/broadcaster was as the morning classical music DJ at WSRN in/at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Not a lot of students wanted the classical gig, and I saw it as a way to get a foot in the door in hopes of getting the Saturday night 60s show in the future. I had a half-decent knowledge of mainstream classical classics having played the violin for many years as a kid and also that the Boston Pops was something my parents would actually let us watch – as a family – after we finally got a TV (my dad assembled/soldered every transiter, resister and wire in the Heathkit TV kit he bought, because why would you want to just buy a working one?!) when I was ten.

The selection at the station wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t small either and I skimmed through it while whole sides of LPs were sent out the airwaves from the top of Clothier Hall. One day I found Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1978) – which had what struck me on the basis of its weird minimalist cover (maybe half presaging the sonogram on Unknown Pleasures?) – and I took it into the back studio to see what it was like. I didn’t know shit like that existed. There was both absolutely nothing and way way way too much to it. It wasn’t orchestral but, emotionally, it drew out the same emotions. I bought a copy and it was rewarding as the most fascinating close listen I’d ever done and as the perfect white noise for studying.

I got the Saturday night 60s slot fall of my sophomore year but also took to dropping a needle on anything in the newly arrived and processed bin that looked interesting. I don’t know why, but apparently it took us a long time to get Brian Eno and David Byrne’s collaboration in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts that showed me angular, fractured, experimental world music awash with sampling, followed soon thereafter by Byrne’s impossible to genre-ize music for Twyla Tharp’s dance program, The Catherine Wheel. (It was about this time that Young Marble Giants came to campus – talk about utter excitement confusion around minimalist rock [was that rock?]) And, the next spring, Koyaanisqatsi was presented as the Fri. night movie on campus and the accelerated, decelerated, bottom-up, top-down visuals of every kind of landscape on the planet blended with ten gazillion arpeggios from Philip Glass… I was transfixed, who needed drugs, though, actually, imagine what that would have been like with a microdose or full tab?! The early 80s were nuts.

The 60s show shifted towards the thousands of cuts on Nuggets, Pebbles, Boulders, regional US, and international collections of garage/punk music and in the middle of my junior year I got the Friday night freeform show where I did what I could to model the DJs on WFMU in East Orange, NJ, who seemed to have total control over every genre and could make sets comprised of 4-6 different kinds of music cohere. I am SURE there were moments, sets, 30-minute stretches and hours that were just unlistenable but, like the guy turned into a newt in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I got better.

I didn’t come across or discover Rhys Chatam, Glenn Branca or Z’EV’s noise music then, and when I did, I didn’t like it but it did like the band I finally discovered them through.

Sonic Youth.

Or at least after a bit of work and time spent with Evol and, almost immediately thereafter with, Sister, I liked them. I was listening to the second/first “industrial” Ministry record a lot and the Annual Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll put Evol near the top of its list for best record of the year. It sounded like there might be overlap in their sounds, so I went back and found the original review, and then another in the NY Times (where Branca, noise, experimental classical and more got mentioned), so I bought it.

At first I was worried that this was going to be a repeat of the god-awful experience of buying Frampton Comes Alive on the basis of published praise and record sales… but it turned out to be much more akin to buying The Wonderful and Frightening World of… The Fall, because of great reviews. Everyone knows, now, what Sonic Youth are, but figuring it out in 1986 was a different thing altogether… I needed that stuff from Ministry, David Byrne, Young Marble Giants, Philip Glass and Steve Reich to help me along. The more I listened the more listenable it got, which led to more listening. The one thing that really pissed me off was that I never got to see them in NYC before I left for Santa Cruz and grad school in late summer 1987.

And so what happens, the week my seminars started at UC Santa Cruz fIREHOSE opened for Sonic Youth in a tiny little bar called OT Price’s… literally walking distance from the apartment I’d found!! I was ridiculously excited; I’d loved the Minutemen and been hit hard by D Boon’s death and had high hopes that Ed fROMOHIO would be a decent stand in, alternative, or replacement (he wasn’t.) fIREHOSE came out, played an energetic punk/post-punk set and the crowd had a good time… too nostalgic for the past I probably could have given them a better chance but, well, I didn’t. When the stage had been reset and more drinks downed, Sonic Youth came out and jumped right in.

I don’t recall the set list but they were committed. The problem was the experimental atonal, retuned sounds of New York seemed to confuse and worry the post-hippy, pop punk crowd in the bar. By the third tune the crowd was waffling, by the fourth a number had turned to conversations with friends and away from the band. By the end of the fourth the band was pissed and after five they put down their instruments and walked off. Where the hell had I moved?! The show had been really good and these surfer wankers couldn’t get it! Aaargh!!!

Now, among other things, I was completely forgetting how many spins of Evol it had taken before I could digest, appreciate and come to love it, but I was young, filled with piss and vinegar, insecure and overconfident at the same time and quite capable of being a smug shit. Put another way, after a decade in NY and NJ growing up a really intense athlete and intellectual, getting used to the Central Coast of California took some time (and it took a while for folks there to get used to me.) To their everlasting credit, the band returned after the crowd – to its credit – kept clapping and cheering for quite a while. They played 5-10 Dictators and/or Dictators-adjacent tunes, the crowd loved it and the show came to an end.

This is the second Sonic Youth ICA, the first (#68 from 2016, by jimdoes) is REALLY good. We share only the first tune – I Love You Golden Blue – because I pulled The Diamond Sea and Dirty Boots in favor of other tunes from Washing Machine (which meant no music from that disc) and Goo after checking the original. There are moments when I was putting this together from the 30 tunes I initially pulled out for consideration that it was really clear that Sonic Youth had a very specific sound that informed and filled a lot of their songs. It’s not that they’re homogenous, just similar enough to be quite notable if you listen to a lot of their almost thirty years of music all at once.

This compilation has an A side and a B side… all I’ll say beyond that is that I think I now believe that the quintessential Sonic Youth song is Trilogy, with B) Hyperstation – included here – the quintessence of their essence.

SIDE A

1. I Love You Golden Blue, from Sonic Nurse (2004)

2. Shadow of a Doubt, from EVOL (1986)

3. Sunday, from A Thousand Leaves (1998)

4. Making the Nature Scene, from Screaming Fields of Sonic Love (1995)

5. Disappearer, from Goo (1990)

SIDE B

1. Screaming Skull, from Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star (1994)

2. Sugar Kane, from Dirty (1992)

3. Incinerate, from Rather Ripped (2006)

4. Trilogy: B) Hyperstation, from Daydream Nation (1988)

5. Tuff Gnarl, from Sister (1987)

HSP