If you are reading this, you must participate. I don’t care if you don’t know what a Sonic Youth is, you still have to choose. Go talk to your local record store salesperson and become informed.
If you’re a hater, good, now pick a song.
I was going to do some laborious thing where I listened to everything and sifted out 20 perfect jewels for your ears, but this idea is better.
Every poster must must choose one song to go into the Sonic Youth 20 big ones playlist. Believe me, you want to get in on this before we hit 20.
Love the paperback cover cut-up technique used to write I’m Insane but the whole “Gila Monster Jamboree” video this clip is cut from is one of those live shows i’d be dying to go back in time to see. Just this ranting about what seems to be a fucked up love/revenge story against a backdrop of menacing bass and guitar scrapes had to be chilling to sit in front of on a cold desert night
all i know about sonic youth is that mark fisher didn’t like them for some fairly abstract reasons that had to do with his views on the proper social role of art
It seems to me that Sonic Youth’s very long career has been based almost exclusively on their being “people of good taste” – curators, in other words, who can turn a notionally ignorant audience on to cool stuff. I think this is subtly but decisively different from being a portal: a portal is itself intensifying, there is a mutual process of libidinization between the portal and what it opens onto, whereas SY now derive practically all their credibility from gesturing to artists more marginal than them. (Also – portals function most powerfully when they are transversal connectors between different cultural domains, e.g. fiction and music – whereas many of SY’s references were to music, justifying the trend that will end up in mediocrities such as Starsailor parasiting credibility by association with great moments in rock history.) Ultimately, there’s something very uncomfortable about SY referring to the likes of Darby Crash while continuing on a thirty year, very stable, career as professional musicians and dilettantes. The problem isn’t quite that SY weren’t self-destructive fuck-ups as that they seem to be so pathologically well-adjusted that the music doesn’t appear to be performing any kind of sublimatory function for them. It isn’t that they “don’t mean it” so much as they only mean it, that, like the worst, most self-conscious meta-art, the work is reducible to a set of easily verbally explicable intentions. There is no sense, even in the early work as far as this listener is concerned, that the music is drawing on any unconscious material. (Improv and automatic writing are the worst ways to access the unconscious – discuss.)
it sounds like he engaged in some trolling in a review in wire magazine by saying that it was all over by their second album so i’m going to pick a random track from their first album to listen to and post, the first sonic youth track i have knowingly listened to
definitely not the official music video but the teenagers’ additions probably made it more punk in some sense
i don’t like or dislike sonic youth myself. i only posted in this thread because it was mandatory
i have definitely read about sonic youth more than i’ve ever listened to any of their records, figuring whatever they’ve been up to i’ve already extracted from other bands i guess
