Beautiful Jukebox: The Music of Sonic Youth (Selection 16--Days Spent Catching Magic)

JUNE 2002

Sonic Youth albums have been integral to my survival since 1990. Over the next years I would hear--in addition to the reissued classics--a total of five fresh records, with mine ears perceiving neither drop nor drip in quaity. Then, ten years into my rabid fandom, the band put out NYC Ghosts & Flowers, and for the first time showed signs of pete-out.

My blase reaction hardly iced my bones, however; give any creative individual(s) a decent amount of time with which to work their human magic, and they will slip. Probably also fall. Possibly through the goddamn floor. But if a decade spent listening to the greatest band extant has taught me anything--and it has actually learned me many things--it's that you don't give up, in, or out. You just give.

Sure as sugar, two years later, here comes five pairs of hands reaching out from the gaping black hole, grasping for steady boards to help pull themselves up, to make themselves visible again. Five pairs because Jim O'Rourke had in the interim taken the blood oath. Despite any fan misgivings, SY both wanted and needed his formidable musical and technical presence, not so much to "inject new life" into their sound (whadda cliche) but rather to spin it on its head--yet again. While there was some dread (anticipation?) that O'Rourke's influence would encourage a detour into Whitehouse-style sear-and-slash, the songs on Murray Street had more in common in songs like "Get a Room" than anything on Musique Concrete. Not shocking; despite being vociferous cheerleaders for noisy bastards, the Youth have always--as a group, mind--dabbled in that world sparingly. (A gracious exception is Silver Sessions, which I could not include in my review series as A) the band does not cite it as an official album and B) each song summation would read thusly: "Holy fucking hog maw, this is like someone cracked open my skull with a watermelon encased in a block of ice. And I've never felt more alive!")

"The Empty Page"--Ah, stymier of Styron, but Sonic Youth make you sound so appealing. The "new" sound is made instantly apparent, with strings seduced by a modified "Pavement tuning" so that they fall in a gentle, perching pattern of love and refuse to ruckus till a couple minutes in.

The lyrics remind me of "100%," Thurston this time waxing on a star-crossed woman (mind you, no real-life inspiration for this song has ever been cited; Thurston has made mention only of John Cage's musical philosophy as a trigger to throw out a seemingly-unrelated slug).

Lee joins in for the last four lines. Beautiful fit.

(The band shot videos for two songs off the album, this the first and best, featuring precisely edited footage shot by Chris Habib during the Murray Street tour. You can see me at 0:50 and 1:08. For a full seven years, the fact that I appeared multiple times in a Sonic Youth video was the unabashed highlight of my life.)

"Disconnection Notice"--Many of the songs on Murray Street were presented by Thurston Moore to his bandmates as skeletal melodies that he knew he could flesh out only so far on his own. They fatten 'em up well, but there's still a minimalism here that hearkens to Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.

With one notable difference being Thurston's lyrical maturity. There's nary a "hop hop hop!" to be found. Case in point: "Disconnection Notice" (also known as "Disco Notice" if I'm feeling particularly cute that day). Thurston was moved to craft this melancholy-slathered reflection on the pain of exclusion after his young daughter was deemed inadequate for a particular private school. Turning his instinctive parental upset into calm indictment--even in the face of Lee Ranaldo conjuring up a potent brick-dissolving spell--Thurston bears his heart and soul without being treacly, using wordplay to show and create empathy. Well played, sir.

"Rain on Tin"--September 11th resulted in the loss of thousands of lives and several buildings. Sonic Youth's Echo Canyon studio on Murray Street was one of the feared structural casualties, but the place that SY called home, the building that Jim O'Rourke ran from on that Tuesday morning after a night on the couch, convinced he was living his last moments--amazingly, the studio still stood. Kim Gordon would later tell Filter mag years later that "Murray Street was like our shelter after 9/11." Sonic Youth aver that they do not take matters such as album titles and covers lightly, and Murray Street proves it.

"Rain on Tin" is a solicitous eight-minute embrace.

We all hope
To signal kin
Rays of gold
Now rain on tin
Gather round
Gather friends
Never fear
Never again

Of course there will always be fear. But sometimes things that go without saying need to be said any way. And anyway, there will always be more to us than our anxieties. Love trumps fear, and if Thurston's simple stanza doesn't convince you, the interplay between the three guitars should do nicely. Each section is immaculately crafted, and fits with the next like pieces of a master puzzle. The culmination at 4:50 to 5:03 is almost choral in effect, and demonstrates how terrible a world without light would be.

Leave it to Sonic Youth to assess the damage, collect it, and compact it into a shining cube that can fit into any hand. They aren't a band; they're spirit communicants.

"Karen Revisited"--In the same vein as "Karen Koltrane," Lee Ranaldo immortalizes an ex-lover turned life-casualty in his own ceaselessly fascinating way. ("You smell of memory"; "She's not in your history books/Lost her mind and kept her looks.") When he explains to us just who Karen was/is/ever shall be, the walls open up around him, including the ones human sight can't capture, and the resultant holes emit a squall that just may be a more accurate assessment of the woman than his words--anyone's words--ever could be.

Lee starts to fight the memory of this intense, frustratingly incomplete connection with some forced apathy, and then--the cacophony vanishes from the air. She's turned to dust now.*

"Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style"--A beaut that got off the boat at the first-ever American All Tomorrows Parties festival in 2002, and I was one of the many standing in the audience thinking that no way that song was gonna end up on the album called what Thurston just said it was called.

Thurston's skewed gifts with the letters is at its apex here. (It's like the anti-"Small Flowers Crack Concrete.") He not only traces some stunning figures with alluring angles, he's taken the time to fill them in with rich colors.

"Killer tunes, bubblegum disaster/Radical adults lick godhead style." And if you don't believe 'im, here are the Borbetomagus beast-men to bleat the most obdurate sounds this side of an English ambulance.

You want a powerful message? You want something that genuinely says something? Hope I don't die before I get old.

Note: the official lyrics show "Bells together outrageously." I have always heard the more referential "Girls together outrageously," but that's just 'cause I wanted to. "Bells together outrageously" sounds like a Lee lyric.

Another note: Accomplished Chicago-based music critic/part-time drummer Jim DeRogatis has repeatedly called Steve Shelley "the weak link" of an otherwise top-notch racket-gang. This is just madness Did he not listen to this song? Or the rest of the album? Or any of Sonic Youth's output from EVOL on? Fuck that mess-talk. Jim DeRogatis thinks the salad bar is the weak link of the buffet.

"Plastic Sun"--Another that premiered at ATP LA (what a show that was!) and pretty cute for a trifle. Kim sings Thurston's "pissed woman" lyrics like the champ she can't help but be, but Jim O put the red cape on for this one. His bassline should be some nation's flag. (Possibly Paraguay.)

(When I'm having another one of those "cute" moments, I like to imagine that "Get your hands off my tomato" is a nod to Devo's "Smart Patrol.")

"Sympathy For the Strawberry"--A nine-minute epic that gives ample room for super-mischievous Kim to wrinkle her nose and curl her toes. She's setting limits--then daring the line to be crossed.

"Let me introduce you," she sings to start it off, and it's pretty incredible. Introduce you? This is the last song! Kim's not particularly mindful of listener comfort, however; I don't know if her own comfort is that desirable to her all the time. Complacency=death? Keep your distance, prickly patch, but don't leave her sight. She'll make sure you don't, in fact. Never know--you just may come quite in handy.

Gorgeous sound forever: frazzled, sweet chordplay; barely perceptible keys jangling; one of the most singular people in music history, double-tracked; the tip toes of trespassers who pop open the forbidden fizzy to protect the vines.

And oh yeah--debuted with vocals live at ATP '02. I'd like a time machine right now, one large enough to fit me and y'all in it, 'cause sometimes--lots of times--words just don't slice right.




*Debuted, with vocals, at the All Tomorrows Parties festival on the UCLA campus, on March 17,2002. I was there, maybe you was too. If you were...wasn't that just fuckin' fantastic?

*Lee wanted to rename the song "Karenology," but the album went to press before the change could be made. Tour setlists would feature the revised title. (I like to call it "Madonna, Sean and Karen." You know, when I'm being cute.)

*When Sonic Youth finish up instrumentals, they divvy them out to each lyricist for's to spin their relative gold. "Karen" was originally Kim's, and "Sympathy for the Strawberry" was Lee's. They switched, and the rest is history.

*'80s Southern rapper Gregory D once recorded a song where he castigated many a ho most viciously, by name. "Karen is a muthafuckin' ho!" Yeah! Retroactive burn! But then he went: "Kim is a muthafuckin' ho!" later in the song. Whoa. Watch out now.

Obligatory True Blood Post

Oh shit, who's Sookie gonna end up with? Are you Team Eric? Team Bill? Team Alcide?

Fuck that.

New team.

Team Pam.

Time to dyke this shit up, Alan Ball.

Thank you.

Beautiful Jukebox: The Music of Sonic Youth (Selection 15--More Casper Than Brown Lady, Really)

MAY 2000

On July 4, 1999, thieves made off with the van housing all of Sonic Youth's gear. One minute it's in the Ramada Inn parking lot, the next it's being pushed through congested California roads to meet its destiny.

SY soldiered on, playing their scheduled gig at the This Ain't No Picnic festival thanks to the generosity of the other bands on the bill, who likely did not have to be asked twice. A lesser band, comprised of lesser people, may have quit. The guitars you spent years collecting and modifying to specifications that 0.7% of anyone in the history of the instrument would ever conjure, the effects, the drums...all gone. Forcing Thurston Moore for the first time in his life to play a goddamn Les Paul.

While I believe--I mean, yeah, let's get this outta the way--that NYC Ghosts & Flowers is the band's worst album, I do not blame it's inferior quality on the gear theft. I don't "blame" anything. Great artists aren't always great. 1942. Beatles For Sale. Floaters. Ya know? Everyone, given time, will slip. Maybe even fall.

The Yootz recruited master musician/producer/remixer/prepared-sound craftsman Jim O'Rourke for some guidance and extra squiggle. He would soon take on a much greater role.

"Free City Rhymes"--For being the nadir of their discography, it sure has a stunning start. The chiming notes are apportations materializing over a screeching, vibrating swamp. Thurston wastes no time: "Ghosts passing time." More lines of casual spectral travel follow.

A harbinger of things to come, though, is the seven and half minute run time. Not the length, but the padding. The noise at the end seems there for its own sake. Before this song, that was one accusation I didn't feel you could rightfully hurl at them.

"Renegade Princess"--Thurston, Kim and Lee on vocals should be a treat on par with a fat plate of Mississippi Mud Cake. But this album isn't called MS Ghosts and Flowers now is it?

Minute and a half of tedious wordage passes before they wake Steve up. Once he is free to be his other alter ego, Stevey Shell the Unflinching King of Bap!, "Renegade Princess" actually gets interesting! It gains menace ("They're gonna fight for your blood tonight") and Thurston's subdued snarl sounds better here than it has in years.

Rafael Toral contributes galactic guitfiddle as the song nears its conclusion. Would've really helped at the beginning too.

"Nevermind (What Was It Anyway?)"--Tense and sultry, with sonics wisely tamped throughout. Nowhere is this more evident than the infamous "Boys go to Jupiter/Get more stupider/Girls go to Mars/Become rock stars" section, where it seems like the fellas could really blast windows out if they wanted to, but they're just not.

And about those lines...my God, every argument for the alleged uselessness of Kim Gordon in Sonic Youth seems to begin and end with reference to those lyrics. Which she borrowed from her young daughter. Kim Gordon did not, repeat did not come up with that couplet on her own. It's a pretty basic playground chant throughout history, people, or at least the history of playgrounds. It ain't all genius outta the mouths of babes, okay, Tina Fey's daughter is the extreme exception.

Variations include:

Boys go to Jupiter, get more stupider
Girls go to Mars, and drive red cars

Boys go to Jupiter, get more stupider
Girls go to Mars, eat candy bars

It's fucking hilarious that after references to Basquiat and being naked she just throws that in there. Every review I read decrying the puerile terror I just love the part that much more.

"Small Flowers Crack Concrete"--This here? This is some sloppy Thurston. A turgid, urgent turd masquerading as beatific poetry.

NYC street scene
The ripped shirt, a bloody mattress
Lying on top of a Puerto Rican pirate
The clairvoyant homosexual pretzel vendor
Plugitin bloitout
Cheap dirt carpet marijuana

Basically.

"What did you bring me?
Not a goddamn thing, yeah
And what did you leave me?
Another tombstone dream, yeah"

"Oh salacious mansion." "Salacious" is one of the greatest words ever. It sounds like you're licking barbecue sauce off of an especially exquisite body part. And this is what he does to it?

"Panic net." Okay, that one actually sounds good. Quality band moniker, too, if anyone is so inclined. But I cannot make it through this song. Nothing memorable I actually want to remember happens during it.

"Bleed for nothing, nada."

I'm surprised he didn't go on, "Squat, bubkes, zilch. Mister Dobalina, Mister Bob Dobalina."

"Side2Side"--Jim O and William Winant help out on this art piece that features Kim stoically reciting commonplace words whilst rolling up pot in pans. Mind-fucking live, trust me.

"StreamXSonik Subway"--A quirky quark, imaginatively constructed. There is quite a bit to enjoy here: the main guit part could inspire Doozers to erect cave-smashing towers; Thurston's A, A, A, B, C, C, C, B scheme, wherein he spins up some colored and coded wordplay; his snug-not-smug delivery, featuring the personality that "Small Flowers Crack Concrete" lacked. Jim swooshes in with wacked-out schiz so it all sounds like the fire that will inevitably flare up when you fail to clean the lint filter in the dryer.

"NYC Ghosts & Flowers"--Allright, enough. We aren't fucking around anymore. Put that goddamn magazine down and throw your dispassion to the wind. This is the epic tale of dragons and fire in a centuries-long battle for domination, except the dragons are poets and they're breathing out drugs and it runs eight minutes. For the second straight LP, LR takes the gold, crafting an engrossing tribute to the artists that the entire album sought to honor in the first place. His readings are meaningful, like every line that escapes past his lips sets off white-hot flashes throughout his limbic system. Contrast this with Thurston's detached, superficially descriptive stanzas on "Small Flowers Crack Concrete." (Both songs, interestingly, reference mass arrests.)

"I last saw you alive/Inclined to thrive."

Always puts me in mind of small rooms that are almost totally dark, save for some natural light peeking in from the outside world, occupied by people born with a perception so profound it renders the standard routine of human survival useless. So they're just in their space, waiting for a friend to tell them a story that they can spit back out to a world that will, at best, grasp a third of the significance.

The climax is nothing less--or more--than the dirt filling in a hole, stealing away the light, sucking away the breath, and stilling the heartbeat, preparing the soul for transmigration.

On the "old" sonicyouth.com forum, this track won the honor of Greatest SY Song Ever. I miss that fuckin' board sometimes. So disorganized and glitchy.

"Lightnin'"--Kim on trumpet? Thurston mating a bike horn with his guitar? This should be--should be--a must-hear, a never-skip, a brain-frazzler, a toe-curler, a teeth-loosener.

It ain't. It's good. It's there. Live they would go the shit off on it, and when possible, soul-scatters like Mats Gustaffson and William Winant would aid and abet the Sonic cause, propelling the basic idea into the stratosphere. As a hint, a promise, it really had no place on an album, much less the last track. This ball don't bounce. It squiggles and squeaks, and I'm sure some alien canine's head began to vibrate, but it just makes me wanna throw in a bootleg from 2000.



I don't give letter or number grades to these albums, because doing so prejudices the readers perception of the review before they start word one. If I did go by either system, though, I sure as sloppy pig shit wouldn't give NYC Ghosts & Flowers a "0.0."

Sadly, Pitchfork's review is inextricably linked with the album even ten years later. The utter gall, the sheer audacity of this Bread the Crescent Rolls, this hack with no saw. A zero means nothing, empty, devoid of anything redeeming. And that, sonic friends, is ludicrous. "Free City Rhymes" and the title track on their own assure nothing less than a 5 of 10 (again, if I was so inclined). The album's most grievous sin is not being poor, but being average. The most scathing indictment in the whole P-fork review is of the author's own taste. If you purport to have enjoyed the music of SY in the past, yet fail to glean the beauty of either song I just mentioned...but you know something? I guess someone could say the same thing about me and this review? How could I just adore A Thousand Leaves but be so unimpressed by this record? It's a ponder.

This is not the only thing wrong with the review. It is the bane of the music journalist to constantly reference the universal "we" and "our." I? Use "I." I would never presume; presumption of collective opinion indicates insecurity in your opinion. That ad populum stuff is for the lazyboned. I stand by my writing till the cows eat the moon cheese.

You may very well adore this album. You may find "Small Flowers Crack Concrete" mesmerizing and artistic, a grand example of Thurston Moore's inextinguishable punk spirit. You may feel that Sonic Youth utterly lost the plot after this album and have yet to retrieve it. You aren't "right" nor are you "wrong." You, like me, just "are." Some folk can't handle purgatory. They're the ones who vomit out self-serving articles full of snark, pointless pseudo-analysis, and flat-out prevarications and libel.

It's all gracious, y'all. Living the Sonic life means: step up, bare yourself and only yourself, and don't fucking lie. Three steps that once taken mark out the path to a bliss you can walk in and out of at will.

I didn't give up on Sonic Youth even after being sorely let down by NYC Ghosts & Flowers; because even their failures contained more hints at success deferred than the triumphs of most other bands. Because not everyone is always beautiful when appearing naked. Because they don't lie.

Cardinal

I guess the introductory paragraph is where I joke about how amazing it is that this post doesn't concern Sonic Youth.

Ha.

What most of my readers don't know--'cause they haven't asked, and I ain't told--is that this blog is pretty much where I put my decompression pieces, those bits of writing I scribble at when my heavy duties get to be too much. By "heavy duties," I mean my novels and poetry. (Yeah, I actually create my own universes, in addition to commenting on those crafted by other more skilled artisans.)

Anyway, I wrote this last Friday and it's about time I got it up.


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Man...I spent almost all my half hour waiting for the train tryin' to elucidate on paper why a cardinal flying across my field of vision while I was walking to the station stole my senses for a second but all I could muster was a series of viciously unreadable run-on sentences, ala this one.

Yeesh.

My mom loves cardinals. 'Round here you don't see 'em much. But she's KY bnb, and that's the state bird. I grew to love them too, mainly 'cause they're redbirds, and thus more striking than the plain ol' robins and crows that tend to alight onto western Maryland.

My mother has a birdbath in her backyard, one she can see standing at the kitchen sink. Robins were the most frequent visitors. Some other unspectacular types. Not many cardinals. Or blue jays, for that matter.

Not long after my father died, nearly three years ago, a cardinal came by. Every day for two weeks, a frequency unprecedented to my mom's eyes.

Not long after my father died, my oldest sister, who like our mother has a substantial collection of sundries featuring the redbird, noticed cardinals flitting around her garden for several weeks. Again, seeing just one or two a week was pretty special. But two or three in a day?

When I decided to move to Frederick last month, Mom drove me out to view a potential apartment. Top half of a house, no utilities due, near a historic, gorgeous, vibrant downtown. I was so taken by the possibility of escaping Hagerstown at long last that my apprehension accelerated and I began to voice a thousand reasons why it wouldn't work out.

Mom was steering us down Alternate Route 40, just like every weekday since I'd started work in Frederick. I had worked myself into a lather, speechless from rage at imagined setbacks, tears streaming down my splotchy face.

A cardinal flew across the car. Close enough to make out the gray on its breast. In the two months Mom had been taking me to and from work, we never saw no goddamn cardinals.

Mom said it was a sign. I have always believed in spirits and spiritual guidance of both a positive and negative nature, way before my father passed. So I must admit it shocked me out of my sorrow. A bit.

I got the apartment.

I lost my job.

My first week in Frederick, I was a wreck no one was slowing down to gawk at. I loved my new place; great location, great neighbors. But; no income, no phone. Family helped of course, but loans from your kin is just receiving welfare from a government that loves you very much.

I walked every day, keeping my metabolism boosted, building leg muscle, soaking up the sun in a very non-Sheryl Crow manner, and wondered if I'd ever get the chance to fully enjoy all the shops and restaurants I strolled by and gazed into. Everything looked appealing. Except my future.

It was only a week after settling in when my feet turned me down the end of my block towards Laboring Sons Alley. My mind was no doubt suffused with some self-doubting/loathing/immolating bullshit when a cardinal flew out in front of me. First one I'd seen since moving, and I spent fucking hours outside, using exercise as an anti-psychotic medication.

Today I'm heading to DC for job training. I'm type crazed--training in the capital, job split between Frederick and Gaithersburg. Lotsa travel. Lotsa room for error.

Walking to the MARC station this morning, I passed by Laboring Sons Alley. It was a bit after 6, and my urge to vomit billowy waves had just passed. I tried to replace all the worst-case scenarios doing an HB stomp in my gourd with best-case (or rather, "likely") ones.

A cardinal flew out right in front of me, and settled on a phone pole across the street. Second one I've seen since moving here.

Coincidence my big ass.

I don't know how it's gonna work out, my life. But it will.

Beautiful Jukebox: The Music of Sonic Youth (Selection 14--Collecting the Ravelling)

MAY 1998

A Thousand Leaves saw light three years after Washing Machine, a gap previously unmatched in Sonic Youth's recorded history. Every second of the record shows the band as far away from the sound of Goo and Dirty as possible, the prevailing aesthetic sentiment one of squawk-boxes prodded and pounded, of simple words fit into abstract sentences, of every excess bit of fabric dropped on the studio picked up, collected and re-threaded to create some marvelous new garb. The first album they recorded at their new Echo Canyon just happened to be their best ever.

The cover is a piece by Marnie Webster called "Hamster Girl." Sometimes I stare at in hopes it will make some kind of sense, but in the end it makes no kind of nothing. The hand makes me think of the "Time Warp Tickers" game in the legendarily garbation Action 52 collection, and why are they touching the goddamn hamster and why is there a hamster, was it going to try and crawl up in that poor little girl in the background?

The tri-guit deployed yet again, showing the effects of effects. Seriously, they are phased the fuck out all over this album, and I couldn't be happier. It's like a Caraviggio painting, cloaked in shadows with beams of light perfectly elucidating key moments and figures of the work.

You ready to see me bloviate even further? I know I love this album, but I'm not sure about you.

What are you doing? Looking at my blog. And what do you see? The words of a woman in rapt adoration of recorded sound. I see--someone who shares this passion. So let's adore.

"Contre Le Sexisme"--What incantatory force drives Kim Gordon to enter into a non-lysergic wonderland, "Eat Me" shirt stretched over her chest, dead bent on exploring and exclaiming while ducking the pebbles the rabble hurl at her in their ignorance?

"A calm wind will stir me too," she assures the peculiar, unfriendly creatures who surround her. Searching for allies, she waves at the sound. The sound waves back.

Streeeeeeetch. Kim plays her vox like she and the fellas tend to play their electrified banjos. Yet many who marvel at the latter take umbrage with the former (and atop it all, neglect to acknowledge Kim's role, making it all about Lee and Thurston, like Kim isn't deadly when she straps on six).

"A thousand leaves for your disguise" is not only the first of several lyrical refs to the album title, but reminds me of Margaret Cho's last resort plan to get laid: "I'm just gonna have to cover with leaves, and hope somebody falls in."

"Sunday"--A tribute to torpidity that sucks all the helium out of the one-eyed prude balloon and recites lyrics that can potentially strike the listener as personal while remaining ambiguous enough to make said listener wonder what it is they're relating to.

Sunday--lazy, languorous, beasts with ambiguous features lurking in crooks and cracks. Thurston's Sundays sound hopeful, wistful, and in love. When I was young, Sundays meant the last day before school started again. When I got older, Sundays meant the last day before work started again. Extended unemployment brought the joy back, but one thing about being a wage slave? The "wage" part. Thurston Moore is a real lucky fucker.

The delicate intro, relentlessly familiar riff, which eats itself after some time in the deep fryer--"Sunday" is like the rest of the album, immaculately structured to reward repeated listenings.

"Female Mechanic Now on Duty"--One of the greatest song titles in their history, for sure. Kim took her lyrical inspiration from Meredith Brooks' insipid smash "Bitch" ("I'm a bitch, I'm a mother, I'm a child, one-hit wonder"). You'd think Kim would straight smash on a triflin' ho, twist gnarled wire into a Barbie head, but her words are actually underwhelmingly inscrutable.

None of that matters; the guitar work is carving itself into the side of a mountain. It's the kind of skronking raunch that either turns you off or turns you on--you don't shrug when faced with Sonic Youth at the height of their powers. "Female Mechanic" is a pedal clinic, but far from sterile. The careening wails give way to falling leaves 'round about 300 seconds in, and I can just see Snoopy blowing them over to a waiting orange and brown pile.

(The second half of the song was taken directly from the band's performance on Sessions at West 57th, one of their most breathtaking television appearances.)

"Wildflower Soul"--"I don't want to be cynical. That's one artistic temperament that I don't feel has any real place in music"--Thurston Moore, Rolling Stone, 1994

I don't know that I agree with that opinion, mainly because I don't see why any temperament shouldn't cross all art forms, but I appreciate what he's saying. It means "Wildflower Soul," a breathtakingly cohesive appreciation of blissful, carefree youth that also celebrates the inevitable growth. From the first molten notes to the gentle breeze that churns into a full-blown wind storm freeing seeds from their puff, it's more epic poem than song.

Kairotic Youth.

"Hoarfrost"--The only song from A Thousand Leaves I've seen live more than once. (My ideal SY setlist? The entirety of this album, with "Silver Rocket" and "Starpower" as the encore. You're not in the mood? Well you get in the mood!)

Inspired by a hike on the white Canadian hills that Lee took with Leah Singer, and shit, you can walk gingerly around inside this song. Second best song about snow ever, just behind "Skating" by the Vince Guaraldi Trio and a league ahead of "Snodland" by Soft Machine. So much happening, but it converges in the middle of an imperfect circle.

In the winter, when the streets are buried underneath inches of flakes, Patrick helps his pops plow paths clear. One year "Hoarfrost" popped up on his mp3 player as he toiled. When I was able to speak with him the day after, weary myself from shoveling, the first words out of his mouth were wrapped up with wonder--not over the hills of snow, but over looking at said hills while listening to "Hoarfrost."

"It was perfect. That song is what snowfall looks like, what winter feels like."

Lee's voice is fragile ice, as key a component to the vibe as the sounds he walks alongside. "We'll know where when we get there."

(Now is the perfect time to pull out the parentheses and point out yet again how amazing and bang-on Steve Shelley is behind the kit. Just death from above. I don't know how dude can keep from jumpin' back and kissing himself most days.)

"French Tickler"--A french tickler is a condom featuring pleasurable protrusions. I've never had any experience with a prophylactic of such a sort, but I did once have sex to this album. Wasn't great. Kept getting frustrated that the act was distracting me from listening to the songs.

Kim is alternately sultry and raw, crackling with exposed lusts. You can be forgiven any involuntary paroxysms incurred while listening.

"I feel combustible," she sings, and it's not just her. "Forever fabulistic, blowup, pleasuristic." You know you're doggy paddling in some ecstatic waters when you start making up words.

The guitfiddles and boss bongos hit your palette like a tasty pastry during the mellowed-out verses, and your gut like a cassowary's kick when Kim throttles her throat, in the throes of recess bliss.

"Nothing excellent can be done without leisure"--Andre Gide

"Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise"--Jacques Attali

"French Tickler" takes those two quotations to heart and soul.

"Hits of Sunshine (For Allen Ginsberg)"--Art is palliative at its best; when it clicks, it can reduce the pain of this terminal condition known as life, but never can it reverse the cycle of suffering or stop it altogether. It just aims to improve the quality of life.

That'll do.

Given it's eleven minute runtime, you could reasonably expect "Hits of Sunshine" after a couple verses to slide slow into a pit of savagery. Funny thing though--it never does. There's something very classical-sounding about the watercolor tones they achieve here, segueing from one intelligently played section to the next. It sprawls. It stains.

"Karen Koltrane"--I'm at an emotional crest the whole album long; that's why it made such an indelible impression to begin with, why I respond so instantly and powerfully to the pulses contained thereon. The romance reminiscence that is "Karen Koltrane" may be the most stirring moment of the whole album, even more so than "Hoarfrost," and no shock I suppose that both songs are helmed by Lee Ranaldo, the most earnest of SY's vocalists. His delivery of the first two lines here absolutely seize the heart.

Lost love, lost mind. The ring modulator as metal detector/map of the world's heart. Thurston's supporting voice on the "Will she stay forever?" section is spectacular. It curdles around Lee's straining queries and cuddles up next to the sparse sounds that lose any answers to the ether.

Could have done without the infrequent little frog farts, though.

"The Ineffable Me"--Kim catches shit for goof-squad lyrics that she didn't actually write ("A cum junkie's job/Makes my dick throb" is clearly Thurston scribble). Fuck the Kim hate.

A pattern on A Thousand Leaves is how Thurston and Lee sing their plaintive meditations on the inexorable progress of life with a studied gentleness while Kim eats dirt and spits it back out as flame. (So much for the pacifying effects of motherhood.)

Do fools realize the extent of Kim's influence on the band they aver would be that much better without her in it? It's real simple--real simple-- to say 'Well, Thurston started the band and she was already his girlfriend and had no musical experience, she's just along for the ride', but if you study the history, Kim's art background pretty much drove the band's direction for years. Thurston and Lee--each far more accomplished than Kim musically--would often run ideas by her in the studio, and defer to her judgment. Lee and Thurston wanting to record an album where piano replaced guitar as the primary instrument? Guess who shot that half-ass idea down with a .600 Nitro Express Magnum?

"Listen to her bass parts, her guitar parts. Anyone could play what Kim plays."

Yeah, but could just anyone think of the parts she plays? Uh huh.

"Snare, Girl"--Tempting to listen to this sweet (yet somehow spooky) lullaby teeming with nubile imagery and mark it as another example of papahood unleashing Thurston's inner hippie. However, the man himself insists the lyrics date back to his high school poet years.

One man's treacly is another woman's gorgeous. I have to remember to take a ball of yarn with me when I listen to this song, so I can find my way back out of the maze when it's over.

"Heather Angel"--Heather Angel was an actual actress (I even walked by and snapped a pic of her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame) but Kim plays her own role here, assumes her own persona, speaking in swaths of possibility, offering no ideas, only feelings. The music's unfettered ascension, the EVOL-esque martial percussion, makes for a most sanguine conclusion. An entire galaxy formed, in just under 75 minutes. (Where's your hammer, brother?) Fucking exquisite.


In M.O.P.'s legendary "Downtown Swinga," Li'l Fame expresses his desire to be buried with a tape of Paid in Full. Desire is nice, but it helps to put paper in front of your lips. See, I've already made out a legal last will and testament, and in it I stipulate that I am to be buried with my vinyl copy of A Thousand Leaves (along with a particular Snoopy doll). It is not only the greatest album Sonic Youth has ever made, it is the greatest album anyone has ever made. I feel like I only did 56% justice with this written review. But that I could do it justice at all, that I could elucidate with some competence the ways this wreck-hard has spun my brain around, and I mean that shit is still a-twirl, to where it won't stop till everything else does...I'm glad I could at least do that.

Beautiful Jukebox: The Music of Sonic Youth (Selection 13--Enter the Mutron: 36 Pedals)

SEPTEMBER 1995

Ever since Daydream Nation in '88, Sonic Youth had been releasing albums every couple years. This changed with Washing Machine, which came just a year and some change after Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. The very title of the record suggested cleansing, and after 1994, the band needed it. They'd put out an anomalous record that effectively exposed any dreams DGC had about them becoming super-profitable mega-stars as just that, dreams. And a friend of theirs who had become a super-profitable mega-star was found dead by his own hand.

Lee Ranaldo has more than once in interviews likened being in a band to being in a marriage: "There's something about what we do together that's further solidified by the solo things we do."

There is no secret to SY's longevity and fierce creativity, other than that of a consistent, persistent interest in the creative community around them that they can in turn take inspiration from. So while Sonic Youth were not touring or making new music, Lee and Thurston individually played around, sometimes locally sometimes globally, sometimes solo but more often in collaboration with free jazz musicians like William Hooker and Rudolph Grey.

When it came time to hunker down in a studio and make some new music, the band members decided to leave the city and record at the Pavement-approved Easley Studios in Memphis. The reinvigoration could not be stopped, even though big plates and buckets of fat sloppy down-home Southern-ass BBQ are pretty enervating.

So is a lunch consisting of a Whopper and fries, but damned if that's not what me and my best friend Angela were eating as we sat in a gazebo at Greenbrier Park, listening to a newly-purchased Washing Machine on her battery-powered CD player. First and only time I ever devirginized a Sonic record with someone else in the room. Felt kinda cheap, ya know, like how could I get all sensuous and exploratory, how could I close my eyes and breathe in the scent of the music with Angela's big ol' redhead in the back watching the whole time and exclaiming how NOISY everything sounded ohmigod.

"Becuz"--A nod to Patti Smith's "Because the Night," Kim kicks it off over guitars that sound like they're going through the "Charlie Brown's Teacher" pedal. With vox reminiscent of Wanda Robinson, Kim speaks to a young girl besotted by her new dude. (The line "Holding his hand like a brand new kite" leads me to believe the girl is less Lucy than Chuck in the situation.)

With this ring modulator, I thee wed. The ceremony takes place in the middle, and Monie is the flower girl. Shit is colorful as Monopoly money, but this stuff is of genuine, real-world value.

"Becuz" drops the listener brusquely into what is the most notable thing about the album before you even press "play." Kim Gordon has largely sworn off four strings for six, and her presence not only completes the mightiest trio that doesn't have the name "Brotzmann" in it but sets the tone of these songs in many ways. You'd do best to watch some WM-era live gigs to really get what she's bringing to the table.

"Junkie's Promise"--Thurston Moore swears on a three-pound plate of barbecued baby back ribs that this song is not about Kurt Cobain. Maybe 'cause he didn't want to be lumped in with the other artists who'd done blatant tributes to the recently-deceased, or maybe 'cause, well, it's not about him. (It is safe to assume Thurston has befriended more than one goodhearted tragic figure in all his years.) Still, "All I know is all and all is all I've heard"? "I heard you say/'You know I hate myself'/'But I love everybody else.'"? Hmm.

The very first seconds of this song almost made Angela drop her burger on the ground.

"Saucer-Like"--Many fans bemoaned the utter lack of Lee on Jet Set, and in spectacular atonement, he gets two songs on Washing Machine. But it wasn't through any triumph of the will.

"Those guys particularly asked me to sing on this record," Lee told huH magazine in an interview to promote the album. "I mean, if they hadn't I probably wouldn't have."

(That quote is amazing to me. I've never seen Lee admit anywhere else that he didn't even want to bring songs in for the album, that basically the Dirty experience apparently bruised his ego so deeply that he felt there would be little to no point of leaving himself vulnerable for Kim and/or Thurston to say, "Eh, not really feeling that one." And maybe not even saying that explicitly, which could wound worse.)

"Saucer-Like" feels more open wide than the first two songs, with a light wind hanging around, and the lyrics more evocative of the life lived inside one's own head. There's probably still people out there who don't know that's Kim "oooooh-aaaaahhhh"-ing at 1:19, 1:23, 1:27, 1:31, 2:12, 2:16, 2:20 and 2:24.

"Washing Machine"--There was a buzz before the album's release that Sonic Youth were going to change their name to Washing Machine (that cleansing metaphor again) and the fact that this news came from Thurston Moore should have immediately clued everyone in to its veracity. But Opie's so goddamn deadpan; when he said that the follow-up to Daydream Nation was "gonna have no notes, no tones, no music, but it's gonna blow your mind," there were some people who thought he was serious. I guarantee this.

Nine and a half minutes that seems to fly by. Angela didn't see it this way at the time. "God, why don't they just stop? They've made their point." Yeah. You know, you either have patience with art or you don't. She also felt compelled to imitate Kim's "All right now!"s. Every time. I never tell my friends they need to shut the fuck up. Is that a flaw of mine?

Kim's lyrics are playful throughout the record; on this song I get a series of scenes depicting 1950s malt-shop love, a coupla squeaky kids sharing no-soul kisses over a plate of fries.

Musically, it's almost immaculate. For the first few minutes the riffs are running off in different directions. The arterial riff is in fact a Kim G. original, and that's the key word with her on the guitar. Her style isn't as reliant on fall-back lines and chords like the fellas, who--notorious taste for innovation notwithstanding--still from time to time can be heard regressing into the typical traps of the rock guitarist.

"Typical" is not at all applicable to what goes on from 3:00 forward, however. The sun starts to set on downtown; the streets begin to decongest; the porch lights pop on. A minute later, Thurston goes off like some bizarro Michael Larson. Phase one to two, three to four...whew! Fluorocarbons thru ozone, kids.

I said "almost immaculate." My mild gripe is one that with only a couple exceptions I have for the whole album: the drum mix is sub par. People dog the drum sound on Sister, well, I think Washing Machine is even poorer. To say it's a disservice to Steve Shelley is a disservice to saying things. Best drummer in rock. Totally deserved better. Rant over.

"Unwind"--A rarity fa sho, a Lee/Thurston duet fa real. You can hear the first signs of fatherhood influencing Thurston's lyricism/poetry; "Unwind" is sweet, cozy, and comforting in the way domestic ecstasy is supposed to be. The serenading vocals are the highlight: Thurston reaches higher registers than usual, with Lee acting as a flashlight of sorts.

"Move out into his sundry eyes"? Inconceivable!

"Little Trouble Girl"--Two soft songs in a row? Well, this is a girls-only affair, Kim joined by the other Kim, Melissa Dunn and Lorette Velvette.

Like "Washing Machine," this is reminiscent of the decade everything seems to think represented the apex of innocence among humanity, with the girl-group vibe of the vocals (I still can't believe I'm listening to an SY song that has "sha-la-la"s throughout, sometimes). Word-wise, Kim is in the mind and heart of a young girl talking earnestly to her mother, pleading for some understanding and support ("Mama/I'm not too young to try.")

I have to be in the mood for this song. I don't always want to hear sweet soaring vocals with an undercurrent of darkness.

"No Queen Blues"--Up until Thurston does that "cloak my vocals in effects than bury them in the backyard for the dog to dig up later" thing, this is class. It worked for Psychic Hearts; here, not so much. Mainly 'cause I don't know if he's making reference to a specific woman here, like Courtney or Kathleen or Lydia or I don't give a shit. I'm not amused whatsoever, and less than interested. If screaming the word "hop" over and over on the last album didn't work, why try again with the word "no"? Unless you're going to surpass the record set by "Nobody But Me," just don't even attempt it, dude!

Everything else, though? Works.

The first couple minutes are actually the eight-track demo, before switching abruptly to the fuller 16-track. Strawberry fields are forever. The guitar lines and sounds here are among the greatest they've committed to tape (you know, back when that was the thing); they curdle, circle and squeal. "Wow wow wow," the kitties exclaim from their safety zone by the upset trash cans.
They're getting the kind of tones where you just scrunch your face and go "Uggghhhuuuuhhh."

The ending is fittingly shambolic, and thankfully Thurston doesn't excoriate his throat trying to keep up with the craziness. They musta felt real good for this mix, 'cause the drums even sound like drums should sound on a fucking record!

"Panty Lies"--Attack of the 8-Track Demo! Returns!

Some would say that Kim's lyrics never progressed beyond demo stage either.

Hush, puppies. Yer only good with fish.

Kim is awesome on this. She's having fun but still being bad-ass. "Don't just stare/'Cause she's not wearing underwear!" The exclamatory sounds that punctuate the end of each line provide entertainment for hours. I would be shocked if her daughter wasn't the impetus for this song. "Peekaboo," "First comes walkin'," the evidence is evident. Or something.

I wanna do cheerleading routines to this song. And I hate cheerleading.

(I've seen criticisms that this song is "lazy." I say listen closer. Even if you find Kim Gordon's delivery and lyrics wanting, the string work for each verse is varied and aberrant. My favorite: the bit under the second verse, which is just begging for pebbles to be skimmed over its surface.)

"Becuz Coda"--An instrumental excised from the end of the "Becuz" due to record company trepidation. Sounds oddly reverential coming right after the preschool mania of the previous track. Not too dissimilar to lying on the rocky floor of a chilly river cave and watching the current, moving so slow as red and orange lights glow underneath, flashing vibrant colors along the cave walls.

"Skip Tracer"--Lee's second song takes its title from William Burroughs but it's more upbeat than beat up or Beat up. The inebriated female performer is not Courtney, as pretty much everyone thought at the time, but rather Mecca Normal's Jean Smith.

Lee's about as wacked as Kim is lyric-wise on here, mentioning donuts, cheesecake and telling reflections they'd better "run that!" It's not precisely poetry, but he says it like a poet. Thus. It could come off smug, but he smudges the calligraphy nicely. High school journal keepers are prone to melodramatic recollection of mundane events.

What does "Hello 2015!" mean? Who knows, other than Lee Ranaldo. Who else needs to know?

"The Diamond Sea"--One of SY's most beloved songs, and at 19:35, the longest song to ever appear on one of their albums. Fans griping about the dearth of epics on Jet Set were secreting wildly over this one. Faced with a monolith like "The Diamond Sea," a piece of art that is less words and music than breath and flesh, a writer must take one of two paths: scratch out paragraphs to hopefully rival the greatest scribble they've ever manipulated from an ink pen or, keep it pithy.

Pith off.

I forget who it was...I really wanna say it was Fuppetsmaster Rob...but somebody likened the wah intro to the pained cries of Martin Prince being wheeled into the ER after his soapbox derby car crashes--OWIE OWIE OWIE. Classic. That particular nasty sound comes courtesy the Ludwig Phase II Synthesizer, an extremely rare effects pedal that was not only the new sound of the seventies, but also built to store snacks in.

Thurston takes the helm and it's clear yet again that the (positive) crisis of parenthood has significantly affected his artistic choices. His words have a lilt even gentler than the music, addressing the blooming wonder of love in its first days, and dispensing advice on how to never let slip away the sweetest memories, even as "time takes its crazy toll." Thurston's lyrics are basically the counsel of the best uncle you never had; sad in some parts, smart in others, and ultimately sweet without any threat of tooth decay.

Beginning at 2:41, I can hear the sky change. I don't need to be outside to actually witness the atmospheric alteration, I just know, from the sounds. It's got a nuclear shine to it. The clouds are morphing into shapes undreamed by silly little human minds, and no scope is necessary to spy the stardust storms.

Then, I can hear the sky expand. How could it expand? How could it just grow and grow until it stretches out over the ends of the planet? Well, I don't comprehend the precise process, I just know that it is. Can't you hear it too? Sonic Youth have a secret, a fucking fantastic one, and they're letting people in on it. Love is everywhere because life is everywhere. Anywhere. Elsewhere. And death? That's a word those aforementioned miniature minds created in a cute attempt to make sense of the indefinable.

Just exit via the closest door and step outside. Stare into the ordinary. See the orbs flutter and flicker. Hear the blood rushing in your head. We only give ourselves a raw deal. The lights are on to permit play, so toss off the anti-social security blanket and take a position.

Nineteen minutes of unceasing racket would not equal a daydream come true, so the Sonics are sure to land gracefully.

Hello. We're Sonic Youth.
Hello, Sonic Youth!
And, uh...we've been the best band on Earth for thirteen years. We make love to unconventionally beautiful guitars and our drummer is second-guess-proof, this unassuming dude is the most sublime blend of strength and subtlety and--
Hey, that's great. We have free donut holes and OJ in the next room.
How is it that a decrease in volume means an increase in temperature? A most peculiar febrility, indeed.

And you know what? I love it. I love when art throws me off, spins me 'round like a topman tribe, alters my beast, bodies my functions. 'Cause I'm not a Sonic Youth nerd, or a music/book/film/art nerd, or even really an "info freak," insomuch as I'm a life nerd. I geek the hell out over breath and sensation, the tactile and imperceptible, the tension and release, the vulnerable and invincible.

So do Sonic fuckin' Youth. Here's a quarter. You know where to put it.

Beautiful Jukebox: The Music of Sonic Youth (Selection 12--The Lost Album)

5/10/94

"A cruise to the altitude above the raunch"--Thurston Moore, Filter, 2006

Dude, I suppose.

As it turned out, Dirty did not make Sonic Youth superstars. Total U.S. sales fell well short of half-a-million, denying the world a picture of Thurston Moore licking a gold-record plague.

Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star seemed poised for greater things, as it debuted on Billboard at #34, and first single "Bull in the Heather" climbed the Modern Rock charts. Alas, what could have been wasn't, as Kim Gordon's pregnancy erased the possibility of touring behind the album. The potential of a gold record versus the potential in a new life, yeah, we all gotta make our sacrifices.

The band don't talk about this one too much; Kim has called it "a weird record," and in Sonic Youth's great soundline, it is. A clear reaction to its predecessors processed rawk, Jet Set concentrates on short, uncomplicated shocks of sound that show the clear influence of lo-fi bedroom auteurs like Sebadoh. It is arguably the most divisive album in their catalog; many fans who balk at 10 minute epic stretch-outs are attracted to the pocket-rock within. While fans who've come to expect sprawl and squall would sooner take a fire extinguisher up the ass than sit through the album.

Also, no Lee songs. This affects some people, and yes, it is a direct result of the Dirty disagreement.

Thurston told Melody Maker the album was "like a dialogue." The shameless spewing of bullshit to English magazines didn't stop there, as he would tell the NME that "Ultimately we're more interested in pillow talk." Finally, he claimed the album was "all about...the complexity of relationships." Yeah...isn't that any work of art ever, my dude?

The pillow talk/dialogue claim is interesting though; kinda posits Jet Set as an indie Double Fantasy, and wouldn't you know, the wife has the best songs on both albums.

In Sonic Youth's great visual history, it's inordinately odd as well. To this point, no SY album featured a lazier, uglier cover. I hate the cheesy design, and the headshots are unspectacular. (Although I guess Lee's is notable for making him look like a well-paid thumb-breaker.)

In the great Trapper Jenn history of Sonic Youth reviews, Jet Set is queerer still, in that it required two addendums.

"Winner's Blues"--Talkin' 'bout sweeeeeeet seasons on my mi-hind!" Thurston's secret Carole King fanboy emerges from the crawl space in this, the first SY tune to exclusively feature the acoustic guitar. That right there should tip you off as to the huzzah?-ness of this album. Composed at the last minute as a potential track for a DGC rarities album.

"Bull in the Heather"--This song took out a mortgage on my life immediately, but as I was only 16, the ink was invisible. Good God, to be alive, aware and appreciate when this song first came out, was fresh, was unlike anything. The band has overdone it live--or maybe I've overdone it live, hmm--and as a result it's hard for me to last through it on record. It really has a lot going for it though: the brutal scrapings of head against concrete against steel, Kim Gordon counting how many times she's done it (uh huh huh huh) and those icy harmonics. That Thurston leaves out live.

Also, how do you go from Chuck D to Kathleen Hanna as your big video cameo?

"Starfield Road"--A wind tunnel is a fine place for hyena love, but sometimes things can progress so far that they begin to regress, and that's when the phone at the Sex Crimes Unit starts ringing off the hook. Suddenly the luminous silver saucer descends at the scene and the townspeople can be heard to exclaim, "Are those cops aliens or are those aliens cops?"

This song ruins my brain, like how coconut ruins anything. I'm useless for a good minute after "Starfield Road" cuts its shameless swath through my central nervous system. Too short? Just perfect.

Thurston's contributions overall to Jet Set are pretty underwhelming, but this is about as good as anyone gets anywhere, ever. If the first 40 seconds of this video don't cause you to exclaim either inwardly or outwardly the untouchableness of it all, hey, the National are on tour.

Best song about anal sex since "Forever In Blue Jeans." There's a neat turn on words here, with the line "Sinsate your belly down." There is no such word as "sinsate"; there is, however, "sensate," meaning perceived by or pertaining to the senses. There is also "sensate focusing," a series of sexual exercises designed to switch the emphasis from the goal to the journey. I'd like to think Thurston indulged in some wordplay and intentionally misspelled the word; as it is, it suggests being satisfied by unwholesome behavior. Likely he just fucked up the spelling, but. A girl got to dream, boy.

(I almost wrote, "This song makes me pee myself, but in a good way." I had to regulate myself there. Can you envision a situation where you'd ever have to say, "Thank God I pissed my pants!")

"Skink"--Synaesthesia is the phenomenon of hearing colors. Homerphasia is the phenomenon of hearing pudding. I say put some synaesthetics in a room with some pudding, pens, and paper and play "Skink," and to a man they'll all write down "blue." This track is like sinking to ocean's bottom; but it's so suffused with heat, it's amazing the water hasn't evaporated. Exquisite admixture of Kim sensuality ("Kiss beyond/Kiss me on the lips") and goofiness ("Ooh/I love/You!"). The boys keep it smartly sparse, but one person's "That's a wise collective musical decision" is another's "Where is the extrapolation on this fuckin' album?"

I still haven't read any Carl Hiaasen though.

"Screaming Skull"--Total throwaway, but I loved it back then. Love it now, too. The guitar is dumb as a bag of hammer-heads, but I have a deep affection for "special" sounds, too.

(Not-fun fact: for the first year or so, I was confused as to who sang this song, Thurston or Kim. Snort all you want, but don't deny the breathy femininity of Thurston's delivery here.)

Listen close for Thurston under his own screaming at the end: "Oh yeah/This shit is fuckin' fucked up!"

If you haven't heard the "Rap Damage" version...you've lived, but not as well as you could have. It's Thurston in Royal Tuff Titty mode, affecting a John Wayne voice to bemoan the mainstream artists "suckin' on the big D" of the corpogres (any portmanteau in a storm!). For intentional hilarity in a Sonic Youth song, it's unbeatable.

"Self-Obsessed and Sexxee"--The first of two Thurston-sang tracks that address admirable issues in vague, non-committal ways. This is a paean to riot grrrls. Not shocking, as Kim and Thurston were all chummy with Bikini Kill, and Kim basically handed the template for those women to run with anyway.

"Magic marker on your belly button/All right." Is that supportive, or sarcastic, or do you even know anymore, man? You think when the great story of feminism is told, Kathleen Hanna with the word "RAPE" scrawled across her bare tummy will rate mention alongside the Seneca Convention, the Pill, or Roe vs. Wade? Do you think "Eat meat/Hate blacks/Beat your fuckin' wife/It's all the same thing!" deserves a place alongside The Second Sex as literature that provides insight into the female condition?

The song is saved only by Thurston's chanting of the utterly inane "Party party party/Party all the time." Puts me in mind of Eddie Murphy's 80s smash "Party All the Time," which for all the retroactive shit it gets by people who overanalyze and suck the ecstasy out of orgasms, is a great fucking song, and a song that kicks "Self-Obsessed and Sexxee" in the goddamn sternum.

(The only period of my life I reminisce on more than that time I was discovering Sonic Youth is the 80s. MTV played videos! McDonalds introduced the Value Meal (which was the size of what a regular order is now)! I vividly remember when those worlds collided, when my sister got herself, her boyfriend, me and our mom some Value Meals and we all huddled in front of the TV to watch the world premiere of the "Purple Rain" video. I think my mom even likened it to listening rapt to the Fireside Chats. That's my childhood! Vivid purple!

"Bone"--Leaves the house for work dripping invincibility. SS is patrollin' the beat, Kim G. is sliding around the circumference of the neighborhood, and those two incorrigible fellas are armed and vowing to make beehives humble. Then, jeez, the exhibitionist guy runs up to the schoolyard and...peters out.

Notable for a tri-guitar non-attack and hey am I the only one who thinks Kim Gordon is sounding like Kim Deal here?

"Androgynous Mind"--I like when artists aren't afraid to show the more solicitous side of themselves. They're not just creative; they're concerned.

The greatest intentions do not always make for the greatest art. This is obvious. I still consider "We Are the World," and I cannot figure how Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones could conspire to make something that breathtakingly awful.

Same here. Sonic Youth dealing with homophobia? That should be a great song.

It's not.

"God is gay/And you were right." Yeah, T-bone? What are you saying there? I dunno, it's like Thurston heard "All Apologies" and just had to conjure up his own homo-friendly soundbite?

This song tears at me; Thurston claimed in an interview that the lyrics are meant to imitate the mind state of a gay person subjected to slurs and threats, and that's an incredible lift-off point for any work of art, but as Thurston isn't a gay person, and thus never directly in the line of fire of said epithets, how could he be personally expected to articulate the suffering, doubt and rage that a victim of social violence has to endure? First-rate art is usually first-hand experience. If he was looking to expose his empathetic heart, an instrumental would been better. The band absolutely rips during the "Hey hey it's okay" screech sequence; three minutes of that, careening to and from variations, would have made for a stirring act of solidarity. Instead, we have Thurston Moore's well-meaning if ill-fit for the task pen.

"Quest For the Cup"--A schlumpy start gives way to white-gal bluesy strut. Dedicated to writer Lisa Crystal Carver. She's a round-trip that lost the ticket back home, that one. I still have, in one of my many boxes o' readables, a Details from 1996 that features an article on Carver. In it, she announces her desire to make a love connection: "He's got to be smart but have emotional problems. He's a bit misogynistic; he doesn't have to respect other women, just me."

Just like I misheard "Reggie White" in "The Wonder," I almost swore Kim was saying "Hakeem Olajuwon" here. (It's actually "feel like an alarm clock.") Woulda made sense, as Kim was in the throes of her Knicks obsession then.

"Feel just like a donut." Round, and with a gaping hole in the middle. I feel ya.

"Waist"--First off...Snoopy! Maybe if I write about having a dream wherein me, Yoshimi and Snoopy have a pizza and ice cream cake/dance party in his doghouse, I'll actually have the dream. It is my dream to one day have that dream.

Thurston wakes up and brushes the crumbs out of his bangs here, and he sounds better on this song than elsewhere on the whole album, like he's simultaneously glad and pissed to be roused from his couch-bound slumber.

Spin had Jet Set as its lead review one month; lamentably I no longer have that issue, and remember little about it other than it was how I found out Kim was expecting a baby, it was written by Mike Rubin, and he made a deal about the "guitar solo" in "Waist." So I got the CD and I'm all, "That's a guitar solo?" I listen to it nowanights, and I'm all, "That is not a guitar solo." It's spaz noodling, is all that is. That'll happen from time to time.

(Stupid Spin! It was as stuffed sick with shitsacks then as now, but the music they reviewed was better, so it was worth buying, 'cause remember this is pre-Internet explosion and you couldn't make an instant music expert, just add Google! I mean, Charles Aaron was like Christgau for architecture majors, but I'd rather read someones thesaurus-fucking opinion of the Breeders than similarly over-serious thoughts on Radiohead.)

"Doctor's Orders"--Tale of an aging housewife devoted to insidious half-life after many fulfilling years spent raising children and vacuuming the same goddamn rooms over and over.

There exists a rough version of this (and most of the rest of the album) on the Net; the main difference between it and this finished product is Kim tunelessly shouting the chorus. The lullaby-delivery on the album is so much better. And oh my sweet Jebus, when the guitars kick in at the "Mother came home today" part. I could listen to that till my ears turn vivid purple! and fall off.

(Search for the "T-vox version." Exact same tune, but Opie tosses off some lecherous snarf over it.)

"Tokyo Eye"--Patrick is one of the biggest Jet Set fans I know. For what it was, and for what it could have been. Still, he had limits.

"Why don't you like 'Tokyo Eye'?"

"It's okay when Thurston's not...."

"Singing?"

"No, I mean yeah, but that's not singing."

"That whiny...."

"Yeah, that whiny, straining voice. It just bugs me."

"But musically. C'mon. Toy monkey cymbals and all. Crash-crash. And when they kick it up a gear. Knock over all the jam 'n jelly jars. Shit yeah."

"Right, but you have to get through Thurston first."

"Worth it though."

"True, true."

"In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader"--I thought this song was hilarious in '94. It was literally the only song that my dear pal Angela actually liked on the whole record and along with "Into the Groove(y)," the only SY song she liked at all. It had to be how goofy it is. Smoke some weed, laugh your skull soft at some cartoons, quality time.

In retrospect...how dire was that particular session? Jerk-ass riff wandering aimlessly, relentlessly dumb lyrics that climax in an exaltation to the Trix rabbit.

Buried in the Sonic vaults is a Goo-era hip hop remix of an SY song by Daddy-O of Stetsasonic (it may be "Kool Thing," I can't remember). Steve Shelley claims it is too horrifying to ever see the light of day; I say, it can't be much fucking worse than "Bourgeois Reader." And they put this on an album! They played this live multiple times! Meanwhile "Disappearer" got played, what, once?!

"Sweet Shine"--Perfect choice to end the album, as Kim's owned the entire ragged ride anyway.

Thurston told Melody Maker that "Sweet Shine" was "very personal to Kim." I have my own theory on it, which I articulated as best I could when I did my top 30 SY songs list.

"Cowboys are languishin'/Little girls are bees/Is it really a green stagecoach/Crawlin' up to me?"

Lines so memorable Thurston quoted them at the beginning of his Alabama Wildman book; in response to an interviewers query, he would claim to have chosen them for their quintessential Kim-ness. I think they made an impression worth regurgitating for a different reason. The cowboys are the boys in the band, in moments of relaxation, say pre- or post-concert. The buzzing girls are as close as any band on SY's level can get to "groupies". The green stagecoach--genius fucking use of Wild West imagery throughout; note also the "Marlboro belt buckle baby" line in the first verse--is jealousy, visiting the wife of the guitar hero.

And there's more, all suppositions and guesses in a fool's game. We all have our explanations to fill such open space, usually designed to endear the song to us. That was mine.

I'm almost embarrassed to type out stuff like that, but that's how my mind works.

The guitar melodies are immaculate, and Kim's performance is even better than that. "Sweet Shine" glimmers as a rare peek into the deeper recesses of Kim's mind and memory. With her chilly, oft-imperious demeanor, Kim is the most impenetrable lyricist in the band, so this track's like a bittersweet treat. The true definition of nostalgia--the pain of it--is evident in her voice.

Hidden Track--Outtake from the Japanese dub of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, specifically the Flying Ace fight sequence. Chinese people in Japan love Sonic Youth! Urusai-wane!




Patrick ponders some beautiful shit sometimes, he does.

"I love Jet Set. You know this. But it's mainly for Kim's songs. Like her songs, all together, are four stars. Thurston...three stars."

"And Lee, no stars. Oh shit! Maybe that's where that part of the title comes from!"

Once I was finished amusing myself (and that can take an hour or so), Patrick got to his point.

During the baby-inspired hiatus, Thurston Moore wrote and recorded his first solo album, Psychic Hearts. It's a masterpiece of pop sensibility, punk severity, and holy shit extrapolation. He also acquits himself lyrically. The title track is a mature message of strength and intelligence to a mentally ill teen girl struggling to maintain her identity. Where was this heart on Jet Set? And aside from "Starfield Road," where were the great Thurston songs?

Wouldn't Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star have been a much better, more enjoyable record if Thurston's lesser contributions were nixed and replaced with the greater tracks on his solo album?

(This is what captivates Patrick and me. This is our crystal meth.)

Thurston has 8 songs on Jet Set. Keep "Starfield Road," because it clearly licks godhead radical style.

"Winner's Blues" can be replaced with "Cherry's Blues." Both are acoustic, both end in the same word.

The rest can be switched out for:

"Ono Soul"
"Patti Smith Math Scratch"
"Psychic Hearts"
"Tranquilizer"
"Cindy (Rotten Tanx)" (anyone doubting a Sonic Youth treatment of this song would kill, refer to "Poet in the Pit" off the Dirty reissue.)
And if you absolutely must axe "Screaming Skull"...replace it with "Female Cop."

The possibilities...



There is a rumor that for the first half of the record you can faintly hear the corresponding songs from Sister ("Schizophrenia" under "Winner's Blues," etc.) This is not a rumor. It is fact, and it's worth damaging your ears turning up the volume supra-loud to hear "Catholic Block" at the end of "Bull in the Heather" and then all of a sudden SCREEEEEEEEOONKKKKKKKKQQQQQ.

The real question was always how? And the realer question: why?

After years of Internet query, a member of the band actually addressed the issue. Steve is like the man and shit. He cleared up that "how" like a motherfucker. Although the why is still out there....