Sonic Youth: Classic or Dud/S&D?

Speaking of "Nevermind," I'm listening right now to NYC Ghosts & Flowers... I really like this one, I think it's one of their most enjoyable albums. It's "experimental" in a way that hits my sweet spot (as opposed to the approach they take on a lot of other stuff, which doesn't connect with me so much)

funny that you mention the clash. i cannot relate to their stuff at all and find it conventional, predictable and tedious. urgent is about the adjective which seems furthest away of any song i have ever heard by the clash.

thank god i'm not the only one who feels this way about the Clash.

thought The Clash had a great sound

10 favorite SY albums, chronologically

Evol
Sister
Daydream Nation
Goo
Dirty
A Thousand Leaves
Goodbye 20th Century
NYC Ghosts & Flowers
Murray Street
Sonic Nurse

not sure of the order, maybe Sister/Daydream Nation are overall tops for me, but Evol was the first one I heard. It was the one that made me obsessed with them, and it has several amazing tracks as well as the ∞ locked groove at the end of Expressway to Yr. Skull

in retrospect I appreciate Goo and Dirty a lot more

Not so sure that the first time I saw Sonic Youth play might be the best show I ever saw. It was on the Goo tour and the opening act was Redd Kross. They played Big Star before Red Kross played and Richard Hell before Sonic Youth. It was in the Indiana room in the Union at Indiana University in Bloomington. Not that big a room at all and I saw an insane Primus and Fishbone show the next year in the same place. That SY show was the first time I saw a big circle pit open up and people stage dive at a show. They stopped the show and played Madonna's Rock the Vote video when it aired during their set. Lee Ranaldo's got a poem called "Bloomington Indiana...Autumn" that might have it's origins to the date perhaps. And I think the recording of that poem was the fist collaboration between a SY member and Jim O'Rourke.

Oh yeah, the McDonald brothers came out for the encore and sang backing vocals ala the Supremes with Kim with Thurston on bass on the show closer "My Friend Goo." The set was awesome, big part of their set was off Sister and EVOL. They opened with "Stereo Sanctity" and I remembered getting carried away from the stage in the crowd like being in the middle of the ocean. I had been to some punk rock shows before that but it was usually like 10 people beating each other up in the middle of a basement, different kind of thing.

that was right after I left town, but a ton of my friends were at that show!

funny that you mention the clash. i cannot relate to their stuff at all and find it conventional, predictable and tedious. urgent is about the adjective which seems furthest away of any song i have ever heard by the clash.

thank god i'm not the only one who feels this way about the Clash.

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Monday, October 14, 2019 7:29 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

me too zzzzzzzz

first time I saw sonic youth was at the WFMU benefit at the Ritz. Lineup was Love Child, Gumball, Dim Stars, John Zorn's Painkiller and Sonic Youth. I was a huge Sonic Youth fan but was getting pretentious and ended up feeling like Painkiller blew them out of the water. I definitely listen to Sonic Youth more than Painkiller these days.

v enjoyable thread!

i never felt a deep connection to this band but i have loved listening to their music. and they soundtracked a lot of my formative years. 'dirty boots' was inescapable at college parties ime

i saw them first 1993 on the bizarre festival near the lorelei. they produced some great guitar noise and blew everyone else off the stage. especially new order was totally ridiculous. other bands who paled in comparison: therapy?, porno for pyros, the young gods, helmet. consolidated were quite good, actually. hole was ok too. that was about nine months before kurt's suicide.

"“JC” is considered top-five SY? Weird, it sounds like filler to me."

it's one of my favorite songs on Dirty certainly. I guess it's about Joe Cole but the lyrics have always, always been creepy and unsettling

what have I done

I got on board the SY train at the perfect time, since I had a super hip friend in 9th grade who made me a copy of Daydream Nation not long after it came out, and Goo and Dirty were both great follow-ups that rewarded anticipation. I've had different favorite Sonic Youth albums over the years, including all three of those, but none of them have really ever been among my all-time favorite albums, if that makes any sense. I just don't feel the need to listen to them that often. Similarly, I've seen the band a bunch in different settings and venue sizes, and while I don't remember any of the shows being bad, I also don't remember any of those shows being among my favorites, either. Or remember much of them at all, tbh. Kind of weird, esp. for a band that made five or six records that I do like a lot.

Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star gets less love than the other Geffen albums, and the way it uses brevity to limn gender play and sexual posing puts it over Goo and Dirty. Sonic Youth were still learning, which is to say: its post-DN predecessors required the sheen just as the band needed to get experiments in getting radio play just right.

May have mentioned this on the board elsewhere, but I got into them through Alec Foege's Confusion is Next book from 1994. My freshman year of college I was just really starting to spread my wings into new music and I randomly came across that book in an art supply store. To a kid from the middle of nowhere Illinois, it made them sound like the best band ever. A few months later DGC started their reissue project around the release of EJST&NS, so my first albums were actually the Screaming Fields comp, EJST&NS and Made in USA. Interesting entry, to say the least, but I was enthralled. Washing Machine was the first album that came out after I was a new fan, so that one will always have special place for me. I remember pissing off my roommates on a technicality on the nights we used to rotate songs and I chose "The Diamond Sea" for my turn.

I don’t know if I hear sheen on Goo and Dirty. I think they were just different attempts at presenting their sound, though it is interesting that their desire, after Dirty, was for something more primitive.

Definitely more sheen on Dirty to my ears, that album sounds great. The irony imo is that "more sheen" actually translates to louder and more abrasive in this case. I think the nature of their noise before that resulted in a sort of fuzzy haze, but the stuff on Dirty is jagged and shrill in all the ways feedback and distortion should/could be.

OTM

I actually think Daydream Nation’s sound is fairly clear and, again am not sure that Sonic Youth gained something invaluable in what they were trying to do sonically with Dirty (though I like its sound well enough). There are all sorts of approaches and this was a major label band who perceived their contemporaries to be groups like the Dead C.

I don't know that it's invaluable or that it was required for this band but I do think there is more sheen there (a hyper-realistically brighter sound, stricter stereo separation, more layered overdubs) that gave it a distinct quality and worked with what they were doing then. Goo actually sounds pretty naturalistic to me, like DN with higher fidelity.

xp I'll take any excuse to bring up the classic Bananafish description of the Dead C as "sound[ing] like Sonic Youth in a wind tunnel with broken microphones"

This came on the radio yesterday, the singer sounds *exactly* like Ranaldo, I was giggling to myself, from now on I'm going to pretend he and Kim had a side project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YIlwxBuvM

I hate that song more than anything in the universe

Maybe we should revive to talk about the Bandcamp archive stuff? Because there's a lot now!

The Rarities comps have been great -- the second, with all the weird live 80s singles, is top-notch -- but I appreciate how they're slowly but surely putting up all the 80s catalog stuff now. Bad Moon Rising just added:

https://sonicyouth.bandcamp.com/album/bad-moon-rising

I want to go into the Rarities releases in more detail, but I gotta say real quick that the SY Forced Exposure single (Kill Yr Idols b/w Making The Nature Scene) was so hard to find back in the day that i have never actually heard it. now that I have, the version of "Nature Scene" on this is the most stomping, blown out, destructo-awesome version of it I have ever heard, totally smoking the LP take.

I await the more detail with interest!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4uL9fAeoXc

I await the more detail with interest!

ok well...

these are weirdly organized, but make sense if you step back and think of #1 as a live overview, #2 as an odds and ends, and #3 as unreleased/demo.

the sound is a little thin going into the 1st live one, but by the time we get the the 1990 Irvine gig (where shakey mo is immortalized on the "Dirty Boots" 7") everything gets full and loud, I especially dig the takes on JC, Wildflower, and No Way

some of the weirdo semi-legal singles on Vol. 2 are ones I've never seen, and one (the Warpower 7") I had never even heard of. As noted above the "(Over)Kill Yr Idols" single is one of the most powerful documents of the Confusion Is Sex era.

it's weird that they don't include the boot 7" of them and Iggy doing "Wanna Be Your Dog", I don't get that at all:
https://www.discogs.com/Sonic-Youth-Town-Country-4-June-87/master/272904

nice to see the Chemical Imbalance live version of "Marilyn Moore" get a digital home at last.

this promo 12" of "Candle" was my special secret for a long time, something I could pull out to impress other fans. I got it at a sale from a radio station I used to DJ at in the 90's, but the music director/dictator had a bad habit of putting tape DIRECTLY ON THE LP TRACKS if there were swear words, or (in the case of "Ghost Bitch") suspected swear words (there aren't, asshole). So for years I have suffered with a playable but VG- copy of these tracks, and the "Ghost Bitch" here is one of the most towering, smoldering, impressively heaving piles of sonic rubble in their entire catalog IMO.

I was also familiar with the (relatively unimpressive imo) Forced Exposure single that makes up the last 3 tracks of Vol. 2, but it's the stuff in between that's the treat. The long outro to Xpressway is glorious, you can't go wrong with Kotton Krown or World Looks Red (which really THUMPS, great sound) and OK Kat N Hat might be kind aunfocused on first listen but it's fun to hear these scraps.

Disc 3 is even cooler from a fan standpoint, I had no idea they were dropping all these weirdo tracks as MP3s on their website 15 years ago. I haven't dug into it all the way yet but "Machine" sounds great, like an SYR outtake, and it's nice to have some of the first Peel Session (but again, where the hell are the other 3 tracks?).

sorry shakey is on the Dirty Boots *CD single* bonus live tracks, from the same 1990 UCI gig

for reference:

https://sonicyouth.bandcamp.com/album/rarities-1
https://sonicyouth.bandcamp.com/album/rarities-2
https://sonicyouth.bandcamp.com/album/rarities-3

Are these versions of the 80s albums different from the mixes that were previously commercially available?

Listening to Rarities 2 rn. The Murray St-era Chicago show is the only thing I've bought so far but a lot of the live stuff has been v good.

I saw someone online complaining that the mixes are different, and that they're new and due to tape degradation don't sound as good as the DGC/Geffen releases. Can't speak to the truth of that, just spreading gossip.

Haha wow, thanks for mentioning that Chicago show, I was at that one. It was killer! Had no idea they uploaded it, I need to grab that.

And the debut EP is up on Bandcamp now, in the expanded version with the live tracks:

https://sonicyouth.bandcamp.com/album/sonic-youth

Wow, I had no idea they had so much cool shit on Bandcamp. I'm honest enough to admit I'll never listen to it, but I like that it is there!

i found a decent, relatively inexpensive copy of Bad Moon Rising yesterday :D

My challop is that the debut EP is their best record. Burning Spear slaps everything.

DESTROY: the *entire* NYC Sonic Youth Cult Of Art and all the pretentious jazzwankers who hang out at the Cooler wishing they could be Lee Renaldo. You're not. Now shave off the chin-rag and go home.

I really miss the Cooler, actually! Pretentious jazzwankers sounds more like Tonic tho (which I also miss).

She wore a dress once. That was a whole news cycle. The Cooler was the pre-Tonic that wasn’t the Knit.

She wore a dress once. That was a whole news cycle. The Cooler was the pre-Tonic that wasn’t the Knit.

Wow that’s weird. Ignore the first part of that. And the dupe.

Thought you were making up some Sonic Youth lyrics.

just listened to their debut for the first time. the music feels very Glenn Branca-esque, plus hand percussion. I really like the cover image.

It was on Glenn's label.

Ignore the first part of that.

No way, that was exquisite, I wouldn't change a word of that.
Not how I remember the place but love the idea of pretentious jazzwankers having to set foot in the X-Large boutique on Lafayette to buy their Cooler tix.

Evol and Sister have hit Bandcamp

https://sonicyouth.bandcamp.com/album/evol

https://sonicyouth.bandcamp.com/album/sister

That's all the 80s full lengths and I think the only studio things not on Bandcamp now one way or another from the decade are Kill Yr Idols and Into the Groovey.

If you could re-sequence/revise the track list for one Sonic Youth album, what would it be and how would you change it?

I’m going with Washing Machine, an album that’s near to perfect but slightly half-hearted about its desire to be psychedelic.

Here’s what I’d do:
- cut “Junkie’s Promise”
- cut “Panty Lies”
- merge “Becuz” and “Becuz Coda” into a single song
- would I cut “Skip Tracer”? Maybe
- replace the 19:35 version of “Diamond Sea” with the ~25 minute long version from the CD5
- Bliss out