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Thurston Moore Revisits His Sonic Youth

nytimes.com

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Re: Thurston Moore Revisits His Sonic Youth

#41

Post by microtonal »

_rpxpx wrote: post #15
art-not wrote: post #9

I've mostly fell out of listening to Sonic Youth, but it was the first band to ever open my eyes to the idea of 'weird' music. I think a lot of who I am today began with that first experience, when I first listened to Evol. While I don't listen to them much anymore, I still put on Washing Machine from time to time. I'd argue that is their best work.

Agreed. I bought Washing Machine on the day it was released, during my secondary school lunch break. I remember the NME review claiming The Diamond Sea as the best thing SY had ever done. I agreed with that when I got it home, and still do. It was the pinnacle of their work really, which went rapidly downhill afterwards. Pitchfork's 0.0 rating of NYC Ghosts & Flowers was sadly wholly appropriate. But the records Evol…

> It was the pinnacle of their work really, which went rapidly downhill afterwards. Pitchfork's 0.0 rating of NYC Ghosts & Flowers was sadly wholly appropriate.

I think that was pretty much the only dud (together with Jet Set), Murray Street and the albums after that are quite ok.

Re: Thurston Moore Revisits His Sonic Youth

#43

Post by shautvast »

>>For Thurston Moore, a driving force in the important art-noise band Sonic Youth, the epiphany was “Louie Louie,” the indecipherable-at-any-speed single by the Kingsmen.

Haha, I named my dog after that song, or was it Richard Berry’s original, or all the other covers?

Re: Thurston Moore Revisits His Sonic Youth

#44

Post by beepbooptheory »

My earliest memory of what has become modern, streaming video apps was Google Video (I think that's what it was called). It was before they bought youtube.

I very clearly remember searching for "Sonic Youth" on it and getting maybe less than a dozen results, but one of them was this indie documentary/tour-video called "1993: The year punk broke," which is about Nirvana and SY touring together through europe.

Its a really fun little movie, but mainly it felt absolutely huge to "discover" it like that. Its hard to imagine these days that you could search for anything and not get, at least, thousands of results. Back then being a hipster about music really felt like a special club, like some special minority of people drawn together by taste, and the internet as it was reflected that nicely.

Embarrassed now to remember moments where I tried to convince my friends of how good and important Sonic Youth, Neutral Milk Hotel, and the Pixies were, even if they hadn't heard of them; trying to quote Pitchfork and AllMusic reviews to make my point.

Re: Thurston Moore Revisits His Sonic Youth

#45

Post by _jal »

ilamont wrote: post #26
_jal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, but I didn't get to see them live until Daydream Nation. Those shows were a lot of fun, but yeah, I was only catching the end of that, but earlier shows were... noisy. It took them a while to get art-rock inaccessibility-as-cred out of their system. Or maybe Moore is just really self-indulgent. Or both. You never know what will happen, but after reading _Girl in a Band_, I don't think Deal is interested.

I have a Dutch import of a live Sonic Youth club show from Amsterdam in the mid 80s. It's practically unlistenable. I get that their crucible was art/punk/experimental/psychedelic but it would be some years before they put away the power drills and lava lamps and got down to being a solid live rock band. Their studio efforts from the early era were better IMHO.

> Their studio efforts from the early era were better IMHO.

Oh, absolutely. I still listen to Evol and Sister fairly regularly. The noise shows were a lot of fun to be at when I was a kid, but I wouldn't want to listen to them again.

Re: Thurston Moore Revisits His Sonic Youth

#46

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

jkern wrote: post #21

I enjoy Sonic Youth a fair bit, but in the majority of cases find Thurston Moore completely uncompelling as a singer.

“Completely uncompelling” can be a virtue. One of the factors that makes New Order such a peerless band is Bernard Sumner’s unaffected, almost amateurish singing.

Re: Thurston Moore Revisits His Sonic Youth

#47

Post by adw »

Modified3019 wrote: post #35
appletrotter wrote: post #11

It's a shame he cheated on his wife :(

Huh, well that’s disappointing to hear. This sort of thing is why I basically never look into the personal lives of artists.

The whole backstory here is, to say the least, complex, extends over about a decade, and is important subtext for the last few SY records.

Starting around 2003, Jim O'Rourke (go listen to Bad Timing and Insignificance, which are both amazing records and very different to each other) was in a relationship with Eva Prinz while she was in a (maybe?) open marriage to her first husband. In some order, then:

* Jim and Eva break up

* (2005) Jim a) leaves Sonic Youth b) moves across the country c) moves to Japan

* (2006) Eva and Thurston Moore start a publishing company, Ecstatic Peace Library

* somewhere in here, Eva Prinz gets divorced

* (2009) Eva Prinz marries Bernardo Guillermo, a furniture designer and the son of Princess Christina of the Netherlands; they have two kids, one before and one after the wedding

* (2010) Kim Gordon finds out about Thurston's affair with Eva

* (2011) Kim and Thurston separate; Sonic Youth split up

* (2013) Kim and Thurston divorce

* (by 2017) Thurston and Eva relocate to London

* (2020) Thurston and Eva marry

From the outside, assigning responsibility for anything here is kind of impossible and immoral, but the whole thing is remarkably cliched rock-and-roll nonsense for a band like Sonic Youth were...

Re: Thurston Moore Revisits His Sonic Youth

#48

Post by cammikebrown »

ilamont wrote: post #5

I've been listening to Sonic Youth since Evol. Their live sound got better as they aged, which doesn't happen for a lot of bands. This show from Austin City Limits in 2011, months before they broke up, captures it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O8VLwh1Na0 An underappreciated aspect of Sonic Youth is the drumming of Steve Shelley. He kept many of the discordant songs together and provided a driving beat…

Appearing together, and actually performing together are two very different things

Re: Thurston Moore Revisits His Sonic Youth

#50

Post by crispyambulance »

I saw them live circa 1988-ish around the time of Daydream Nation.

They've all been super creative. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon and also Lee Ranaldo have had interesting side projects. I very much was interested in their noise stuff. Moore collaborated once with Borbetomagus. And Ranaldo did a lot of sound experiments.

I did get the impression that they were aiming for a much wider audience in the late 80's and early 90's, much like the Pixies, and also like the Pixies it never seemed to pan out-- but it was close.

Moore has done some television host stuff 20 years back, "Sonic Cinema". He definitely has a knack for that-- introducing films and interviewing artists, etc.

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