Wow. I indirectly saved someone's life. go me.

Sugar Bear...

I don't think there are. The only band to have come after SY that remotely springs to mind is, as has already been mentioned, Radiohead. Actually,the only band before or since SY that I'd put above them in terms of their ambition is probably The Beatles. Pink Floyd might be another candidate, but they strike me as being ambitious in a slightly different way to either SY or the Beatles.

This is why I have trouble with the whole "ambitious" thing. Besides Radiohead, arguably U2 might be there (though they mostly have been around simultaneously with Sonic Youth), it just so happens their ambition has led them to make albums I hate. They've still flirted with increasing the vocabulary of mainstream superstardom, it's just they're so damn annoying.

I think the problem is in thinking of ambition as a single thing. U2's ambition strikes me as being rather different to that of SY's or The Beatles'. With U2 it seemed more about maximising their commercial standing by self-consciously adapting their sound in order to break America.
Saying that, one of the most interesting things about SY has been the way in which they've so meticulously managed their career. That kind of power usually only comes with enormous commercial success, or none whatsoever. That SY have managed it while remaining on the fringes of the mainstream is one of the things ! admire most about them.

Yeah that sums up what I meant with my first post. They managed to have many 'difficult' good albums, never one that was 'terribly' shit, yet many people know who they are, they did invent a way of playing rock music which is still annoying to Madonna fans, and also entered collective consciouness to a certain degree. Radiohead are way more famous than them, but they didn't invent anything and play crap music. Don't get me started on U2, there is enough slaging them off as it is.

Whatever people's personal view of Radiohead is, they remain an interesting band in their own right. I wouldn't say they 'invented' a new way of playing Rock, but then I wouldn't say SY did either. I think both bands perfected a direction touched at by other bands that ultimately lacked their ambition. To begin with, SY were never doing anything all that radically different from, say, Live Skull. The difference is that Live Skull would've never had the ambition (either in terms of their creative or commercial imagination) to push things forward enough to create something like Daydream Nation. I don't know much about the bands that Radiohead progressed beyond, but I'm sure the same would stand - at least in terms of an album like OK Computer or Kid A.

I think another quite unique aspect of SY is the way in which they've so consistently managed to intersect with cutting edge areas of fashion and art. Certainly this isn't something bands like U2, or even Radiohead can boast. Although there are countless bands that have. The Beatles were great at it, but ultimately had too short a career to compare with SY's. Ditto The Sex Pistols and The Velvets. The Stones obviously had a great sense of what was going on around them (especially in areas of fashion), but this only really lasted up until the mid 70s. Ditto The Who up to around 1966. Bowie's an obvious case but by the 80s he'd pretty much abandoned any interest in incorporating his interest in the arts into his actual music (effectively treating it as a seperate hobby). Roxy Music are another obvious one, but that seemed more confined to their early period. Pink Floyd, despite their ineluctable 'artiness' seem never to have concerned themselves much with what was taking place elsewhere in the arts. In that sense I really do think that the sheer ambition of SY's vision is pretty much unrivalled, at least in terms of its commitment over such a prolonged period.

Fascinating thread this.

Sonic Youth didn't invent rock music for sure, yet they managed to to make it sound more deranged than other mainstream bands and still Starbucks ask people to compile an album with their songs to put on sale in their shops, film directors, fashion designers, prestigious gallery owners all want to have a slice of them. Radiohead aren't the worst band in the world, to a certain degree I think they have also produced some excellent stuff visually, but their records are way too indebted to a certain way of doing things wich used to work out very well with british rock, but with them doesn't seem to move forward like it used to. Also, we are talking about a band that has a pretty small back-catalogue compared to SY, yet they've been going on for over 17 years.

I don't think there has been any band as ambitious as them since. And I think the only band that ambitious before was the Beatles.


Though I think Fugazi was pretty ambitious in a social sense, and to a certain extent an art sense. But in a different way than Sonic Youth.

Bjork maybe? At least in terms of the criteria being set out. I don't think she comes close to SY in terms either of impact or career longevity but I do see certain similarities at least in terms of their type of ambition.

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.

Again, i think that while Captain Beefheart clearly had a vision that could be described as ambitious, itwas very different to SY's. Captain Beefheart reminds me more of someone like Mark E. Smith or Neil Haggerty in taking an entirely individualistic attitude that had almost no regard for the conditions of popular acceptance. SY on the other hand have from quite early on made it explicit just how important mainstream recognition was for them.

The other problem I think is that ambition seems to take different forms and levels within SY itself. I think it's safe to say that Lee is more musically ambitious than Kim, whose ambition seems more about the role the band can play within popular youth culture. While Thurston's ambitions seem increasingly more focused on ways in which his band can serve as a kind of trojan horse for other less successful (but in his eyes perhaps even more worthy) ones. This in itself makes SY's ambition such a formidable (and admirable) entity.

Well-said.

The Captain was delusional, though, and thought his music was going to be well-accepted by the mainstream.