sonic youth are relativly obscure to the general public, outside of the us at least.
there are certain communities that know them as superstars, but outside of that community, who has heard sonic death or CIS? i could be wrong though. hey they never sold more than a few hundred thousand copies of anything.
my point being obscure is relative. here i am probably considered someone who listenes to a wide variety of music but not ncessarilly obscure. outside of the internet, with people that i hang out with, im the guy that knows everything about music and listens to weird onscure bands like big black or whatever.
hope my point was at least semi coherent

I'm not sure what your point is, they have sold 500,000 copies of daydream and dirty i believe? That's pretty big...

Sonic Youth are a cult band, not an obsure one. They are known in small and big cities.

i read in an interview with thurston that sonic youth's highest selling record is around the 250,000 mark. that was last year though. i don't consider sonic youth obscure, but i think a lot of people only know about them because they are name dropped a lot.

That is wrong.

Not a single sonic youth album has sold GOLD status in US (500 thousand opr more)

EJST&NS and Dirty are their highest sellers, and to this day they have yet to crack the 400 thousand mark.
and that counts people buying the albums several times.

sonic youth in ROCK terms is still underground. They are not obscure.

wolf eyes, animal colective, lightning bolt, etc are OBSCURE as all fuck to much "alternative music fans" and certainly completely UNKnOWN to mainstream music fans.

You are actually right. None of the people I know knew Sonic Youth before they met me

weird, I'm pretty sure I read in entertainment weekly around the time murray street came out that daydream and/or dirty had went gold. I guess thurston would know though.

Perhaps you don't know many people?

daydream nation has yet to crack 300 thousand.

the thing with sonic youth is that maybe 20 times more people have heard of them for the past 28 years than have actually HEARD their music.

I wouldn't call Animal Collective obscure though, they've been on television viewed by millions of people and had feature articles in magazines subscribed to by millions of other people. I like porky's term "cult"...

You could make cases for Lighting Bolt and Wolf Eyes being fairly well-known, but they're not near as big as Animal Collective...

Also, I've said this before, but I must live in the hippest town on earth. Only 40,000 people live here but a good handful of my friends have all discovered stuff as "obscure" as Harry Partch, Cerberus Shoal, Babyland, etc. separately from each other.

And yeah EVERYONE knows Sonic Youth around here and has heard their music...

So, I guess maybe things don't seem as obscure to me because I always hear friends talking about them. One thing, though, is I do live near Bloomington, Indiana which is a popular college town and almost everyone there is a hipster and art lover. Cerberus Shoal actually did play there, that's probably why we all know that amazing band.. but bands as diverse as Genghis Tron, Mong Hang, Xiu Xiu, and Mahjonggg have played there as well. Great, small town.

around that time i doubt daydream nation even came close to gold or 250,000 records. now that spin and other national magazines are naming it one of the best records of our time, it is starting to sell more.

Only the select few like us can appreciate and love the sonic youth SKRONK!!!!

no matter how much I hear wolf eyes, and noise bands and such, confusion is Sex still blows them all away.

COMPLETE INHUMAN!!!!! COMPLETE INHUMAN!!!!

again,. you are speaking from your and our insular world of underground and avant garde music fans. those bands you mention are well known among the very few (maybe 300 thousand out of the BILLIONS of people in the world, if that) people that seek out new music man. That is obscure.

where has animal collective played to milliosn of people on TV?

Dude, I just don't think 300,000 or so listeners would make a band "obscure". "Cult", like I said, is a much better term... using your logic ("billions of people in the world"), everyone but Madonna and Michael Jackson and U2 would be considered obscure.

Animal Collective played on conan o brien last year around october.

Yeah but then they played #1, I think most of the people found that too strange and just forgot them... Because you have heard of a band doesn't say you have heard their music. Animal Collective are well-known inside the underground circle, but I don't think they're known elsewhere.
But then again I speak from France, which is like er, asshole for music. Seriously, we are always 6 month late about hype bands and all, even when they actually come from France: for instance we began to hear about Justice 6 months after the hype began everywhere else in the world

True, I can't speak for anyone but all the people I know Indiana, so who knows.

indiana must be a hot bed for underground artists, because the only people i know that listen to bands you mention live in new york city.

Well, again, I can't speak for any state but my own, but I will say that the people I know in Michigan are into much better music than we are here. Michigan people are really on top of everything...

But then, do we really care about what is obscure or not? I don't think so. We probably all listen to obscure things and well-known things, and that's about it, I think

interesting. i never would've thought the midwest would be that much into underground music. when i think of michigan i think of either techno, negative approach or kid rock.

oh and motown of course.