read the book, lazy arse
it's nothing extraordinary
ego shattered by the rest of the band
that's it
that is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ordinary


this book "Goodbye..." is a gem.:D
It took me 5 days to read it.
very comprehensive

its a shame that whole Genetic shit happened. it seemed to have broken Lee's confidence in his 'ordinary' songwriting style. i think he needs to get back into that. hopefully his upcoming solo album isnt just a noise bomb but real songs that delve deep into his musical roots.


also, i love reading the part where Lee suddenly becomes enamored with noise after playing at the noise festival. it really became heavily influenced by those events

just got it today...
read the intro, and it seems to be a really good one.
the pictures are ace I think

I enjoyed reading about Thurston's amazing father, George Moore, and hope someday his modern classical music will be recorded.


Think the bit about the botched "caper" involving Thurston and his bad company buddy, Mark, is a real scoop.

...just starting out on this one...I'm reading several books right now...

at any rate, this is about the only current thread that's amounts to more than a heap of dung, so thought I'd post...

I'm 100 pages in and loving it.

Founding a Daydream Nation

Whether you've heard of the band or not, whether you're a fan or only dimly aware of their 25-year existence, you've probably felt the effects of Sonic Youth. For a band that never reached popular success or put out a top 10 album, Sonic Youth made themselves known in the art and music worlds as cultural icons during the 80s and 90s. If the names Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley don't ring a bell, then Kurt Cobain, Beck, Sophia Coppola, Spike Jonze, and Chloe Sevigny might. Like Gertrude Stein to the lost generation, the four members of Sonic Youth either directly paved the way or actively encouraged the young careers of the grunge generation.
As biographer David Browne makes clear in his new biography, Goodbye 20th Century, this is a band whose passion for music and the arts inspired others to achieve more recognition and success than the band themselves would ever know. Some might view such stagnation as tragic or, at the very least, frustrating, except for the fact that the band's muse-like power was based in an unwavering sense of integrity. As one record label executive put it, "I don't know if [mass recognition] was necessarily important to them. Or all four of them at one time, let's put it that way."
Though the band's obsession with uniquely innovative sounds (the noise coming out of a deli refrigerator was once recorded for a song) was considered too chaotic by the mainstream public, Goodbye 20th Century shows how their personal lives were as traditional as their music was revolutionary. Browne, a longtime music journalist, warns in his introduction that, "You also won't find the usual litany of rock-star foibles here: no car crashes, drug overdoses, hotel room trashings, and other tales of excess that sustained Behind the Music for years."
Sound boring? It would be if it weren't for Browne's ability to portray the band's very "lack of cliche" as such an exceptional feat. In Browne's words, it's a story of "stability and relative well-adjustedness, of creating chaos onstage but not off it. In its contrariness, it's almost, well, punk." Few other bands can boast that. --CHLOE KAMARCK
http://www.mensvogue.com/magazine/bl...ng-a-dayd.html

Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth

by David Browne

Perseus
May 2008, 422 pages, $25.00

by Kirby Fields
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/...-browne/print/

read it in 2 days over the weekend. a great bio for sure.

wow! so steve said that washing machine was a piece of shit(he sort of took it back but not really). he said he loved the experience but thought the album was their weakest.

I like that it discusses them as pretty normal ppl. I mean like how they hung out with Lydia Lunch and Richard Kern and all those ppl, but at the same time they weren't really like that... how they were actually more conservative ppl at home and just got crazy on stage. It just sort of made sense when I thought about it.

hi all, i've just finished reading chick's "psychic confusion", and i'll be starting on browne's book asap.

i have to admit that i was pretty disappointed with the chick penned biography. i agree that chick does a pretty good job on the early years of sonic youth. i enjoyed reading his somewhat grim account of the new york no wave scene that "spawned" the band, and i think he did pretty much a great job on most things sonic youth pre-EVOL. interesting interviews with collaborators and bob bert! if anything, i'd like to have even more info on various artists around NY at the time; some tips and album recommendations perhaps (that would be more interesting than all these "[this guy] left [this band] to play [a certain instrument] in [another band]" tidbits). in that respect, i think everett true did an awesome job in his recent nirvana book; pouring from his encyclopeadic knowledge of the pacific north-west scene, he made me check out lots of bands i'd never even heard about. that's what a great bio on SY should aim for as well, in my opinion!

chick gets pretty sketchy from here on in: he's relying heavily on the testimony of e.g. paul smith, and large chunks of material from 85 - 89 are based on his accounts alone. i'm really missing more input from the band. to me, chick really fails to convey the personality of the band members, instead resorting to cliches, like "kim's the artist of the band, thurston's the forever-young teenager etc." i'm really hoping browne's got more stuff to tell us, especially since he's got some fresh interviews with them.

also, what's the deal with chick really fast forwarding everything after 1994/1995? to me, that's the period that really needs documenting in the first place, since we already got the foege bio of the early years... chick = lazy? i think chick does a pretty good job when it comes to putting some of the albums into a historical/political/musical context however.

it was a nice read, but i was ultimately quite disappointed how it turned out. here's to hoping browne's got it right (and, judging by several of the posts here, it seems he did get it right) :)

Has anyone ever seen a picture of Ann Demarinis? With everyone in love with her cuz she was an alleged cutie I'm just curious. This book is definitely a lot of fun to read.

Maybe its just me but I have noticed when reading this book that there are several references and or comparisons of Sonic Youth to U2... kinda weird to me as really the two bands don't share much in common, except The Edge "used to experiment with more or less outsider guitar sounds" (i say used to because the U2 now is nothing like the U2 of 1980-83) but not even remotely close to the level of being as adventurous as Sonic Youth.

I wish my friend would finish reading this so I can have a borrow of his copy!

i got two spare copies of browne's book, so if anyone would like to trade for e.g. some DVDs of sonic youth (or other cool indie bands), send me a PM!

god I hate this thread being stanked up by mentions of fucking U2

I couldn't agree more, every time the author mentioned that loathsome band it irratated the fuck out of me. I think that David Browne favours a much more traditional 'rock' orbit.

found a photo in the New York Noise book, which was sitting next to the pile of $20 signed No Wave books at the Strand.

there was a sentence that said something like "Steve saw Cat Power open for Liz Phair at a Raincoats concert". If its a Raincoats concert, Cat Power opened for Raincoats.

Also, the MEcht Mensch 7" is Acceptance, not Zombie.

Great book. One of my favorite moments is p. 392 when the New York Times arrives in Northampton the day after CBGBs closes. Browne writes that Thurston picks it up, "looks at it, studies it." It is a nice segue into a reflection on the band's relation to CBGBs.

i just finished it. it was fucking cool!
what more to say, except browne did his work great.