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After 25 years, Sonic Youth are happy to pop the avant-garde bubble.
IT IS A jovial Thurston Moore on the phone from his New England home. In fact, it usually is a jovial Thurston Moore, for this is a man totally contented with his life. Why wouldn't you be, when you and your group, Sonic Youth, emerged from not just the New York underground but the avant-garde end of the underground, ploughed your own path for 25 years weathering musical fads, to become elder statesmen who sell enough albums and tickets across the world to live a decent life.
Oh, yes, and you, your wife and daughter get to perform a song on a mainstream television show such as
The Gilmore Girls.
As odd as it sounds for a band that explored heavy drone rock and atonal sounds, released books of poetry and prose and produced films and staged visual art shows, Moore, his wife and music partner in Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon, and their 12-year-old daughter, Coco, appeared in an episode of the family-friendly program in May. What TV show can we expect to see them on next,
Everybody Loves Raymond?
Moore barks a laugh. "I don't really watch that much TV but I do watch [
The Gilmore Girls] and I was kind of happy to be on something that I knew something about."
The two other programs Moore admits to watching are
The Sopranos and
Big Love, a series about a polygamous marriage that is yet to screen in Australia. Is it coincidence that the three shows the guitarist-singer watches are centred around families? After all, as well as his partnership with bass player and singer Gordon, Sonic Youth has been essentially one happy family - with guitarist-singer Lee Ranaldo and drummer Steve Shelley - for much of its existence.
He laughs again. "Well, there's nothing better than the family dynamic for [helping you understand] the human condition, that's for sure. I totally enjoy watching that.
Sopranos may be that real New York thing: even though it's set in New Jersey, it's in this area. With
Big Love, Chloe Sevigny is in that and she's our ex-babysitter. And
Gilmore Girls supposedly takes place in an area that we actually live in, the New England area of the north-east, though it's shot in Hollywood on a back lot."
As far from Hollywood as possible, Moore still regularly plays in experimental noise groups in tiny clubs and galleries and is disappointed that the tight schedule for the band's Australian tour prevents him doing something similar in Sydney. Given most of the band have families and aren't exactly young punks, do they really want to or need to tour any more?
"We don't really sell that many records; we do most of our business as a live band," Moore says. "Plus, I think we all generally enjoy playing live. I go to see bands all the time and not necessarily because I want to hear the music but because I want to be witness to the performance. I go to see a lot of things but most of what I see is really subterranean to the mainstream. I'm not really interested in clap-your-hands-above-your-head rock'n'roll bands, I'm not really interested in much that you can see on TV or [anything that is] middle-of-the-road or traditional."
The kind of stuff that gets played on
The Gilmore Girls?
"Exactly," Moore chuckles.
Sonic Youth are often referred to as an avant-garde band, but I wonder whether that label is past its use-by date. Not just because the avant-garde is always shifting, but because this is a band capable of making albums verging on pop, such as this year's
Rather Ripped, essentially their third song-based album in a row.
"I guess we can be perceived as avant-garde because it's a term for music that is unorthodox or art that is unorthodox. Which is all very fine. We never really set out to win any popularity contests," Moore says. "But we've always had complete interest in pop music, melodic music. I find it more interesting to move away from the vanguard of extrapolated experimental noise music when it's such a popular musical style right now. I think it's more interesting for us to not delve into that right now but to do more direct, compact, sonic pop records.
"I always thought popular culture was sort of really there for avant-garde people to use in their work. Warhol always did that. I would think that in the same way that the mainstream needs the avant-garde to break ground, to shift thinking, then non-mainstream needs the mainstream to present the point against which it rebels.
"I really like blurring the distinctions," Moore says. "If you can do that, then that is really cool."
Sonic Youth play the Enmore Theatre on Wednesday.
