How Sonic Youth Unfucked The World: Evol At 30 - by Carvell Wallace (MTV news)
 

Thanks!

very good.

"When I first heard SY, I didn't understand them..." is exactly how it was for me. I was just like "what is happening in this music? It doesn't sound right... but I think I fucking love it!"

We need dat EVOL DELUXE BOX SET: album + outtakes disc + live 86 album + Evol documentary DVD.

Thanx, it´s interesting!

To me first SY song I heard was Teenage Riot and I wasn´t very impressed then. It sounded kind of too ordinary punkrock song to me. But year later in the very beginning of Goo, I thought this band was really great! Even Goo didn´t sound very out of ordinary to me, because I had already listened bands like Velvet & Joy Division, but that time it really felt great I have found band who made same kind of music as Velvet in present-day.

yes

"We should have listened more carefully to Evol."

Some of us did, dude. And MTV is the greatest power for the destruction of creativity ever. Like pedophiles grooming children for rape, MTV groomed the American listening audience for shit like Drake and Taylor Swift.

Well, of course MTV was mostly just full of crap, but on the other hand I don´t think at least european MTV was just totally bad. There was program called alternative nation, although it mostly circulated same videos, I remembered to seen there for example SY Shadow Of a Doubt -vid. Also it introduced me JSBX showing their Dang-vid. There was no internet in the eighties and in the beginning of nineties, so if you wanted to know new bands, television, radio & magazines were the only places to get information. And I didn´t really have money to buy every album that sounded interesting in the magazines. Today in Finland there are no channels in television to see any alternative bands. Only way is to be active in internet.

In 1985 for music there were 3 weekly newspapers coming out of London, plus several monthlies. Rolling Stone was the monthly standard for corporate music out of the US. Across the US there were hundreds of DIY music fanzines, including standouts like MRR, Flipside, Suburban Voice, Unsound, Boston Rock, Terminal, Trendy Rag, etc. Both MRR and Flipside had cheap classified ads and there could be 100's in a single issue. There was a lot of corresponding and trading going on. In the US, college radio had hit its apex, but most places around the country near a college could hear some different music. I think most commercial FM radio had closed up by 1985, there were a few exceptions - like Oedipus' Nocturnal Emissions on WBCN in Boston. Downtown Portsmouth NH, which was the largest town near me, had 2 record stores, Rock Bottom was the new wave punk store, across the street was I think Sessions that had a wall of the top 100 singles all available. I used to meet up with Alex Barr(who nowadays sings for the Dropkick Murphies) at Rock Bottom to talk about punk rock. You could also go out to the mall to Musicsmith and sometimes find stuff in their cut outs or import bins. The biggest deal was to go into Boston to buy records. I used to buy lots of singles by writing to the addresses at the end of the best sounding MRR reviews.

Those were good times, Mortte. I don't think we will see the like again. I shouldn't be so pessimistic. But when I looked at a fanzine in 1985, no one was tracking how much time I spent reading a page. No one was slipping me cookies to record and track my listening habits when I inserted a cassette into my walkman. When we slam danced there was no one live streaming us into our parent's dens.

It was very different in the beginning of eighties in Finland. There were only two radio channels, three television channels and only one seriously taken music magazine. You just couldn´t hear alternative bands anywhere, all you heard are those plastic 80ties commercial sounds. But gladly it changed when speedmetal boom came in the end of eighties (I think it was 86 or 87), then there started also big alternative wave in Finland that lasted into begin of nineties. Many independet records were made and alternative magizines borned. So to me the beginning of eighties was quite boring time, but the end of it and also the whole nineties was good time.

I agree mostly you the sickness of today´s internet, but anyway I am glad I can find there so much great old music I haven´t ever heard before. And you can always choose not to be a part of it at least not so much as most of today´s people just want to be.