Praise for Sonic Youth, the best band ever
 

I just had to come here to register and share my thoughts about this band.

Sonic Youth has been my favorite band for about 8 years now... And they'll always be my favorite band.

I've heard all the great rock bands through the years... from the big 60s bands and 70s bands, to the 80s bands like the Cure, the Pixies, the Smiths... All through the 90s... Pavement, Pearl Jam, NIN, Tool, Soundgarden, My Bloody Valentine... From the mainstream bands, to the underground bands... Joy Division, Nirvana, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Band of Horses, Slowdive, you name it....

I've heard so much music... So much more than most people. And I don't care if that's arrogant, because I know it's true.

And I've never heard a band like Sonic Youth before... It's like on one side is every band in history... And on the other side is Sonic Youth, in their own world... And it's unbelievable to me how many people miss out on this world, and don't even know it exists... It's unbelievable to me how Sonic Youth shirts aren't being worn by every other person I see....

To me, they've made the best music in history... They've made so many classic albums, and have written so many songs that are classic. It's been a musical journey for me to experience all their albums, and it's a journey that'll last forever, and will never be matched again. I've thought of writing letters to them to let them know how I feel, but I've never done it... Maybe one of them will read this though.

I just want Sonic Youth to know I love them... I love them profoundly, and deeply. They've changed my life... The type of person I am, how I feel about the world, and how I feel about music and listen to music. Words can't actually express how deeply I love their music... It'll be with me for the rest of my life, and I can't ever imagine my life without it. They've gotten me through so much, and I have so many memories with their albums.

For someone who's never heard Sonic Youth, or has never really gotten into their music... To me, that's like hearing someone has never experienced the sunshine. I just feel sad about it... I try to convey in words to people what they're missing... But they just don't seem to understand, and I know I can't express it well enough to make them understand.

I just had to come here and write all this... Maybe people here will understand. It's a place I can go to share my thoughts about it.

Sonic Youth, I love you... So, so much.

I hope they read this as well. They're obviously the fave band of a lot of folks here ;)

Welcome aboard.

I think a lot of this is the unfortunate labeling of them being "just noise." Some of their work is noisy, surely. It is, however, so much more than that. So many are in too much of a hurry in the world and/or lazy and need things to make sense at face value. Turn off your brain, and let the Sonic waves douse your mind and penetrate your soul . . .

That's impressive that you've heard all the great rock bands.

Not enough love for Band of Horses on this website.

The first Band of Horses record is an absolute classic. The second one is average at best. The rest are trash.

Henry Rollins had a great quote one time, someone asked him why he was such a music snob and he said, "I can't forget what I know".

I'll admit I only listen to sy once or twice a year for a few years now. part of that is because I listened to them SO much about a decade ago. another reason is because I'm constantly listening to new stuff searching for my new favorite thing. though after all these years, I still consider sy my favorite band by far. no other band has consistently amazed me. I remember when I was first getting into them, they were like a drug. every album I got I loved. still to this day I've never found another band as good. they kind of ruined music for me. I was spoiled early on. I still find artists that I very much like, but its only songs or albums.never is it everything they've done. I pretty much honestly like everything sy has done.

this, this.

nice post

Indeed.

Yep. Hah. Well said. :)

I had a roommate in college who I talked to a ton about music because we had really similar taste. We were talking SY once — talking about why their music was deemed so inaccessible by so many, when to us it felt epic and beautiful and very easy to love, and he said, "I've always considered Sonic Youth to be, at its core, really just an amazing and elemental pop band in the tradition of the Beatles."

I'd never thought of it this way at the time, and surely there's a lot about SY's music that is decidedly anti-pop, but it made sense right away, and I think it's true. Not "pop" in the stylistic sense, but "pop" in the cultural sense. Four distinct personalities (at least, usually it was four), making collaborative music with four different but perfectly complimentary visions and styles.
If you put on Sonic Youth and just let the music wash over you, you find that beneath the fuzz and the feedback and the squall, there's almost always an extremely listenable and lovable foundation of grooves and melodies, shifting and changing, tweaking the musical status quo and layering it ideas and sounds previously unheard of.
There's so much simple, dynamic beauty in SY's music. "Kotton Krown" is a lovely little love song. "Teen Age Riot" is an epic, fist-pumpkins anthem. "Hey Joni" is an exercise in warped pop dynamics, "Total Trash" is a deeply melodic pop number enshrouded in noise.... "Shadow of a Doubt" is an eerie ballad that just happens to have all traditional elements stripped away and laid bare... "Eliminator Jr." is a kickass rock song. And on and on. These are all songs that could have passed for hits had SY simply taken the easy road to pop songwriting, but instead they deconstructed and reinvented, just like the Beatles did.

They might be the most listenable band I've ever heard. And certainly, they are to me and my punkish, often counterculture-leaning sensibilities what the Beatles were to my father's generation. The ideal. The ultimate. The perfect storm.

I think the world would be a better and happier place if people would just shut the fuck up and put Daydream Nation on their headphones and learn why it's so goddamn great. Same goes for pretty much every other album. Sonic Youth is for lovers. :D

What the fuck is a music snob anyway?

about 75% of this forum, hay-o!


Going back to sonik's post - hell yeah. Although I actually do still listen to SY quite often... at least once a month, though often far more - his experience getting into the band echoes my own. I'd track down each album, and then explore it and fall in love deeper each time. Sonic Youth to me wasn't just getting into a new band, it almost felt like getting into a new genre. Or learning a new language.

Perhaps a big part of it has to do with the order in which I acquired their discography. My first SY release was actually the Dirty Boots EP with all those live tracks. Then I borrowed a copy of Screaming Fields, so was exposed to a bunch of the 80's stuff. Then I found a copy of Made In USA locally, and had no idea what it was. So I was listening to this weird instrumental sndtrk a ton not realizing that it wasn't really a proper album y'know?

I slowly started picking up SY albums as I'd stumble upon them in the wild. This was the late 90's. So mostly I'd have to get lucky and find a used CD. But because of the time, the few albums that would get stocked new were the new releases. This meant that more of what I was experiencing from the band early in my listening was pretty weird. Like Goodbye 20th Century was one I got pretty early because it was "their new album" at the time, and it was actually in stock locally. I also picked up NYCG&F and SYR5 right when they came out as well.

So yeah, to me this band was just this whole new musical universe. Just hearing these juxtapositions in their catalog as I was first getting into them really did something to me. I still love NYCG&F/SYR5 as a back-to-back listen by the way. Although almost two decades later I still struggle to sit through SYR4 haha.

Sonic Love <3

Someone asked Louis Armstrong one time what "Jazz" music was, and he replied " some people have a mind to knowin, and if they don't, you can't really tell 'em". Same thing applies.

Not to diss the other writers, but Thurston is a shockingly underrated melody maker. His vocal lines go through my head all the time.

Please care to name the 75% of this forum that is so snobbish about music taste. There aren't that many people actively posting on here about music so it should be an easy task.

the "hay-o" indicated a joke. Would have been cool if you commented on like, the way longer part of my post that wasn't a joke.

You review people's lack of laughter at your jokes?

No. I just thought it would be fun to talk about SY.

How sweet of you.

Yeah, this was it for me. Everything always comes back to SY for me. Grew up listening to, as was the fashion at the time, whatever Britpop type stuff was on the radio, plus older, mostly British rock via parents, got into grunge/pop punk/'mainstream alternative' at 14ish and had my head completely cracked open by SY at 16. I probably have 3 or 4 proper, hardcore, can't-possibly-listen-to-anything-else-for-a-fortnight sessions on them a year these days, but there was a very long period of time when I played them at least every other day. First album was Sister, first album I got on release was Nurse.

I still see them as a genre unto themselves really. Have naturally ventured into no wave/Branca/etc, as well as other atonal stuff, guitar based or composed, and all the other many, many threads to pull from digging into the band, but no one else has quite the same combination of texture, melody and groove. The fact that there are 18 (I think...) albums proper, plus yer SYRs and archival bits and EPs and unlimited bootlegged skronk wig out alternate versions and demos and covers and on and on, not to mention the side/now-current projects of Thurston, Lee and Kim, and you've got a body of work at least as substantial as some entire scenes.

Hello to OP as well! Nice to see a little bit of good old fashioned sonik love on the board, makes me all misty-eyed and nostalgic.

which is I equate SY with a genre unto themselves: the list of other artists/bands/composers/etc I've discovered THRU them is fucking long. The Branca stuff you mentioned; the composers on Goodbye 20th; the collabs on SYR's or any one of Thurston and Lee's improv releases; No Wave; Swans... but then there's the other side where they were covering The Carpenters and Beach Boys and Madonna. The Sonic Family Tree has deep roots and a thousand leaves.

Trying to explain or understand Sonic Youth is a moot point. Their GREATNESS is what physicists refer to as a "brute fact".

That's not what he did though. He said it would have been nice if you'd said something about the actual post. Lack of laughter at jokes isn't being discussed. Commenting on non-jokes is being encouraged.

sonic youth was like a drug. before i ever did drugs. then i did drugs, and realized it was the same feeling getting high, euphoric. i'd listen to them for hours as a teenager. getting to the many sweet spots in their songs that just made me feel good and happy, wanting to hear it and experience it again and again. the greatest band.

I'm not sure SY were ever my favourite band, but they were probably the most vital in introducing me to other ones. They also seemed the most multi-faceted of those bands: less limited purely to music (largely through Kim) than those which, on purely musical terms, I preferred.

They were and are my favorite band, but I definitely agree about the freedom and lack of limitation to their sound being a huge selling point. I may prefer, say, "Good Morning Captain" to anything SY did in the '90s, but while Slint was a bit boxed in musically and stylistically, SY could do anything. Noise jams, acoustic ballads, post-punk dirges and epic rock songs. They could do soft or loud or pretty or ugly or hardcore-fast or jam band-chill, and ALL of it came out sounding like something utterly singular and unique.

I used to get a little hung up because I liked the energetic, power chord punk of Hüsker Dü, but I also liked the borderline-metal slog of Dinosaur Jr. and the whipping smack of the Pixies. I'd be frustrated because I didn't know which I liked more, and I resented having to always decide. With Sonic Youth, you didn't have to decide.

And by saying you love Sonic Youth, you're getting multiple messages across. You're saying so much... all at once (unless the person you're talking to has never heard Sonic Youth, in which case you're basically saying nothing). For a while I'd answe that frustrating, "What kind of music are you into?" question simply by saying, "Well, my favorite band of all time is Sonic Youth, if that tells you anything." It worked.

I was thinking less about their sound than their broader cultural interests. The way they (thanks mostly to Kim) tapped into areas of art, fashion, etc, as well as (through their connection with people like Richard Kern) things like underground film. They helped introduce me to bands like Live Skull, Pussy Galore, Big Black, Swans, etc, which at the time I probably listened to more than I did SY. But compared with SY, they really didn't extend much beyond the music they made.

Gotcha. Agree.

I'm stealing that line....

*pops head up*

chellooooo!

*pops back down*

SY is my favorite rock band. They have been since I got Daydream Nation when it came out. I have ridden the ups, the downs, the all-arounds, with my band. I even went back and re-listened to EJST&NS to give it another chance after ten years and it STILL FUCKING SUX.

hahahhah!

The best thing about Sonic Youth is that what they did was so idiosyncratic, so dependent on those four personalities, that no one has really been able to coe along andcarry the torch. Polvo tried, but failed, and SY outlasted them. Unwound tried, and burned themselves out. The fact that, even in 1988, the members of SY were all 10-12 years older than anyone in the other bands I loved at the time made them seem wise beyond their years.

I spent decades forcing SY on anyone who would listen, at parties, at friend's houses, during ten hour acid trips, etc. and while some poeple liked aspects of the Youth (the rockers really loved Dirty and the fat riffs, for example) I have never found anyone in my daily life that has the same passion for their skronk as I do.

* Same, except damn you're old, and I love EJST&NS. I've never really gotten anyone into SY. I've just found fellow SY fans. I've tried like hell, but never turned someone.

the moment i heard that 3 note opening riff in becuz my life changed forever. i think that was 1995. i was 14. i had already picked up a guitar because of my love of nirvana, but i had no idea guitars could make so many different sounds. squeeling jet engines, a choppy ocean storm, it blew my mind. i immediately detuned my guitar and decided to never let 'conventional' music education ruin my creativity. i never bothered to learn to read sheet or even standard chords. i always and still just make sounds that sound good to me. i make electronic music these days but the timbres and textures of washing machine are still there.

I've always answered that question: "I like everything from classical to punk, and everything in-between, except for most country and most rap." That has been updated. I once dismissed all country and that was a mistake. Some early country (heck, even some 80's stuff is great) is phenomenal.

This is a great line. I discovered so many bands and musicians through SY and their connections. The bands that they toured with plus all the artist on Ecstatic Peave. Mats Gutafsson blew my mind on SYR8 and he led me to so many other great musicians. Plus all the artists and writers that they reference in songs and interviews.

Of all the mainstream alt rock bands of the 90s I believe that SY maintained their artistic integrity to the greatest degree. Their break-up has signified a change in popular music. It seems as if in the last decade or so we've begun to see SY lose their influence among bands. Now rap and electronic music seem to have replaced rock and any band on a major label is 100% a corporate product.

It seems wild that so many people take SY and their influence for granted. They were true artist among a bunch of kids getting record deals. Look at pretty much every 90s alt rock band and they either imploded earlier on or they remained the same two decades on. Up to the end, SY remained unique and progressive.

Similar experience here. Nirvana begat Sonic Youth for me. And Washing Machine sounded like the Velvet Underground playing the White Album. I was floored. EJST&NS was actually the first Sonic Youth album I bought, but Washing Machine blew my mind.

One of the most lasting things SY taught me was that music didn't necessarily have to be loud or even aggressive to kick fucking ass. Late-'80s/early-'90s kids like myself reckoned with that assumption a lot I think. But SY's palette was so broad and their dynamic range so vast that even a song like "Little Trouble Girl" could qualify as "kick ass." Somehow. And the gentle, dreary "Diamond Sea," which was just a revelation for time the first time I heard it.

This was an important revelation for me. It led to my exploration of non-loud music. Loudness is worthless in and of itself. It's the tone and the vibe and the energy that makes a great loud song great, and SY infused songs in every tempo with an equally compelling energy. So I credit them with a lot. I don't think I ever would have gotten into electronic music if not for SY, for instance. I looked for that same ability to harness energy properly in other artists, and fell in love with Aphex Twin in very short order.

I still look for that quality. A mastery over the motivation behind the music, and a deliberate and knowing appreciation for mood and the power that a properly shifting chord progression, or properly placed sample, can pack. One thing most of my favorite artists have in common is an ability to make ugly things sound or feel beautiful, and that's exactly the type of mood mastery I'm talking about.

SY was heavy as fuck.

I thought Flaming Lips might be somewhat near SY's level for the longest time, but now I'm starting to think they're just either stuck, or they've stopped caring about evolving, and have given into the impulse to rest on their laurels. In any case, I think musically they had it in them to pull an SY, and I think they did so for quite a while... until about 2013, really. But now, I think they exist as more of a pop culture institution.

Hope I'm wrong. Hope they make something really thrilling again. Heir music certainly isn't bad (I actually quite like their latest album) but they're nowhere near where SY was with Murray Street and Sonic Nurse

well said. a clip of bull in the heather was the very first sy i heard. those plucking sounds were so cool i was already a fan. then some of diamond sea and then junkies promise on a late night show. i had to save up a little to afford the WM cd. what a wait. i was a fan before i even heard a whole album. remember those ads from columbia house where you get 10 cds for a penny? i got bad moon, evol, sister, ciccone, and goo all at once. so fucking awesome.