Here's some stuff:
Quote:
Impose Magazine: Sonic Youth
Steve Albini: Durable. Very durable band. Seems like they’ve been around forever.
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Quote:
How do you feel about the route that the eighties band took. Steve Albini: A lot of them, in my opinion, have given up the very qualities that made them distinctive in the first place. The Swans, for example, when from being one of the most Monolithic, Powerful bands in the world to being a maudlin cabaret. I haven't heard a Swans record that i liked in a long time. Sonic Youth, are a really sad story, because they were an amazing band during a period of their existence, and that was a very poorly documented period. From their very beginning to the period that they released EVOL, that era of the band was enormously infuential, I think they really covered a lot of ground, the distance that they have gone since then has been a very small distance indeed. Basically refined a very few notions and turned some of them into downright parodies and their current tack is very insubstantial. They are pretending to an extent that they are still the band they were seven or eight years ago and the way that they do that is by sort of presenting themselves as a more lighthearted jocular version of themselves with their tongue in their cheeks they are slowly dismantling their reason to exist. They still occassionaly write a good song, to use terms that they would appreciate, there is an occassional that you listen to and think that that is a pleasant enough song but they don't ever have the sort of spellbinding, scare the shit out of you quality that they used to.
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Basically, Steve likes ultra-RAWK stuff. I know a few people in Chicago who hate his guts and say he's not/never was representative of the true "scene" or whatever goes on out there. Speaking of Chicago.. Is it true that Jim was booed by some people when he first played with SY in Chicago? I think playa-hating like that is dumb.