http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle4179019.ece
June 20, 2008
Three books to mark the 25th anniversary of Sonic Youth
The Times reviews by Jesse Jarnow
div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {color:#06c;}THE RELENTLESS networking that partially accounts for Sonic Youth's quarter-century as immeasurably influential art-punks was, to begin with, literally hardcore. From the release of their first album in 1983, they have been a nexus in the American DIY underground, their connections to filmmakers, 'zine editors, visual artists and other musicians cemented through a discographical universe of 7in singles, jams and collaborations. Their music - which employs battered guitars-turned-objets to create a psychedelic cool - is also rather gorgeous.
Perhaps the only bridge between Nirvana (whom they helped to sign), Sofia Coppola (who designed a fashion line with bassist Kim Gordon), painter Gerhard Richter (whose art graced their album Daydream Nation), avant-garde composer Glenn Branca (whose guitar orchestras included Ranaldo and frontman Thurston Moore), and Starbucks (where the compilation Hits Are For Squares is currently for sale), the untangling of the Sonics' tentacles is taken up by two new biographies.
A good deal can be surmised about Stevie Chick's Psychic Confusion and David Browne's Goodbye 20th Century by their treatments of the first meeting between Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, the husband-wife tandem who formed the band in 1981. “He was immediately smitten,” is all Chick says, while Browne provides rich descriptions of the summer evening, the New York venue, and the height difference between Moore and Gordon: “Since she was a good foot shorter than he was, he had to bend down to say hello. Even when did, it was hard to see her petite, lean face.”
“Sonic Youth's is a New York story,” Chick writes, but he is never fully present inside the cramped rehearsal spaces and Chinatown apartments. Browne's book, however, is a purposeful, detailed pleasure, describing the day jobs and the tensions, and animating the real story: how a group of smart twentysomethings repurposed half-broken instruments and thrived by feeding back - just like their amps - into the world around them.
One testament is The Empty Page, 22 short stories inspired by Sonic Youth songs. Presenting the band as “some sort of a unifying theory”, a wild array of approaches result, from Tom McCarthy's Kool Thing, or Why I Want To Fuck Patty Hearst, kaleidoscopically magnifying the band's obsessions with Sixties dystopianism, to Shelley Jackson's tongue-twisting My Friend Goo.
Perhaps Sonic Youth's truest influence, though, is that they never disengaged. Hovering on the edge of the mainstream they are constantly spitting out homemade cassettes, books of poetry, new bands, old bands, and art exhibits - and will probably continue to do so, till sonic death do them part.
Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth by David Browne
Omnibus, £16.95; 400pp
Buy the book
Psychic Confusion: The Sonic Youth Story by Stevie Chick
Da Capo, £16.99; 320pp
Buy the book
The Empty Page: Fiction inspired by Sonic Youth edited by Peter Wild
Serpents Tail, £8.99; 256pp
Buy the book