Neuguitars 2024 #19: Narration, limbo, communication, canonization, archiving and coolness in Sonic Youth
"Sonic Youth is/are dentist drill drone music."
“Catz listened, feeling as if she were melting inside. Sweat beaded on her forehead. In the background, behind the disembodied voice, her band wailed and throbbed and roared angst rock, metal stripped down, fast and angry music like the echo of a subway thundering into the station.”
John Shirley, CITY COME A-WALKIN', 1980
Sonic Youth aren't back but, perhaps, they never went away. If Sonic Youth have no longer existed as an active/operational group since 2011, they have however started an intense activity of archiving, reprinting and anthologizing their work, which has in turn activated an intense process of canonisation/sanctification by critics, historians and the public itself. On March 11, 2022, the blog/magazine The Quietus published this article by JR Moores: Reissue Of The Week: Sonic Youth's In/Out/In where the author, I believe rightly, wrote:
“Despite, or perhaps owing to, the fact that a reunion tour isn't likely to happen anytime soon, Sonic Youth have had the best separation that fans could have hoped for. Much of the time, it hardly feels as if they've even gone away. We are basically living in the state of limbo that we used to inhabit between the "official" studio albums that would pop up every one-to-three years from 1982 to 2009. When waiting for those "proper" records to appear, fans' thirst for all things Sonic Youth would be quenched by various side-projects, live albums, archive releases, reissues, solo works, poetry books, art exhibitions and collaborative performances where Kim, Thurston, Lee or Steve would make an atonal racket while somebody who was still a card-carrying member of the radical underground blew a saxophone like billy-o or sawed a skateboard attached to a contact mic in half. The limbo is now permanent. It still ain't such a bad place to be.“
The subject of Moores' critical investigation was the new album of unreleased songs "In/Out/In", which for a short period had almost raised hopes of a reunion of the group. The album itself, the result of the assembly of 5 songs, some of which were already present in other compilations, cassettes, limited editions, which spanned a period of about eight years, from 2000 to 2010, what did it really offer that was new?
In/Out/In” was an album of entirely instrumental music, the first if we don't consider the eccentric and smart “Goodbye 20th Century”, where SY interpreted, in their own way, pieces of contemporary music composed by John Cage, Steve Reich, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Yoko Hono, Pauline Oliveiros and others. In “In/Out/In”, however, SY were simply themselves: that is, they sounded like Pink Floyd under estrogen, with long improvisational rides that recalled the Grateful Dead and which attested to the excellent level of internal cooperation and of musical telepathy achieved by band members. “In/Out/In”, basically, was an electric contemporary chamber music record that didn't sound like a farewell, but more like the continuation of an epic past, in the wake of the alternative music boom of the 80s/90s, which SY had been largely responsible for.
What Moores' article highlighted was the limbic nature of their current artistic non-existence. Unlike other historical bands, where the work of sanctification and canonization began some time after their dissolution, perhaps on the occasion of a revival or on the occasion of the death of one of their members, SY never seems to have marked a boundary between their dissolution and the consequent, almost immediate, start of the anthological archiving and recovery activity. If you go visit their two sites on Bandcamp( Music | Sonic Youth (bandcamp.com) e Music | Sonic Youth Archive (bandcamp.com) ) you will be literally submerged by a flow of recordings made available in digital mode, a true sonic bulimia capable of satisfying the appetite of every fetishistic fan of the band.
I recently decided to let myself be tempted by the reprint of three of their live performances: "Walls Have Ears", "Live In Berlin 2009" and "Live in Brooklyn 2011", all purchased in CD format. The reason? You haven't seen SY live and live recordings seemed like the perfect way to compensate, I clearly prefer the CD format to the LP and, moreover, I also implicitly wanted to enter their anthological flow.
The truth is that, perhaps, I too have entered a hauntological, nostalgic and middle-aged phase. I love these three of their live albums, so simple and consistent in their format and price with the ethics that the band has always expressed without ever saving themselves or selling themselves short. Three live shows with a high energy impact, which reinterpret their song form each time and where maximum space is given to improvisation and interplay.
Three live shows where speed, desire, sweat, machine oil, electricity come together in a form that still exudes that cool energy that SY have always accustomed us to, regardless of the different periods in which they were recorded. It's true, SY never left, they are still with us, albeit in a dispersed and distanced form, engaged in a myriad of personal projects with a high cultural, informative and communicative density. Their cultural legacies are immense, like their sound, which immediately identifies them as a group and not as soloists.
Unlike most legendary rock bands, once the group experience ended, they didn't stop. They continued to draw personal communicative parables, remaining the cool, intelligent and avant-garde personalities they have always been. While periodically continuing to provide their fans with new ideas both through reissues, merchandising and new recordings of old concerts from their sites, they have cleverly, and perhaps naturally, transformed themselves into four cultural incubators, four elegantly deconstructed influencers, perfectly in step with a entertainment society full of communication and devoid of real skills.
A happy limbo that even the recent release of Thurston Moore's autobiography, “Sonic Life”, does nothing but confirm, through the consecration of his mystical aura of artistic incubator and permanent cultural witness. “Sonic Life” is, in fact, the long-awaited response to Kim Gordon's book “Girl in a Band”, released in 2015, elaborated with a perfect, entertaining and Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative. I don't think they'll return to perform together on a tour, but, all things considered, I don't mind it at all.