I was thirteen years old when I first got stoned- and heard sonic youth.
The story goes like this; i was auditioning for a band that my friend Phil was putting together and after embarrassing myself with my horrendous guitar playing they all decided to smoke pot. I had smoked pot once before when I was 11 with a bunch of skateboarding friends down the street from my parents house, who ended up pulling me out after they thought I was stoned (which I wasn’t) and beating the shit out of me, so I was psyched because this shit Phil had was really good and the stuff i had smoked before was brown. So homeboy fires up a green acrylic bong and puts on a sonic youth compilation. Now my buddy lived in the guest house of his dad’s place in Northridge, though it wasn’t quite a guest house because when you think of a guest house you think of one room a mini tv and maybe a bathroom but this place had a full on kitchen like three bedrooms a living room – basically it was another house and they had one room that was just a smoking room, pot cigarettes whatever. After the first rip I was stoned and to further this cliche’d story they had strobe and black lights in the room with fucking black light posters everywhere.
I think the first real sonic youth song I heard was Titanium Expose off of Goo. I was hooked I went out and bought Confusion is Sex, which if you haven’t heard it – is a weird fucking record that will confuse you if yr 13 and pretty much only listen to the Wu Tang Clan. At that point I stopped listening to everything I was before, besides Wu Tang and just listened to Sonic Youth and related bands – Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney, Pavement, Sleater Kinney etc.
I’ve been with Sonic Youth for 10 years and I’ve seen them turn out record after record and I have to say I’ve liked all of them. There are songs on the records that don’t really grab as much as others but for me Sonic Youth has been pretty consistent. So when I found that Travis had sent me a copy of the newest record, The Eternal, I went straight to my email and downloaded it. I was working on a record at the time so I waited until we had some down time, threw it on the speakers, opened up a beer and sat back.
Now I don’t really write record reviews, I’m not really much of a writer, I’m a musician but I’m gonna give it a shot because Travis called me out. When I first heard Sacred Trickster I got so angry that i wrote a two and a half page piece just bashing Sonic Youth saying how the song was derivative and unimaginative. The same gutteral Kim Gordon vocals over dissonant but cohesive pieces of alternate tuned guitars but after listening to it, it’s a good song. This is new Sonic Youth, and though you could compare this to Rather Ripped – like the dudes over at pitchfork who wish they had as much wit and bite as Robert Christgau (I mean who can give a record an A+ and still just bash the shit out of it, dudes a prick, but dude is good)- it’s different. There are elements of everything they’ve ever done in their previous records but for a band who’s been imitated and not once replicated they keep it pretty fresh. This record is great and I’ll keep coming back as long as Sonic Youth keep putting out records.
