Sonic Youth (what was it anyway)

I remember as a student walking through a sun-bleached park in London and having just bought a tape cassette of Dirty and it having made no great impression, when suddenly the imstrumental section of either Sugar Kane or Teresa's Sound World rolled wondrously into my mind out of what seemed like nowhere, and Sonic Youth's music seemed utterly vital and transforming and I rushed back to my bedroom and listened to the whole album through. I remember queuing up at 08.30 outside HMV to be the first to buy Experimental Jet Set, half-worried in case it sold out - of course I was the only person in the queue. To my dismay the assistant in HMV told me that although it had been delivered, they probably wouldn't start unpacking it until after lunch. I came back in the afternoon and it still wasn't on the shelf. But anyway.

The first thing that annoyed me about Experimental Jet Set was the quote on the back cover - Once the music leaves your head it's already compromised - surely the whole problem with commodification is that it renders one's inmost thought compromised from the outset - the quote seemed like a sly way of dismissing the fact and of excusing what I feared might be a shabby compromise. Added to which I felt irritated by the artful imitation of shaky handwriting on the back cover as if the "writer" were too wasted to form a straight line on the "D", say. But the main reason for hating it was Self-Obsessed and Sexxee, Waist, and all the other songs by Thurston on the album. His obsession with strung-out teens had its full flowering on Psychic Hearts, but the worst of it began here along with the even more tedious male voyeur figure, who narrates both the above. There is something eerie and (as the ads say) wonderfully satisfying about someone - especially an attractive girl - becoming frail and wasted and gradually sinking into oblivion*, and it's a subject that Royal Trux approach with compassion and insight on Cut You Loose. But there's something nauseating about the way Moore foregrounds his voyeurism as if that alone were a sufficient self-condemnation, and something not fascinated enough about his star-struck observer. The thing I rather dislike about Christiane F is the journalistic distance the camera keeps from its subject - it's extraordinary how uncompromised the eye of the director seems to be by the attractions of his subject. Christiane has sex or shoots up before the camera and the camera watches like a waiting paramedic or a half-comprehending bystander. Although doubtless the product of great directorial tact, it's unsatisfactory somehow. Of course Moore's persona of a leering voyeur is no artistic solution either. Someone who gets it exactly right (aside from the Trux) is Paul Morrissey*** in his Trilogy and in particular in his silent short films All Aboard the Dreamland Choo Choo and Like Sleep, both available on the Flesh/Trash/Heat box set. In the first film a young man draws a Violet Wand along his body before stabbing himself in the thigh with an engraving tool; in the second a black couple inject themselves - with an old-fashioned dropper - leaving a thin trail of blood along each arm. Both films are about 10 minutes long but the action in each is extremely slow. The camera is clearly fascinated by what it sees - not only by the rituals of self-harm or addiction, but by everything in the frame, by the light and by the surface of objects. Morrissey's slow, patient observation, his fascination with the act of viewing, be it a rumpled sheet or a line of blood, gives his work not only a critical distance, but the capacity for pity. The truest compassion has its origin in the material, in the objective gaze. Compare Hippocrates, who writes in On The Sacred Disease,

"Such as are habituated to their disease have a presentiment when an attack is imminent, and run away from men, home, if their house be near, if not, to the most deserted spot, where the fewest people will see the fall, and immediately hide their heads. This is the result of shame at their malady, and not, as many hold, of fear of the divine. Young children at first fall anywhere, because they are unfamiliar with the disease; but when they have suffered several attacks, on having the presentiment they run to their mothers, or to somebody they know very well, through fear and terror at what they are suffering, since they do not yet know what shame is." (trans. WHS Jones, Loeb Vol 2)

Hippocrates wants to be among the diseased, he observes their condition and their suffering with the same rapt interest and reserved care as Morrissey exhibits in his films.

*Compare the aimiable sadism with which an anaesthetist tells his patient to count to ten as he injects the anaesthetic** while the nurses and ODAs stand around grinning. The patient never gets further than three.

**The milk makes them doll-like. Propofol is the anaesthetic of choice and the beautiful thing is that it looks exactly like milk, not surprising as it comes as 1% propofol in a soya emulsion.

***Morrissey thinks Christiane F is an excellent film. I think Kurt Cobain did too.

Despite their reputation as experimentalists, Sonic Youth have always preferred to work with traditional song structures - sweet, repetitive melodies held in conformist alignment by Steve Shelley's slick and unscary percussion. (They should never have got rid of Bob Bert!) Indeed their moments of violence and dischord serve only to accentuate the predictability of the songs, which stand out from the background noise, edge-enhanced and sentimentalised. And the rebarbative elements are in any case no more than cool-sounding effects, kids making a mess, chosen not for their truth value**** but on the basis of whether or not they sound good. Which is why they get dropped into the most inappropriate contexts (Diamond Sea) or turn silly (Becuz). Milton Babbitt draws a distinction between "music", the work of a serious composer or interpretive artist, and mere "aural pleasure", in which musical choices are made in terms of the immediate gratifications they afford the listener. Well I love Milton Babbitt and have long mooted writing him a fan letter, and this distinction is as outrageous as it is liberating. It more or less disposes of Sonic Youth's entire output and that of most other rock bands, although I maintain that Kurt Cobain in songs like Radio Friendly Unit Shifter was trying to capture something far more exact with his effects and distortions. And Washing Machine is a grand track.

****So can a musical choice have a truth value? And what is a truth value anyway?

Well it was a pity. The signature waves of ecstatic dischord - creatively exhausted by Diamond Sea and reduced to an idle jog by Sunday - lost all capacity to inspire me until they seemed merely like tame replications of a drug high. The only way to overcome a temptation is to yield to it, but Sonic Youth have always preferred to stand back from the edge of temptation without ever abandoning the thought of it or refusing its terms entirely (though to be fair I've heard nothing since A Thousand Leaves, not even Goodbye 20th Century). Their studied remoteness from situations they're not really remote from (on the cheaply judgemental Skip Tracer for example) seems snotty and dishonest.

This post was inspired by the example of Carl at The Impostume and his analysis of what exactly he disliked so much about Saint Etienne. Actually I always wondered whether Saint Etienne's records weren't a satire directed at the type of people who enjoy Saint Etienne, nostalgic for a time they never lived through or a life they never had*****. Compare Teenage Riot, the worst song on Daydream Nation - street action as retro fashion show. And could there be a worse political song than Youth against Fascism? I can't believe it was recorded in earnest by these smart, well-connected New Yorkers, and though I understand the anger that made Crass record White Punks on Hope, I wouldn't have thought anti-fascism was a very worthwhile subject for parody.

*****I preferred the Generation Game with Larry Grayson.