Zionism, Obama-gasms, "the kulaks as a class must be liquidated", sex work, Rusty Venture, Veronica Lake, Badiou, FOSS, F/OSS, OSS, O, S, S...
And so much more!
But the one thing we haven't argued about is Sonic Youth. Let's correct that oversight.
K-punk writes:
I'm glad someone called me on the deliberately provocative, "boldly counter-intuitive and funny ... elision of Sonic Youth with Primal Scream and Oasis" in my review of the dreadful Brand Neu! 'tribute' album in The Wire 303 (www.thewire.co.uk/issues/303/).
<snip>
When I said [...] that the judgement on Sonic Youth was deliberately provocative, I didnt mean it was false. I realised when I wrote the review that dating the start of the fall from grace so early - with Bad Moon Rising rather than the obviously formulaic later phase certainly consolidated by the time of Goo - was risky. But [Wire writer] Zone... has managed what, for the last twenty years has been all but impossible, and sparked my interest in Sonic Youth again. Who could not be beguiled by this description of Bad Moon Rising?
[quoting "Zone"]
BMR is the point at which their tunings, atonal and droning, blossom into dazzling synaesthetic iridescences. They sound, literally, uncanny – with strings tuned to the same note but fractionally apart, they create their own doubles, an unheimlich shadow sound, like a transparent overlay just out of position. Playing Stoogoid riffery in a harmonic template borrowed from free jazz and serialism, one that smashes the overdetermined limits of the pentatonic, they make discord sensual in previously unheard ways. Alex Ross may take issue with this, but I think BMR is the point where Sonic Youth in effect reconnect discord with the body, restoring to it a libidinal force which you hear in The Rites of Spring, but which the cold geometries of Schoenberg and Webern subsequently evacuated.
[end quote]
This, plus Zone's elaboration of the brilliant concept of "psychopathology of place" further in the post, is precisely how I wanted to hear Bad Moon Rising, but never quite could, even then. And listening to it again this week, it sounds if anything even weaker than I remember it.
The voices of Moore and Gordon have always blocked my enjoyment of Sonic Youth; even when the music achieves the oneiric uncanniness described by Zone, the spell is broken by Moore's hipster-slacker drivel or Gordon's hectoring shout. But it was the fact that they could once have claimed to have been a continuation of postpunk's popular experimentalism that allowed their retro-necro reverence and referencing to have such force.
SY had enough credibility to legitimate the turn to the rearview mirror - the likes of Primal Scream and Oasis, who have never been original or groundbreaking, could then follow in their wake.
On Bad Moon Rising, as Zone rightly argues, it isn't the music so much as the tissue of references that is backward looking. Except of course for that distorted sample of The Stooges "Not Right" at the start of "I Love Her All The Time" - and you could argue that the whole of the last 25 years conversion of experimental rock into part of the heritage industry (culminating in the grotesque return of The Stooges themselves as geriatric teenagers, the All Tomorrow's Parties retrofests, everything so consummately lambasted in Tony Herrington's review of The Stooges' The Weirdness in The Wire a couple of years back) was bred out of that one act of citation. Not so much kill your idols, as put them on the festival circuit, forever.
[...]
full at k-punk --
"My Mind, It Aint So Open"
<http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011107.html>
.d.