> On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 2:46 PM, Dwayne Monroe<dwayne.monroe at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Here at LBO, home of delicious mixed drink recipes, dystopian dating
> > guidance, bored AIs in search of weapons platforms, neuromancing femme
> > personas, language is a virus REsearch, old fashioned cranky opinion
> > mongoing and jacketed anti proton beams, we argue about many things.
>
> I have a historical connection to SY that is probably too strong, but
> still I agreed with some of what k-punk wrote. On the other hand, I
> can't really take his posts seriously. I think they'd be worth arguing
> against if he'd (1) not been intentionally provocative or contrarian
> (I can read Zizek for that); (2) shown any interest in the music SY
> has produced over the last 25 years; and (3) not consistently engage
> in the same sort of curatorial exercises and canon-making that he dogs
> on SY for engaging in: Burial brilliant, the rest of dub-step bad; The
> Fall were brilliant through the first half of '82, etc.
>
I'll admit this sounds about right to me.
As for Sonic Youth themselves, I knew nothing of them until I was introduced by a friend to Daydream Nation (1988, I believe, was the release, to answer Chris's question), and it was a revelation. I built rituals around some tracks and sequences of tracks that stayed with me for nearly twenty years, they had such emotional power. Shoot, I even liked "experimental jet set" (which I believe Doug recently used a snippet from). I admit I have not kept up closely with them (I haven't with much of anyone, except for one or two obsessions, so it really means nothing wrt my judgment of them), but now that the question is posed, it occurs to me that I think of them as rather like the way Woody Allen talks about sex and pizza: when they're good, they're really good; and when they're bad, they're still pretty good.
I had a girlfriend once who used to go to Burning Man (before it got the WIRED endorsement, but also after; no, I never went, although I thought about it once for a few minutes). When we were first getting to know each other, she told me a story about DJing at the radio station early one Burning Man, and having played Daydream Nation and A Love Supreme back-to-back. To me, this was a powerful indicator that she was Right, because she was so right, and -- being disconnected from much of a music community -- I was sure I was the only one who had ever thought something like that.
The appeal of Daydream Nation, which I haven't listened to in a while, but which is always on my phone, actually, and always on my computer, and probably one of the first things I put on my computer when I first got an ipod, is in both the sonic and the lyrical thematics, but these are of different orders. The cyberpunk schtick appealed very much to me, as I was also reading Gibson and Sterling (et al) at that time, and I still enjoy that aspect of the album, but the deepest resonances are are obviously in the music itself, especially the guitar work. The relationship between structure -- sustained (more or less, but I think mostly "more") over two LPs -- and its dismantling, or chaos and its structuring. But others are much more eloquent on this than I will ever be. I'd be content (if not happy) to say that it just sounded amazing.
I am inspired to listen to it now, in fact.
j