May 30, 2008
Remarkably unremarkable
On June 10, Sonic Youth will release a best-of album to be sold exclusively at Starbucks. The band recorded one new song for the album and let their celebrity pals pick the rest of the tracks that appear on the comp.:
Bull in the Heather (selected by Catherine Keener)
Sugar Kane (Beck)
100% (Mike D)
Kool Thing (Radiohead)
Disappearer (Portia De Rossi )
Superstar (Diablo Cody)
Stones (Allison Anders)
Tuff Gnarl (Dave Eggers and Mike Watt)
Teenage Riot (Eddie Vedder)
Shadow of a Doubt (Michelle Williams)
Rain on Tin (Flea)
Tom Violence (Gus Van Zant)
Mary-Christ (David Cross)
World Looks Red (Chloe Sevigny)
Expressway to Yr Skull (Flaming Lips)
Slow Revolution (new track)
Steve Albini was right when he said, "Breaking up is an idea that doesn't occur to enough bands."
I bought "Sister" by Sonic Youth when I was 14; the album was released in 1987, a year after I was born. But in the end, the years between "Sister's" release and the beginning of my adolescence didn't matter at all. I loved every song on that album (some, like Lee Ranaldo's 'Pipeline/Kill Time,' a little less than others) and, using the money my parents gave me to buy lunch, quickly added the rest of Sonic Youth's discography to my record collection. I even owned Sonic Youth videos (Goo and 1991: The Year Punk Broke) and biographies, and I didn't believe Melody Maker writer Everett True when he called the members of Sonic Youth "a bunch of middle-age, middle-class jerk-offs."
But it's 2008, and Sonic Youth just doesn't know when to quit. I'm not bothered by the fact that every single member of the band is old enough to be my parent. (Ranaldo's son Coady just graduated from Washington University.) I'm bothered that a once great band, a band whose albums were monumentally important to me, has spent the last ten years creating albums that are the audio equivalents of tranquilizers: 2002's "Murray Street," 2004's "Sonic Nurse" and 2006's "Rather Ripped."
And when Sonic Youth realized its new material wasn't quite hacking it, the band dug into its vaults and began reissuing old albums, including 1988's "Daydream Nation" and 1992's "Dirty." This seems exploitative. Why would anyone be interested in paying $17 for a digitally-remastered copy of an album they already own and love in its original format? When I heard last summer that Sonic Youth would be touring and playing "Daydream Nation" in its entirety, I was full of scorn. Watching Sonic Youth rehash Daydream Nation in 2007 would be like watching a Civil War reenactment! In an article for the Chicago Reader, music writer Jessica Hopper contends, " ... it seems incredibly self-serving for Sonic Youth to be pimping their past triumphs ... We don't dare point out that they're working the underground the way a washed-up one-hit wonder works the state-fair circuit."
Steve Albini was right, and maybe you don't think Steve Albini's too credible, because you remember far back enough to know that he was the audio engineer for Bush's "Razorblade Suitcase." That's pretty embarrassing, but then again so is every single track on "Rather Ripped."