Depending on your age, Sonic Youth either single-handedly destroyed your musical spectrum or made it. No matter your opinion, their story is the most unique band history in pop music. No one else ever went from selling 60,000 independent albums to signing a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal for albums that sold… 60,000 copies. How they maintained that arrangement right up until last year’s Rather Ripped is explored in Goodbye 20th Century (DaCapo, 421 pages, $27.95), David Browne’s exhaustive biography of the group.
It’s a slightly skewered history as Browne rushes through the early ’80s East Village and no wave scenes that the band sprung from. One gets the sense that’s because Browne has no grasp of music’s outer reaches though there are wonderful cameos from the always dead-on and vitriolic Glenn Branca who declares, “I liked their candy-coated version of my music. I loved it. I came in my fucking pants.”
To Browne’s credit, by aiming his sights between Sonic Youth’s credibility-challenged Dirty period and their current state as guidance counsellors to Freak Nation 2.0, a completely original take on the band emerges and in the process an unsentimental portrait of the 1990s is generated. After the growing pains of 1990’s Goo, which saw the band enduring both a manager that faxed termination notices to their friends and the whims of Whitney Houston’s mixer, Sonic Youth settled into a privileged place at Geffen as in-house cool hunters. Thanks to Nirvana, that much is a known quantity of pop mythos, but Browne methodically traces the stress the unofficial job title had on Sonic Youth as they temporarily became zeitgeist brokers. As former drummer Bob Bert noticed from the sidelines, “It was kind of strange there in the early ’90s. It’s like they were trying to sell out and keep their street cred at the same time.” Bert is referring to the time of X-girl, Gap ads, the Judgment Night soundtrack — feel free to take any one as an example.
Browne links that ideological ambiguity to the band’s conceptual art roots but the fact that business was still business — and the music business at that — can’t easily be ignored. Their lawyers did renegotiate their contract in the weeks just after Kurt Cobain’s suicide with the tacit understanding that Geffen owed Sonic Youth for delivering Nirvana. Kim Gordon tells Browne the timing wasn’t the band’s idea.
The irony of Sonic Youth’s iron-clad-contract era is that, by then, they had given up any pretensions to radio readiness and, contrary to the trends of the time, began to perform music infused with folk and jam-band tendencies. Browne’s job gets enormously difficult after Sonic Youth’s depressing Lollapalooza experience (vide Courtney Love socking Kathleen Hanna) and all-around celebrity meltdown (Thurston Moore’s negative epiphany after playing Keanu Reeves’ ice rink birthday party). It doesn’t help that Moore’s getting his daughter Coco to a soccer game on time or Jim O’Rourke’s grouchiness are not the stuff of frisson.
Also, in his final pages Browne misses what Sonic Youth genuinely added to culture. It isn’t their blurring of high and low, or pop and avant — entertainment has long been built on identity theft — but rather that Sonic Youth have destroyed the mutual exclusivity of rock and longevity. That the greyhairs in Wire and Mission of Burma now have the room to make rock music far stronger and more unhinged than anything by people with flatter abs and fuller manes might be the ultimate cool thing.