Sonic Youth's "Goodbye 20th Century"
Review by Tom Roe, Music Editor

Sonic Youth is about as relevant to the pop music world now as, say, Bob Dylan or Lou Reed. Trailblazers, yes, but considered on the pop landscape, the New York noisemaking quartet no longer make records that alter the above-ground music industry's consciousness, the way they did around the turn of the last decade. By now most music listeners interested in pop experimentation have heard the joke about Sonic Youth--calling them instead Quiet Gray or Silent Old. Who out there can even name their last album ("A Thousand Leaves" to the winner), a rambling, unlistenable affair save for the churning "Sunday" single. To these ears, "A Thousand Leaves" sounded like a record from a band that no longer cared. Where the Sonics once celebrated undermining the pop form, now it sounds as if they've tired of dealing with A&R idiots, playing before indifferent crowds waiting to hear clichés from the festival's headliners, and tired, most of all, of the cult of personality that's accompanied their every move since being crowned kings of the underground back in the late '80s.

The Sonics' new record, "Goodbye 20th Century," is a farewell to those days.
Like the three singles they've released over the past year on drummer Steve
Shelley's Smells Like Records label, this sprawling double-album (also on Smells Like) attempts to reposition Sonic Youth from underground pop noisemakers to members of the rarefied avant-garde classical community. And it does so with a sense of humor.

Brian Eno is the only rocker given any real credibility by the avant-garde
community, but the walls between the university halls and the basement clubs
are crumbling faster than you can spell deconstruction. Most underground
"post-rockers" such as Stereolab or Tortoise cite Steve Reich as an
influence. Sonic ideas from the composers that SY "covers" on "Goodbye 20th Century" are slowly seeping into the mainstream, and paradigms are shifting.   The much-ballyhooed Death of Rock, is a misreading of this shift in music.   The "song" form has been superseded by the "sound." Listen to an eclectic arbiter of current experimental trends, like, say, free-form radio station WFMU, and you'll notice that interesting sounds--a theremin floating in here, a Moog zipping by there--dominate playlists while the
singer-songwriters sound dated and old (or, like Beck, are trying to keep up
with the noisemakers). Listen to the radio these days, and you'll hear wacky
parts such as Cher's vocoder-enhanced vocals that sound out-of-place among
the repetitive choruses and hackneyed lyrics. If 20th Century music was
about the song-form, then the future is all about the bells and whistles
that make those songs interesting.

Sonic Youth, of course, have long been about "sounds," even in the "song"
format of the pop world. So this isn't so much a radical shift, but a
conscious choice with this record, to do the pretentious thing and try to
place their name in musical history alongside John Cage, James Tenney, and
Christian Wolff, who are among the composers that the Manhattan-based band tries its collective hand at here. Sonic Youth has long been fascinated with the composers included here--and its a who's who of 20th Century composers, with only Varese and Pendericki missing--and have interacted with Pauline Oliveros (who wrote a piece specifically for the Sonics and this project), and worked with people like Jim O'Rourke and Christian Marclay (who both are among the extended band on "Goodbye 20th Century."). But clearly, their moment in the pop spotlight is over, and to keep enjoying the recording process Sonic Youth was forced to turn left, and try out some farther-out ideas.

Funny thing, though, as they were recording this monumental shift from
experimental rock to more abstract concepts, all the custom-tuned
instruments that the band traveled with were stolen, when someone drove off
with their touring truck in Southern California this past July. So its
impossible now, even if they wanted to, for Sonic Youth to sound like Sonic
Youth again. Those instruments were all one-of-a-kind, crafted and altered
as the years went on. Many of their early songs were built around the sounds
of certain guitars or amps. But, if "Goodbye 20th Century" is any
indication, they'll see that tragedy as an invitation to further
experimentation, and give up trying to pretend they're still a rock band.

This sprawling double album is certainly the most fascinating aural document
they've made in years. John Cage's thirty-minute "Four 6" is the tour de
force here, a captivating drama with William Winant (who choose most of the
tracks, and included this one 'cause Cage wrote it for him), composer
Takehisa Kosugi, SY guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo in one
channel, and SY's bassist Kim Gordon, drummer Shelley, O'Rourke and engineer Wharton Tiers in the opposite channel. Wolf's 1971 composition "Burdocks" is album's most playful piece--well, except for the 12 seconds of young Coco Hayley Gordon Moore screeching Yoko Ono's "Voice Piece for Soprano"--with Marclay's whizzing turntables, Wolf's weird organ sounds, and someone (O'Rourke's?) plaintive violin refrain. There are parlor tricks such as hammering the keys of a piano down before George Maciunas' "Piano Piece #13 (Carpenter's Piece)," or swinging microphones above screeching amps for Reich's 1968 "Pendulum Music."

There aren't new ideas, exactly, on this historical retrospective. But by
casting these tunes in Sonic Youth's oeuvre, they move one of the final
demarcation points between "high" and "low" culture. They'll help make these
avant-classical composers even hipper than they are (prediction: within a
year some second-rate indie band will put four minutes of silence on a CD
and call it a cover of Cage's "4:16"), and, they just might pull the music
industry from its current ultra-conservative position, to a more exploratory
place, shaking the conservatory loose at the same time. Sonic Youth just
might have a second act in them.

Tom Roe tomroe@usa.com is a freelance writer who has contributed to New York Times, Newsday, Brooklyn Bridge, New York Post, Time Out New York, Detour and many other publications. Usually Tom writes about music for The Wire, Magnet, and for a couple years he had an "alternative music" column in the NY Post.   Tom also runs a microradio station, usually based in Williamsburg, called free103point9. In '98 New York mag named them "Best Pirate Radio Station" and this year the Voice did.  They do events, mostly, and people such as Matthew Shipp, DJ Scud, I-Sound, Singe, Daniel Carter, William Parker, Simon Reynolds and Stars of the Lid have been on the air.

Back to the top or to the Most Recent Review

Post your comments to the Arts Bulletin Board

About Us 9.11.01 Hardcopy Letters Writers Group Links + Staff Legal Statements