No one listens to Sonic Youth to learn about the personal lives of
its members. The New York quartet are an ideas band—you listen to
wallow in their famously retuned guitars, which nearly three decades
ago altered rock’s sonic palette as decisively as Hendrix had, and
which are now a comfort staple to rock fans that can do without Hinder,
thank you very much. Up till now you could also read about them without
learning much about the members’ backgrounds and private lives. This is
odd, considering that Sonic Youth have provided one of the most
prodigious paper trails in rock: countless reviews, interviews, and
profiles, and a half-dozen books devoted to or prominently featuring
them. But it’s also appropriate: Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Kim
Gordon, and Steve Shelley separate their lives from their careers; they
leave the drama onstage and on record, where they belong. Even when
they write lyrics about themselves (which is more often than you might
guess), reading their catalog through the lens of autobiography seems
superfluous.
That’s why it’s shocking to read the first chapter of David Browne’s
new Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth and
discover 30 deeply reported, and often fascinating, pages on the early
lives of Gordon and Moore, who formed the band early in their courtship
and have been married since 1984. Browne conducted some 200 interviews,
and for the book’s first three quarters he organizes all that material
into something shapely. If knowing all about Gordon or Moore or Ranaldo
or Shelley’s childhoods doesn’t necessarily shed much light on their
music, per se—the music stands up by itself—Browne’s
excavations are at least entertaining (Gordon’s first high-school
boyfriend was Danny Elfman, whose Simpsons theme song her band
would later cover) and occasionally insightful. Browne brings up the
fact that Gordon and Moore were both raised by academics a couple times
too many, but that doesn’t make it insignificant.
Browne bolsters the well-known facts of the band’s rise with plenty
of new material, the most priceless of which comes from composer Glenn
Branca, whose early guitar ensembles included both Moore and Ranaldo,
and whose alternate tunings inspired their band to adopt the same
tactic. “Sonic Youth gave them what I had, but sugarcoated it,” Branca
tells Browne. “They knew I’d come up with all these incredibly cool
sounds that could be used in the context of a rock song. At the time I
wasn’t going to do that… So I liked their candy-coated version of my
music. I loved it. I came in my fucking pants.”
And Browne is sharp on the band’s move onto major labels: SY signed
to Geffen, undergoing tense recording sessions for 1990’s semistiff
Goo and then nearly losing Ranaldo when one of his songs was
rejected from 1992’s expansive Dirty. That album came after
one of SY’s favorite younger bands, Nirvana, signed to the label as
well, and released Nevermind. In its wake, Geffen began trying
to groom Sonic Youth for genuine rock stardom—culminating
with their headlining the 1995 Lollapalooza tour—even if the
band itself largely thought the idea was a pipe dream. Browne is astute
on the ’90s rise of alt-rock: He quotes one anonymous business
associate on SY’s response to Nirvana’s shocking multiplatinum success:
“It was like having your baby brother suddenly become president.”
Still, it’s hard not to get the sense that he might have been even
happier to write a chronicle of the mid-’90s alt–gold rush,
especially when he notes that over 100 modern-rock stations sprung up
around the country in Nevermind‘s wake.
Unfortunately, Browne runs out of gas in the book’s final quarter,
even if he (rightly) doesn’t think Sonic Youth’s music does. Apart from
September 11 (SY’s rehearsal studios were located near the Twin
Towers), the ’00s are rushed through. He also ignores Amy Phillips’s
infamous Village Voice review of 2002’s Murray Street (“Sonic Youth, please break up”). The page of outraged letters the
paper ran a week later are all the proof anyone needs that among most
of those who care, Sonic Youth are essentially bulletproof—more
so than Browne’s rushed litany of famous people whose careers received
a boost through their association with SY. Despite these omissions,
Browne smartly humanizes the most aloof of rock’s great bands.
