Massaging the History

This past weekend, in a dizzying music-festival haze, I got to watch Sonic Youth headline the Capitol Hill Block Party here in Seattle from a window in an office building just above the stage. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, the city of Seattle closes Pike between Broadway and 12th in Capitol Hill, turning one of its most bar, restaurant, and coffee shop heavy areas into what is basically a 4-square-block concert venue full of indie performers, overpriced Miller High-life tall boys, and Seatle's best hipsters wandering around (I found two people wearing my favorite Sleater-Kinney Dig Me Out t-shirt from 1997, no doubt in anticipation of a set by current screaming-girl-semi-punk reigning champs The Gossip).

Watching just above the stage in a semi-VIP stupor caps off a decade of rather insane devotion to Sonic Youth for me. I've followed every movement of their career since buying Daydream Nation as a junior in high school. I maintain that their work from 1985-1995, between Bad Moon Rising and Washing Machine is the longest, greatest streak of artistic relevance and perfection, with each record a triumph of rock's greatest not-quite-punk noise artistes. The band has now made 6 records since then, roughly one every two years, and that doesn't include any of their strict-noise-symphony SYR recordings that get them branded as pretentious.

Anyway, the career of Sonic Youth is not what I want to write about. Instead, from my office window, I found myself, in one blissful moment, yelling to Kim Gordon as she moved her immaculately chromed-out high heeled shoe to her foot pedal thing, "Kim! I Love you! And I love your dress!" She was wearing a tight chrome mini-skirty dress thing that made her look like a metal go-go girl. Kim Gordon, mind you, is 56 years old. When you look at her up close, as I was lucky to do in meeting her, briefly, 3 years ago as the band toured for Rather Ripped, you notice a few more wrinkles, and her petulant black-eyeshadow-heavy eyes that always look a little fearsome, a little unpredictable, and very very commanding.

Kim plays bass and guitar for Sonic Youth, along with her husband Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo. She sings lead on roughly 30-40% of the songs on each album. Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney once called her the greatest female influence of all women in rock because Gordon was, unlike most female rockers, an equal in her band - a guitarist on other tracks, a mind coming up with ideas, etc.

The truth is, she also is essential to the personality of every Sonic Youth record. Moore may sing on more songs, but in a way, he's a sort of bellweather for each album, the anchor by which Gordon's flights of fancy return to, and where Ranaldo's poetic asides - 1 or 2 per album - jet back to as well. This year, Sonic Youth released The Eternal, their 15th proper album, and initially, I was less interested in it than in any previous record. This week at Block Party, though, Sonic Youth - as they typically do when touring in support of an album - played almost the entire thing, and only 4 songs from their back catalogue, each of which was made before 1990. They proved to me a couple of things - that the album deserved an additional listen, and that they were just as good as they ever were.

Don't get me wrong, The Eternal is not as good as their 85-95 run of perfection, but it is a well made album by good professionals. The reason that the record is not great is the same reason that the band probably won't make a full out bad album - the band approaches each record like a painting, specifying their noise and furious anarchy to each track until it sounds just off kilter enough, but not so much so that it loses all comprehension as a song (although, it should be said, it used to lose all comprehension as a song. And when it did, as in 1985's Bad Moon Rising, it was a better album. Not that they should try and make that album again). If you listen to the opening song from 2006's Rather Ripped, , "Reena," you'll hear it - it's a song that isn't actually that interesting, Gordon simply singing a refrain of "You keep me coming home again," but the music and production of it turns it into a pretty serviceable, not bad rock song.

The Eternal finds Gordon actually creating the best songs with her at the helm since Washing Machine, and it's because she again finds her defiant, childlike, petulant, shrieking, vulnerable core again. Thurston Moore's songs on the record are, almost universally, unnecessary. Not bad per se, but unnecesary. Gordon's songs are necessary. On "Anti-orgasm," she breaks out a bitchy chanting that reminded me of Washing Machine's "Panty Lies," a Gordon classic. On "Sacred Trickster," she (and the band's jangly guitars with her) commands "I want you to levitate me!" with the sort of sexual ferocity she brought to her best tracks 25 (!) years ago. I kid you not, this song could have fit in on 1987's classic Sister except she wasn't as commanding then and didn't know what she wanted to say with the same specificity.

The greatest song on the record, by all accounts even the best song of SY's Block Party set, is its final number "Massage The History," which I think is Gordon singing in a voice she's never broken out before. She sounds old, vulnerable, her voice groaningly low, like a lover before bed, exhausted, singing to a flame, "wishing you were here with me, wishing we could massage the history, the history." I have no idea if it's correct, but in my mind, it's a song to Moore, of longing for the sense of familiarity they share by experiencing the entire Sonic Youth experience together. "You're so close to me" she sings like a long string of moaning in the song's bridge (or, whatever its "middle" should be called), and it's true - she and Moore are like one entity of rock noise and expression.

How did she make a song - and, indeed, a record of songs - full of this much feeling and discovery? The truth is, I've counted her out since 1998. Here is a brief trip back through the history of Kim Gordon songs in Sonic Youth's post-Washing Machine "adult" phase.


2006 Rather Ripped
Gordon sang the album's opener "Reina," and, basically, a couple boppity songs - a love anthem "The Neutral" ("He's not a poet or a mystic... he's just neutral"), and "What A Waste", the most accurately titled song ever at Gordon's helm. Her best number on here is the slow-burning, beautiful "Turquoise Boy," but like the album around it, Gordon on Rather Ripped plays the part of a competent rock professional. Her voice is at her most Neco-esque and straightforward.

2004, Sonic Nurse
"Pattern Recognition" is a strong album opener, but like the Ripped songs, is fairly straighforward. That's true even of wannabe wacky tracks "Dude Ranch Nurse" and "Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream," a giddy love fest for Mariah Carey, its chorus of "Hey hey little baby breakdown." That song is at least fun, but Gordon's squeaky-girl delivery is just a pose to contrast with the material. The truth is, I believed these good times much less than the good times of "Panty Lies" or Goo's "My Friend Goo," which are just as off-kilter, but you believed them. The album's beautiful penultimate number "I Love You, Golden Blue" is one of the best SY songs of this decade, but is as close as SY has ever come to a slow dance.

2002, Murray Street
I do believe Murray Street to be the great album of Sonic Youth's "adult," post-1995 phase - it's warm and happy, and you feel happy for them for being in a place to produce it. The Gordon songs are good - "Plastic Sun" is bitchy and loud, and "Sympathy For The Strawberry," at 8 minutes, is a build to be proud of. Still, are they as good as Gordon as her most unhinged? I can't say they are.

2000, NYC Ghosts and Flowers
NYC Ghosts and Flowers is perhaps the most underrated of all of Youth's albums ever - immediately dismissed by most, it's the last of their conceptually driven records, each of Moore and Gordon and Ranaldo's tracks aligned on the same notion of regret, mystery, ghostliness. The album is the most claningly abstract of the Sonic Youth recordings that aren't labeled SYR, but Ghosts and Flowers is mournful and haunting. Gordon has one No Wave ramble, "Lightning," that I never listen to. There's "Side2side" which is sorta neat, but is mostly a joke. Her real contribution (it's a short album) is "Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)," which is at its core the heart of the record - dismissive of her, if not the entire alternative movement (it is titled Nevermind, after all). I love it, but in its petulant half-growl, I'll just say I believe her more now.

1998, A Thousand Leaves
And this is where we lost her. A Thousand Leaves is the first Sonic Youth record to fail at its intentions and ushered in this modern, half-way there era of who they are. Lee Ranaldo's songs are extraordinary on the record, Moore's are solid, but from a different, melodic planet. The song "Hits of Sunshine (For Allen Ginsburg)" hints at who they are now - it's an 11 minute ode to a poet. Now Sonic Youth had become elder statesmen of the fine art community, so, they sing about fine art. Gordon to me on this record lost her mind, and not in an appealing way. "French Tickler" and "Female Mechanic Now on Duty" molest her themes of female subjugation and start to verge on caricature. "Female Mechanic" especially sounds to me like Gordon trying to call a do-over on "Washing Machine," arguably her greatest song, ne, work of art. The album begins and ends with more noise rambles - "Contre Le Sexisme" and "Heather, Angel." But mostly, the curious element is "The Ineffable Me," full of shrieks and spoken word and outre "shock" cussing: "A cushy job/ a pussy's job/ a cumjunkie's job/ makes my dick throb." Gordon has always pushed the sexual nature of her songs, and that's fine, but this seems like either a climax of all of her work, or producing those elements that borders on tedium. In Washing Machine, their previous record and last great work, Gordon's songs climaxed in "Little Trouble Girl," a song of sexual vulnerability (its teenage character finds herself pregnant), and you imagined leaving the teen of Gordon's subconscious lost and wandering to adulthood.

What was there, then, to make of "The Ineffable Me" (maybe it can take the best-titled song award from "What A Waste")? In a way, that song, pushing Gordon's approach so far forward made her lose it. Her songs are for the most part, until The Eternal, seviceable, good songs by a good person and a talented artist. Sonic Youth has always managed to be an incredibly stable band living incredibly stable lives (Moore and Gordon have been married for 25 years!), perhaps because they get their noise and confusion out through their music. Yet "The Ineffable Me" was too noisy and too confusing, too ineffable, and ultimately, too untrue. It's not until "Massage The History" that I truly glimpsed the Gordon that was left behind at the end of Washing Machine, and I marvelled at how truthfully she grew up into an adult.

Pictured: Gordon, and my head from our spot above the Block Party on Pike, Gordon sorta visible in the Silver Lamme thing in the middle of the stage.

Death waltz

I sat down to write about the songs that help me cope with loss, but I knew that would be a piece that would never mean very much to me. My father died two weeks ago today as I write this, a Monday, and the week that followed would be a difficult one. However, it's not as though a calm, unencumbered life was occurring before. My father was sick for 19 months, and this year, my father's "bad" times during treatment for his colon cancer were worse. Sometimes he'd need morphine and wouldn't be able to speak or interact much, except for the rare protestation to something, a sad muffled response to let you know he was still around, still processing everything he saw before him.

But maybe I'll go back a little bit further. I love music. I spend so much of my energy writing about music, trying recapture the experience of feeling, truly feeling, a great line, or chorus, or guitar part. I never thought that my obsession was anything out of the ordinary until I met people who were surprised and impressed with my own musical knowledge, but then again, I grew up in a house with my father and my older brothers, whose reaction to music was similar to my own. My oldest brother Josh, 7 years older than me, was my first example of listening - to awful, awful music. It was 1989, he was a fan of Janet Jackson and Tears for Fears and most of all Madonna, as were the vast majority of teenagers at the time. Then, my Dad, as he would until his death, listened to Bob Dylan and the Band and Van Morrison, artists we made fun of him for. So far, this is the same story of any children born to parents who, in their teenage years, found a promise and release in that sort of music as it was released. We will never know what it was like to live in a time when this music was the new music of the time.

When I went to college in 2000, my music taste was different from my father's, and then somewhere down the line, it got a little bit closer. I owned many Bob Dylan albums, more than anyone else I know, but less than my father. I have a fondness for the Band and Van Morrison without the same unconditional love and awe of everything they touched. Again, this is not especially the point.

In March of this year, I think, or maybe April, or maybe February, I was home, and my father was not doing well. I was there for a weekend and our interactions were almost all from his bedside. He was in bed most of the day, but would get up on occasion - to shower, to change into pajama pants, to do things that sufferers of colon cancer must do on a daily basis that they too will ask their children to leave the room for. Knowing what he went through at the end, this was actually a relatively functional time for my father.

But there was something else he'd get up to do - put on a cd. Other people might argue with the logic of putting your stereo on the other side of the room when you were sick, I certainly would have mine near me, but Dad wanted to get up to flip through his cd's and pick one. This day, it was The Healing Game, a 90's "comeback" cd of sorts by Van Morrison, and I must use comeback in quotation marks because it was an album, basically, for aging fans like my father who continue to pay attention to his career, and this album had a slightly larger fan base that who you would intuitively think that would encompass.

Dad listened to four or five songs from this record, and I recall hearing "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Sometimes We Cry" for years. This day, Dad put on his socks and played those songs as he walked around the room. When you're sick, walking around a room is something you must plan to do, work up to, think about, tell people about, and then finally do. If you do it like my father did, you push yourself to make it last for four or five songs. The final, of course, being "The Healing Game," to which I may always remember him sliding on the carpet, punching into the air, as though mocking Jake LaMotta preparing for a fight in Raging Bull, a movie for which my old video copy sat by a TV. Who knows when the last time Dad watched that movie was, but I know it was likely in his mind - my father's memory is like my own, and some things stay put.

I want to talk about the word "may" for a minute in the preceding paragraph. I may always remember Dad sliding on the carpet, punching the air, an act which had a certain significance to my father, who probably was in the middle of the knowledge that, finally, he will never recover from the illness that ails him. I can say I may always remember this image in this context because I don't listen to that song on my own. I don't even like 90's Van Morrison. The song is not one of the 8700 or so on my iPod, and will not come up on random. I've now mentioned my Dad's love of the song and album to many people and played it at my Uncle's house while we had a reception for my father's funeral. I thought of this many times, and when an association like that is rehearsed enough times, it forms a memory that is difficult to erase. Perhaps I would have forgotten that had he recovered and played the song in other contexts around the house, as he had for years - while cooking, while talking with me over coffee, playing in the background as we planned our day. Because those things won't happen again, and I will likely not play it, the song will not really have the chance to have its context adjusted.

When I was a teenager, I used to attach songs to all of my friends, and even make lists saying which song reminded me of which friend. Julian, my best friend from high school, was "Man On The Moon" by REM, because he loved REM and I helped him get an email address that referenced it. I think. Now, thinking of those page long lists of songs attached to people I have very little relationship with but remember pretty well, I can't think of any others. Though we often talk about the songs we attach to other people, we are typically using songs from our own lives and forcing them into a context they don't usually fit. It is July now, and many stations and music sites will talk about their "songs of the summer," of which, regardless of your taste in music, the first one that will likely pop in your head is a song called "Summertime," be it by Mahalia Jackson or Sublime or Will Smith. They were smart to force that context on you by putting summer in the title.

I once saw a "Summer Songs" list that included "Sherry Darling" by Bruce Springsteen, whose chorus, with a wailing sax behind it, sings "Well there's a hot sun burning on a blacktop." I can get behind this, that's a wonderful, hot night type of song, but again, the context is forced - I'll also enjoy the song and think of hot nights burning on blacktops in February or November. My friends have songs and artists they love, perhaps less than I love the ones I love, but probably very few things will "instantly remind me" of who they are or our memories; those things we force into place because this is the way in culture that we discuss music - as deeply associated with memory and experience.

Music is, of course, deeply associated with memory and experience, but the length of those experiences retaining in our memory is more of a questionable thing. For example, for years, my friends and I had dance parties in the house some of us rented in Boulder. We'd play "What You Waiting For" by Gwen Stefani or "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," or "Roses" by Outkast - a song which prompted a deep breath and fast-as-you-can sing along to its "Well she's got a hottie's body" lightning-speed bridge in the song's center. We'd play many other songs too, but the truth is even when I hear those songs now, I am not, as writers of music would have us believe, transported back to those nights in those living rooms, though I know and remember those times being wonderful. The song is just a song. I do not remember the clothes I wore on those nights either, the food in the kitchen, the hat my friend Dylan wore, and in a way, all those things are equally relevant.

We speak of music and our memories in a way that feeds our narrativization of our lives. We see our experiences as stories, and we feel saddened that we are no longer having dance parties to Outkast's "Roses" or sharing coffee with our fathers while Van Morrison sings in the background. Music can make you feel experiences of some kind while you listen to it, and so much music has moved me, I would hope that is self evident by now. Yet a song is just a song, and portable as it is, a song is easier to carry with us throughout our lives than the people we love and share experiences with, because experiences happen and vanish into collective storytelling. The song, as Robert Plant reminds us, will always remain the same.

So, when my father died, I had some thoughts that came out in tunes that floated around my head. "Thought you should know Daddy died today/ he closed his eyes and he left here at 12:03." This is what Poe sings at the beginning of "Exploration B," on Haunted, a wonderful album she made dealing with the death of her own father. Easy enough for me to recall, but I had no choice on the matter, and I certainly never listened to that record with my own dad, who would have hated the whole thing. I thought of Dionne Warwick singing "A chair is still a chair, even if there's no one sitting there" in "A House Is Not A Home." I don't know why I thought of that line, maybe others have a better idea. For my father's eulogy, I spoke about Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell" and shared a memory of my father speaking to me of that song's meaning. The association I think of when its mournful guitar begins playing is especially sad, but that now perhaps has more to do with writing a eulogy relating to that song. And this forever will not be the case. I played Dylan's "Buckets of Rain" and "Man In The Long Black Coat" too, and I suppose I don't know why either. Again, I feel I had no choice in the matter, this is what I wanted to hear, and you don't argue with a man in my position going through what I was going through, whatever that was.

Songs help you get through life, or they help me get through life, and sometimes you hear a great song and believe it was written to reflect your experience. Maybe it was. Maybe it's nothing like your experience. Maybe it has lyrics you ignore as inapplicable and focus on the lines you cannot get out of your head for reasons you cannot entirely put into words. My Dad is gone, and this was difficult, and the music remains, some that comforts me, some that I will have to keep on my shelf for a while. But a chair is still a chair, even if there's no one sitting there.