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.
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