Over the course of 2022, I listened to 365 new-to-me albums. There was no direction, I would google a combination of “best” <genre> “albums of” <decade>, or “most underrated”, or “forgotten,” or something similar. From there I would chase styles and periods I wasn’t very familiar with, ask for recommendations around a theme, or track new album reviews on various sites. It was fun, and I picked up some new favorites, but I don’t really feel like I learned anything. For 2023 I decided to once again shoot for 365 albums, but with a bit more focus: I want to revisit bands that I know and appreciate, primarily from my youth/teenage years, and listen to their entire discography from beginning to end as an adult in my forties.
I decided to start with Sonic Youth.
Sonic Youth is the perfect example of the type of discography I’m looking to revisit. For starters, they have 16 studio albums and 9 EPs spanning three decades. Despite this deep catalog, my version of Sonic Youth’s discography has two albums:
Experimental Jet Set, Thrash, and No Star, herein referred to as EJSTNS
Washing Machine
Additionally, they recorded the following seven songs:
“Teenage Riot”
“Kill yr Idols”
“Kool Thing”
“100%”
“Incinerate”
A cover of “Superstar,” by The Carpenters
“Shaking Hell”
Most of those songs are the closest Sonic Youth gets to hits, except for “Shaking Hell” but I’ll get to why it’s on the list in a little bit.
There’s a practical reason why my exposure to Sonic Youth is so limited, EJSTNS came out during the brief period of my life when rock surpassed hip-hop as my primary music genre. As for why I was drawn to Sonic Youth during this period of my life, the reason comes down to horniness: a pubescent tale as old as time. This horniness was centered around the video for “Bull in the Heather” which I first saw when I was 16. Please watch it if you haven’t seen it yet, or if you have seen it because it’s always worth watching:
I was horny before I turned 16, my figurative and literal attention around this video wasn’t a sexual awakening, but when I saw this video I distinctly remember thinking, girls get horny too? That’s because, for the most part, I was steeped in the horniess of hip-hop. Hip-hop horny, especially in the mid-90s, was centered on one premise: guys get horny, and girls like it. But when I first heard “Bull in the Heather” I had the realization of oh my god, women have needs, and I need to figure them out if I’m ever going to be good at doing something about my hip-hop horny. I needed to know everything about “Bull in the Heather” horny, so I bought the album. I was especially drawn to Kim Gordon’s songs.
During this period I met a girl in my AP Bio class who was wearing a t-shirt with the cover of Sonic Youth’s Dirty. This girl was cute, and I asked her, “So, you like Sonic Youth?” and she responded, “They’re my favorite band,” and I said, “Yeah, I love them,” and I swooned because maybe she was “Bull in the Heather” horny. I remember her telling me that she was going to drop out of school and run away to California with her boyfriend and I all I could think was, “You are so cool.” Women who listened to Sonic Youth were cool and cute and “Bull in the Heather” horny and I had to be a fan of this band.
I bought Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine the day it came out and listened to it over and over again. I saw Sonic Youth headline at Lollapalooza and stared at Kim Gordon the whole time because she was cool and cute and “Bull in the Heather” horny.
And then I mostly got back to hip-hop. I saw Sonic Youth again, about a decade later, at McCarren Pool in Williamsburg with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They played “Shaking Hell” at one point and Kim Gordon was on stage, the wind whipping her dress around, as she screamed, “I’LL TAKE OFF YOUR DRESS! I’LL SHAKE OFF YOUR FLESH!” and I just DROOLED. I was a high schooler discovering “Bull in the Heather” horny all over again except now it was “Shaking Hell” horny, the adult version.
Because of all of this, I’ve always considered Sonic Youth to be an important part of my development and, at times, I’ve told people they were one of my favorite bands. But I never really listened to any albums or songs outside of the ones listed above. But now I have! So let’s get into it.
___________________
Interlude: A Primer On Sonic Youth In Case You Don’t Know The Band But, For Some Reason, You Want To Read This Article. Maybe You’re My Mom.
Sonic Youth is a New York-based noise/no wave/rock band that was active from the early 1980s up to ~2011. Their core make-up since the mid-1980s has been Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo on guitar, Kim Gordon on bass until the late 90s when she transitioned to guitar, and Steve Shelley on drums. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, who were married, took turns singing most of the songs with Lee Ranaldo sprinkled here and there. They have a cult-like following and are a largely celebrated band even though none of their albums were ever certified gold. They’re held close and not for everyone; at least that’s how I like to think about them.
____________________
The Listening
Between January 1st and January 6th I listened to 22 LPs and EPs in this order:
Sonic Youth (EP)
Confusion is Sex (LP)
Kill Yr Idols (EP)
Bad Moon Rising (EP)
Evol (EP)
Sister (LP)
Master-Dik (EP)
The Whitey Album (LP)
Daydream Nation (LP)
Goo (LP)
Dirty (LP)
TV Shit (EP)
EJSTNS (LP)
Washing Machine (LP)
A Thousand Leaves (LP)
NYC Ghosts and Leaves (LP)
In The Fishtank 9 (EP)
Murray Street (LP)
Silver Session for Jason Knuth (EP)
Sonic Nurse (LP)
Rather Ripped (LP)
The Eternal (LP)
I could not get a copy of the following EPs:
Whores Moaning, an EP that was exclusive to Australia and seems to only have songs from Goo so, all good.
Kali Yug Express, an EP that had a limited press of 500 vinyl and was exclusive to France.
Sensational Fix, an EP that came with Sonic Youth’s book of the same name, and which is now out of print and sells for a good chunk of cash.
____________________
The Thoughts
The first thing that becomes apparent when listening to Sonic Youth’s discography is that their sound really changed over the years, and the Sonic Youth I knew from EJSTNS and Washing Machine is not the same Sonic Youth from their first decade. Their early stuff was this perfect marriage of lo-fi, post-punk, no-wave noise rock albums that matured over time. Their first EP, Sonic Youth, sounds more like a Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd album than any other Sonic Youth album. More psychedelic and calm than a bunch of kids who started tuning their guitars against the norm to make them sound like banshees.
At this point, it would be good for me to point out that I’m not a music critic. I just listen to music, a lot of it, and I have opinions that are based entirely on feelings. You see, I haven’t listened to a Syd Barret-era Pink Floyd album in over twenty years. So when I was listening to Sonic Youth and came to the conclusion that this sounded like a Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd album, I went back and listened to short clips of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd songs and said, “Sure, close enough.” I’m not really here to make astute observations about Sonic Youth’s catalog, I’m here to talk about how Sonic Youth makes me feel now compared to when I was a teenager.
Anyway! Confusion is Sex, their first album, is a sloppy noise album, in my opinion. Noise for the sake of noise; more discordant than I’m interested in caring about. The aforementioned “Shaking Hell” remains my favorite song on the album but it’s admittedly from a nostalgic standpoint. Even Bad Moon Rising, their second album, was a bit of a drag to listen to. It all felt unrefined and lost.
And then comes Evol, which introduces something I personally remember falling in love with when I first listened to Sonic Youth (outside of Kim Gordon’s sleepy-flat-horny voice): amazing DRUMS! Evol opens with such a killer hook, and so many of the songs on that album have a driving intensity and that, I feel, is that perfect Sonic Youth sound. A driving, pounding beat that Thurston and Kim and Lee can just riff on, experiment on, lay feedback over. It’s no surprise that this is the album longtime Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley first appeared on, and it is simply wild seeing how much he completed this band.
Everything from this point (1985) through the 90s is just fantastic in its own way. I can understand why the purists are cold on EJSTNS and Washing Machine, they have remarkably different sounds, but since I started there as a teenager I also understand why I like them so much…they have remarkably different sounds.
__________________________
Interlude: A Washing Machine Review from MiL
I was listening to Washing Machine in the kitchen, cleaning some shrimp, when MiL came up from behind like a specter of death, several dirty dishes in hand and a robe hardly fastened, and cheerfully asked what I was listening to. After I jumped and screamed, “JESUS CHRIST,” a reflex that makes my religious MiL flinch a little bit each time, I quietly said, “Sonic Youth.”
“They’re pretty good,” she said.
So there you have it, MiL thinks Washing Machine is “pretty good.” Does her musical taste extend beyond Art Garfunkle and Gregorian Chants? Hardly. Does she tend to like anything Liz and I like because we keep her alive? Probably. Does she actually think Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine is “pretty good?” Of course, she does, because it is.
___________________________
I have nothing interesting to add to the hundreds of thousands of words that have already been written about the Sonic Youth studio albums of this era. Again, I have no formal music training, so I can’t add anything insightful to the discourse. I would like to pause, however, and talk about the EPs and Sonic Youth side project The Whitey Album for a little bit.
Let’s start with the EP Master-Dik. I feel like this is where Thurston Moore The Character started to show up. I never really cared for Thurston Moore The Character, and I know that seems kind of hindsight-being-20/20 considering how he was having affairs and all that, but when I heard his songs on EJSTNS as a teen they felt like they were written in a different universe than Kim Gordon’s songs. Take the lyrics to “Self-Obsessed and Sexxee” as an example:
I remember when you first arrived
Magic marker on your belly button alright, alright
I read what you said you said drop dead oh no, oh no
I need you now 'cause I know you got nowhere to go
They come off as Cool Kid demeaning. Borderline predatory. That kid in high school who acted cooler than everyone and at first you were like, “This kid is cool!” and then he pisses in someone’s locker while screaming, “ANARCHY!” and you’re like, “Oh, he’s just a dick,” and then later you hear he really likes to touch girls’ hair and says ‘bitch’ way too often,but then that Cool Kid turns into an adult and they actually are a little cool, but they use that cool to just treat other people, including their partners, like shit. That’s how a lot of Thurston Moore’s lyrics sound: like Cool Kid starting to become older and actually a little cool, and he knows it, and he’s an asshole.
Anyway, Cool Kid Thurston Moore made his appearance on Master-Dik, in my opinion, which is actually a very cool EP but what should be cool undertones are sometimes cringed overtones and you realize you never want to get into a conversation with Thurston Moore because he’s going to demean you, roll his eyes a lot, or repeat what you said in a dumb voice.
_____________________
Interlude: Diablo Cody Was Right
I can’t talk about Sonic Youth without talking about Juno. In that movie, Jason Bateman is a guy who was once Gen X high school cool, now a suburban husband and soon-to-be dad who loves Sonic Youth and wants to fuck his teenage surrogate mom. Juno was released in 2007, four years before Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon got divorced due to Moore’s extramarital affairs, leading to the end of Sonic Youth.
I liken Jason Bateman’s character to Thurston Moore had Sonic Youth never gotten famous; had they never tuned their guitars differently, had they never gotten further than making a demo before buying buttoned-down shirts and getting office jobs. Just this guy who thinks he’s cooler than he is and thinks his impeccable taste makes him infinitely fuckable. Did Diablo know? Have an inkling? Or does she just understand the Gen X man?
______________________
This Cool-Kidness came to a head on The Whitey Album, an album that is equal parts immeasurably cool and overblown pretentious. Technically, The Whitey Album was made by the band Ciccone Youth, a one-off of Sonic Youth, composed entirely of the members of Sonic Youth plus Mike Watt and J Mascis. Described as a tribute to Madonna (last name Ciccone), but with the feeling of poking fun at Madonna, the first half of the album is the type of avant-gard noise rock you hear at an art installation that involves a lot of televisions showing static and the backhalf is a noise/sludge take on pop music of the 80s. Mike Watt does a cover of Madonna’s “Burning Up,” Thurston Moore does a cover of Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” and Kim Gordon does a cover of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” which sounds like it’s a karaoke version BECAUSE IT WAS DONE IN A KARAOKE BOOTH. Thurston Moore raps on a song called “Tuff Titty Rap!” Kim Gordon then does a rap version of “Making the Nature Scene” from Sonic Youth’s Confusion is Sex. Meanwhile, “MacBeth” and “March of the Ciccone Robots” have some of the most incredible hooks I’ve ever heard. It’s the kind of album a bunch of stoned high schoolers would make except it actually works and it’s good and it’s cool and it’s so infuriating because it shouldn’t work so much that it feels like it doesn’t work even when it does.
Does that make sense? Again, I’m not a music critic.
And then there’s the EP TV Shit which came out months before EJSTNS. Since I know EJSTNS so well I came to the conclusion that TV Shit, a very fun and short noise album done with Yamatsuka Eye, is basically an amuse-bouche for EJSTNS. The themes and overall sound are all there, they essentially let us know what the full album is going to feel like. I don’t know if this was the intention, but this was my read and I like it. I like the idea of a short and chaotic EP serving as a palate setter for an album.
On to A Thousand Leaves! Loved it. It’s a very different Sonic Youth album but, honestly…it’s grown-rock. It’s mature while still holding flashes of Sonic Youth’s noise-rock roots. And it makes sense! Moore and Gordon are parents now, and they’re making Sonic Youth lullabies, and they’re beautiful.
_____________________
Interlude: Wait, What’s Grown Rock?
It’s not a real term, I don’t think. It’s a term I use, though, to describe musicians that come from a countercultural music scene (punk, rap, etc.) but eventually hit a point where they realize they’re in their 40s and need to stop making music about teenager stuff. At that point, they become grown-rock or grown-rap or whatever else. As a 44-year-old, myself, I like to see bands grow up with me and start to develop a sound and dive into themes that continue to create a soundtrack for my life.
____________________
Next up is NYC Ghosts and Flowers, an album that I knew one thing about going into it: It got a 0.0 rating on Pitchfork. I tried to avoid reviews before going into any of these albums so I could develop my own opinion, but only seven albums ever got a 0.0, and that makes those albums known. I decided to play this album while running since running tends to be when I pay the most attention to what I’m listening to; I didn’t want to dismiss it because of preconceived notions.
My opinion of this album can be summed up like this: if A Thousand Leaves was a song of Sonic Youth lullabies, NYC Ghosts and Flowers is the album you want to wake you up and shepherd you through your day. It is an incredibly sweet album. It is introspective and simmering with sadness and a pinch of hope. There’s this one moment on the titular song where Lee Ranaldo pushes out the line, “Familiar with the things you wanted? Able now to take it all in? Making peace with every hole in the story?” and at that moment I felt every time everyone had ever lied to me, and every time I ever lied to someone, and I had to stop running because I was full of loss and forgiveness. Anyone who dismisses this album is, honestly, a heartless monster.
I’ve been peppering a disclaimer in this piece that I’m not a music critic. Maybe music critics should do that, too.
If I had to put a narrative to the remainder of Sonic Youth’s studio albums, I’d say Murray Street felt like a very solid attempt to perfect their grown-rock vibes, Sonic Nurse is when they started to make their smooth descent, Rather Ripped is when they dropped their landing gear, and The Eternal is their inoffensive landing. Nothing about the last three albums feels particularly new for the band, but none of them are bad either. They’re a rehashing of sounds and themes, maybe through their grown-rock lens, and are all perfectly good Sonic Youth albums, making them a lot better than other bands' best albums.
The two EPs I listened to over this period, In The Fishtank 9 and Silver Session for Jason Knuth, felt more like the music the band wanted to make over this period: Avant-guard noisescapes that range from cacophony to beautiful cacophony. In a way, it felt like the studio albums paid the rent, and the EPs nourished their souls.
So…what are my favorite Sonic Youth albums, now that I’ve listened to them all? Hard to say, because my take on Sonic Youth’s discography is that there are five distinct periods. So I’ll pick a favorite from each:
Their pre-cool period, which is just the EP Sonic Youth. One EP…I guess that one’s my favorite.
Their noise-forward period which was Confusion is Sex through Daydream Nation. I can’t deny the fact that The Whitey Album was the one that grabbed me the most. I listened to it three times in a row.
Their rock-forward period, which was Goo through Washing Machine. EJSTNS is still my favorite. There’s nostalgia, but it’s also a unique album in Sonic Youth’s discography. Every song on it is singable! I like singing.
Their grown-rock period, which was A Thousand Leaves through Murray Street. It’s NYC Ghosts and Flowers, you goddamn monsters.
Their “an EP for us, an LP for them” period, which was Sonic Nurse through The Eternal. They all felt the same too me, I don’t think I’m going to spend too much time in this period. Silver Session for Jason Knuth was some good music to fade away to, at least.
This was a fun way to start the new year and I plan on continuing this project. I’m going to tackle the complete discography of Gang Starr/Guru next. I think Depeche Mode, Pearl Jam, Nick Cave, Jay-Z, Flaming Lips, and Tribe Called Quest/Q-Tip/Phife Dog would also make for fun undertakings. And maybe even the complete discography of Wu Tang Clan + spin-offs up to Wu Tang forever. And the Def Jux catalog? We’ll see where it goes.
Until next time, I hope you all get “Bull in the Heather” horny and have some fun.