Sonic Youth Quotes

Pearl Jam is a band I have a lot of respect for. Nirvana and Sonic Youth I feel the same way about. Mumford & Sons, My Morning Jacket, Wilco, Givers, and Foo Fighters are just some of my favorites. I respect bands that give me something of themselves that I can feel. ("Posing" bands turn me off generally speaking.) It all has to do with a feeling I have about them. That is what music is to me, a feeling. It's similar with people too.

I can appreciate that,” says Henry. He’s adding to the list. I look over his shoulder. Sex Pistols, the Clash, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, X, the Mekons, the Raincoats, the Dead Boys, New Order, the Smiths, Lora Logic, the Au Pairs, Big Black, Pil, the Pixies, the Breeders, Sonic Youth… Henry, they’re not going to be able to get any of that up here.” He nods, and jots the phone number and address for Vintage Vinyl at the bottom of the sheet. “You do have a record player, right?” My parents have one,” Bobby says. Henry winces. What do you really like?” I ask Jodie. I feel as though she’s fallen out of the conversation during the male bonding ritual Henry and Bobby are conducting. Prince,” she admits. Henry and I let out a big Whoo! And I start singing “1999” as loud as I can, and Henry jumps up and we’re doing a bump and grind across the kitchen. Laura hears us and runs off to put the actual record on and just like that, it’s a dance party.

[...] to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.

The first one hundred pages were fueled by early Misfits (“Where Eagles Dare [fast version],” “Horror Business,” “Hybrid Moments”) and Blanck Mass (“Dead Format”). David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.

In England, people had been loudly proclaiming the death of the guitar and the birth of the synthesizer, but Sonic Youth and other American guitar bands started to create a buzz.

David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.

I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things - a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace.

Hardcore groups were singing songs about Ronald Reagan. I wasn't interested in this and preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture. I suppose you could say that Sonic Youth was always trying to defy people's expectations.

Gainesville, FL was soft on teen shoplifters in the 90s. The police were rarely involved. But you got banned from the store. This divided friend groups. Some had to wait outside. They would be beside every record store. Caught with a Sonic Youth CD down their shirt. Waiting. I'd join them. Not because I was banned. I just liked flirting with the Bad Girls.

A fantastic Riot Boy, Trash the Senses.. -Thurston Moore

Advice. Who’s the coolest, toughest, hottest rocker girl you can think of?” “Debbie Harry,” Mom said. “Tha—” “Not finished,” Mom interrupted. “You can’t ask me to pick only one. That’s so Sophie’s Choice. Kathleen Hanna. Patti Smith. Joan Jett. Courtney Love, in her demented destructionist way. Lucinda Williams, even though she’s country she’s tough as nails. Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth, pushing fifty and still at it. That Cat Power woman. Joan Armatrading.

There had been an attempt over the summer to mix that Camden Lock lot with this Caldwell lot, but Keisha Blake did not especially care for Baudelaire or Bukowski or Nick Drake or Sonic Youth or Joy Division or boys who looked like girls or vice versa or Anne Rice or William Burroughs of Kafka's Metamorphosis or CND or Glastonbury or the Situationists or Breathless or Samuel Beckett or Andy Warhol or a million other Camden things, and when Keisha brought a wondrous Monie Love 7-inch to play on Leah's hi-fi there was something awful in the way Leah blushed and conceded it was probably OK to dance to. They had only Prince left, and he was wearing thin.

El problema no era su trabajo, que me parecía magnífico, sino su gusto musical. (...) Del walkman salía a todo volumen una música horrenda de cualquiera de esos grupos que los veinteañeros suelen escuchar. Mientras que pudiera probarse científicamente que su música era inferior a lo que escuchábamos los de mi generación, todo estaba bien (...) Sonic Youth durante horas, y, de repente, el Beethoven tardío. Después, Grand Ole Opry, catos gregrorianos, Shostakovich, John Coltrane. (...) Estaba dedicándose a gastarse los primeros cheques de su vida en una exploración metódica de nuevos tipos de música, escuchándolos con atención, formándose distintas opiniones sobre ellos, odiando algunos y disfrutando de todo el proceso. Era así en todos los demás aspectos de su vida. Tenía barba y pelo medio largo, y un día sin ningún miramiento, se lo afeitó todo y apareció calvo: "Pensé que sería interesante probar este aspecto algún tiempo, ver si la forma en la que la gente interactúa conmigo cambia". Era irritante lo abierto que estaba a todo y lo dispuesto a probar cualquier novedad; además, era deprimente porque me hacía darme cuenta de mi propia cerrazón mental.

a mass spiritual purification campaign, these youths were raised on a diet of propaganda broadcast via loudspeakers from sunup to sundown in schools, factories and villages. The cacophony of today’s square dancing is a sonic memory bridge to an idealized past, according to Song Jiahong, a humanities professor at Yunnan University. “The intimate memories of the loudspeakers are

When people ask me what L.A. was like in the sixties, I tell them there wasn't as much terrible stucco as there is today: no mini malls with their approximation of Spanish two-story buildings, no oversized SUVs bulging out of parking-space lines. What used to say "Spanish-style" is now something diseased looking. Nobody seems to know how to stucco anymore.

People realized there was a way to do it in a very underground, low-key way that still counted and was still important,” says Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. “People got this idea that ultimately what mattered was the quality of what you were doing and how much importance you gave to it, regardless of how widespread it became or how many records it sold.

Sonic Youth recognized two things: One, that without substantial radio airplay, press was the main promotional outlet for underground bands, and two, that underground music fans paid particular attention to music criticism.

The members of Sonic Youth realized that “a life involving music” depended on cooperation—if bands worked for each other, everybody would benefit.

Like Dick, Sonic Youth found beauty and genuineness in the messed-up and broken

One night I had been listening to [Goo], downstairs with Espen, we had been smoking hash, and I was lost in the music, literally, I saw it as rooms and corridors, floors and walls, ditches and slopes, small forests between apartment blocks and railway lines, and didn't emerge from it until the song stopped, it was like drawing breath because the next minute a new song started and I was caught again.

I've never been good with structure—doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I'm supposed to do.

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries, because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.

A very tall bearded guy was standing in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. “Hey”, he said. “Hi,” I said. “Excuse me, do you rehearse here?” “Yeah,” he said, extending his hand and saying, almost formally, “Gibby Haynes. I’m in the Butthole Surfers.” I shook his hand. “Moby,” I said. “I just moved upstairs.” “Are you an artist?” “No, a musician.” “Oh, cool. Welcome to the building.” “Do you know who else has spaces here?” I asked. “Well, there’s us and Iggy and Sonic Youth and Helmet and Sean Lennon and the Beastie Boys and some other people,” he said as someone behind him started making a wall of feedback.

It’s as if Sonic Youth has gone back to the very beginnings of the process by which the world reveals itself as something other than its advertisement, as if the band has discovered the most marginal no,” Marcus wrote. “The power of Sonic Youth’s no will be negligible; few will hear this music. That the spirit of the act is still at work may not be.

says Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. “People got this idea that ultimately what mattered was the quality of what you were doing and how much importance you gave to it, regardless of how widespread it became or how many records it sold.

Relationships are currency, something Sonic Youth had picked up on not only from the art world but from the camaraderie of the SST bands.