Sonic Youth‘s live swansong, coming just in the vinegar strokes of the band’s existence. For whatever sour taste one might have in light of Kim Gordon‘s autobiography (which mentions this show in particular, if I remember rightly), this is a band whose mark on rock music is pretty indelible. And in fact, rarely aped to any great degree.
It’s not quite a ‘greatest hits’ show — they’re way to NYC cool for that — but it’s a whistlestop tour of much of their corpus. It’s almost a shame that this setlist is still part of their release schedule — there’s a few songs from the last studio album The Eternal on here and I’m not convinced those songs would’ve stayed in the roster given a few more years; conversely I’m still convinced that A Thousand Leaves and NYC Ghosts & Flowers, omitted from this selection, were the peak of what we now know to be ‘late’ Sonic Youth.
For posterity, I should say that Sonic Youth were probably my favourite band for a long time; I know their material better than most bands, even if I didn’t keep hold of a copy of Rather Ripped. This setlist isn’t my dream setlist; but also like a lot of SY obsessives, I’d probably be happy with a setlist of “The Diamond Sea”, something off Confusion Is Sex and “Female Mechanic Now on Duty”. I still have a copy of The Silver Sessions, so take that as all the pinch of salt you need. And yeah this album has all the stuff that made SY magical, for my money. There’s the monotonal feminist malice of “Flower” — if it has a melody, it’s in the one-note bassline and bass drum. There’s the living no-wave antiquary which is “Kill Yr Idols” (is there anything more ’80s fanzine than using the contraction “yr”?). Dreamy two-chord drift interspersed with GUITAR MAKE ANGRY NOISE BRRRNNNGNNGNGNGN of “I love Her All The Time”.I don’t know what the popular idea is of Sonic Youth in 2023 — I hope they’re considered as slightly more important to younger people than just “yeah Dad, we get it — New York, 1980s… well done”. There’s so much timbre from the unison strings, and so much harmonic invention from the tunings that it’s really worth keeping them in the canon. And despite Gordon’s admonitions, none of them have done anything properly reprehensible in a way that would make them a 1970s rock band.
Sonic Youth’s legacy, on which the paint’s still drying, doesn’t have to be as the band that got me into experimental music. There’s still plenty here that alludes to their keeping one foot in the pools of proper rock music — “Drunken Butterfly” sounding like L7 almost certainly didn’t at this point — spite by white noise. “Sugar Kane” (also from Dirty) sounding like indie discos since about 1986. There’s a nice listing towards early Sonic Youth, which is nice to hear, closing with a really playful noiseout of “Inhuman” (Confusion Is Sex), which gives the impression perhaps of a full circle. There’s omissions, but as I say, I’d be a shit person to ask to put together a Sonic Youth finale setlist. For posterity, this is a lush collection and if such a person exists who hasn’t heard SY, it’s a neat encapsulation of why, for a lot of us, they were the best band in the world for however long.-Kev Nickells-
