sonic youth are relativly obscure to the general public, outside of the us at least.
there are certain communities that know them as superstars, but outside of that community, who has heard sonic death or CIS? i could be wrong though. hey they never sold more than a few hundred thousand copies of anything.
my point being obscure is relative. here i am probably considered someone who listenes to a wide variety of music but not ncessarilly obscure. outside of the internet, with people that i hang out with, im the guy that knows everything about music and listens to weird onscure bands like big black or whatever.
hope my point was at least semi coherent

I'm not sure what your point is, they have sold 500,000 copies of daydream and dirty i believe? That's pretty big...

Sonic Youth are a cult band, not an obsure one. They are known in small and big cities.

i read in an interview with thurston that sonic youth's highest selling record is around the 250,000 mark. that was last year though. i don't consider sonic youth obscure, but i think a lot of people only know about them because they are name dropped a lot.

That is wrong.

Not a single sonic youth album has sold GOLD status in US (500 thousand opr more)

EJST&NS and Dirty are their highest sellers, and to this day they have yet to crack the 400 thousand mark.
and that counts people buying the albums several times.

sonic youth in ROCK terms is still underground. They are not obscure.

wolf eyes, animal colective, lightning bolt, etc are OBSCURE as all fuck to much "alternative music fans" and certainly completely UNKnOWN to mainstream music fans.

You are actually right. None of the people I know knew Sonic Youth before they met me

weird, I'm pretty sure I read in entertainment weekly around the time murray street came out that daydream and/or dirty had went gold. I guess thurston would know though.

Perhaps you don't know many people?

daydream nation has yet to crack 300 thousand.

the thing with sonic youth is that maybe 20 times more people have heard of them for the past 28 years than have actually HEARD their music.

I wouldn't call Animal Collective obscure though, they've been on television viewed by millions of people and had feature articles in magazines subscribed to by millions of other people. I like porky's term "cult"...

You could make cases for Lighting Bolt and Wolf Eyes being fairly well-known, but they're not near as big as Animal Collective...

Also, I've said this before, but I must live in the hippest town on earth. Only 40,000 people live here but a good handful of my friends have all discovered stuff as "obscure" as Harry Partch, Cerberus Shoal, Babyland, etc. separately from each other.

And yeah EVERYONE knows Sonic Youth around here and has heard their music...

So, I guess maybe things don't seem as obscure to me because I always hear friends talking about them. One thing, though, is I do live near Bloomington, Indiana which is a popular college town and almost everyone there is a hipster and art lover. Cerberus Shoal actually did play there, that's probably why we all know that amazing band.. but bands as diverse as Genghis Tron, Mong Hang, Xiu Xiu, and Mahjonggg have played there as well. Great, small town.

around that time i doubt daydream nation even came close to gold or 250,000 records. now that spin and other national magazines are naming it one of the best records of our time, it is starting to sell more.

Only the select few like us can appreciate and love the sonic youth SKRONK!!!!

no matter how much I hear wolf eyes, and noise bands and such, confusion is Sex still blows them all away.

COMPLETE INHUMAN!!!!! COMPLETE INHUMAN!!!!

again,. you are speaking from your and our insular world of underground and avant garde music fans. those bands you mention are well known among the very few (maybe 300 thousand out of the BILLIONS of people in the world, if that) people that seek out new music man. That is obscure.

where has animal collective played to milliosn of people on TV?

Dude, I just don't think 300,000 or so listeners would make a band "obscure". "Cult", like I said, is a much better term... using your logic ("billions of people in the world"), everyone but Madonna and Michael Jackson and U2 would be considered obscure.

Animal Collective played on conan o brien last year around october.

Yeah but then they played #1, I think most of the people found that too strange and just forgot them... Because you have heard of a band doesn't say you have heard their music. Animal Collective are well-known inside the underground circle, but I don't think they're known elsewhere.
But then again I speak from France, which is like er, asshole for music. Seriously, we are always 6 month late about hype bands and all, even when they actually come from France: for instance we began to hear about Justice 6 months after the hype began everywhere else in the world

True, I can't speak for anyone but all the people I know Indiana, so who knows.

indiana must be a hot bed for underground artists, because the only people i know that listen to bands you mention live in new york city.

Well, again, I can't speak for any state but my own, but I will say that the people I know in Michigan are into much better music than we are here. Michigan people are really on top of everything...

But then, do we really care about what is obscure or not? I don't think so. We probably all listen to obscure things and well-known things, and that's about it, I think

interesting. i never would've thought the midwest would be that much into underground music. when i think of michigan i think of either techno, negative approach or kid rock.

oh and motown of course.

Yeah, seems there's a huge huge noise scene in Michigan. What's odd to me and what first alerted me to this, over on my scissor shock band page, I get more adds from people in michigan than from anywhere else in the world. Pretty odd...

yeah that is odd. what michigan bands should i check out?

It is just semantics really.

the entire NOISE "scene" is obscure as fuck man.

obscure means away from the limelight, which in the case of animal collective is dead on.

Wolf Eyes are from Michigan or at least Nate Young is, I remember this from a coversation a friend and I had w/ him and Aaron Dilloway when we opened for them back when they were still somewhat obscure for a noise-band (pre-subpop days) god this was in 2002 er something. I remember Nate quoting that he went to the same high school as Andrew WK I think... god my mind is foggy about stuff that happened only 5 years ago?

and since the rise of the internet it doesn't really matter where you live to find out about what underground, cult or obscure band exists almost anywhere as long as you try to search it out you'll almost always find something about what you're looking for on the net these days, there are a few exceptions but as time passes the likelyhood of not finding something about someband becomes less.

I'm pretty sure Animal Collective has been on MTV2 also. I saw a clip from it on youtube a long time ago, it was just a little interview, some kind of "artists you need to watch" segment. I definitely see Animal collective becoming a pretty mainstream band eventually.

And yeah, Andrew W.K. was in Wolf Eyes for a while actually, scott.

I'm sorry to repeat myself - I hate it when other people do it to me - but I still can't see what the problem is when a very well known organ of information relating to music covers a band that are not very well know but very well-liked by a minority of people. If you're criticising the quality of that coverage - fine, but I don't believe that a few innacuracies or ommisions really make that much of a difference.

You're right insofar as lots of people round here know SCG, but if it weren't for a handful or articles on much less 'obscure' groups in Melody Maker/ NME when I was a teenager, I wouldn't have picked up on a lot of the stuff I did.

Last.fm is just another manifestation of 'how to reach out to people who haven't heard 'good' stuff'. You can invoke qualitative differences (and let's let it be known here - I don't follow Pitchfork, neither do I use last.fm) but the bottom line, for me, is that regardless of how people get information about 'good' music, the fact that it's out there is a good thing.

I think you're a similar age to me, so I'm surprised by your attitude. I wasn't a teenager that long ago, but the internet was by no means a going concern for disseminating musical information when I was a teenager, and the possibility of me coming across a band like Wolf Eyes (let along SCG) was miniscule given the options available to me (John Peel/ The Evening Session/ NME and the like). Sure the ability for people to find out about 'good' (but not well known) music, however blithely it's done, is a good thing?

Regarding the obscure thing - I live in a city now; there's a healthy amount of people around who know about 'not widely known' music. When I was growing up in a village on the outskirts of no-wheresville, Somerset, there was absolutely no-one around me who was even that aware of Blur, let alone something like Sonic Youth.

They got great coverage for Strawberry Jam, but I don't think they're going to go mainstream, the new songs they're playing live sound less pop than Strawberry Jam, it seems like they're going back to Feels. I've read lots of live reports by people that only knew Strawberry Jam and were super disapointed because they only played those new songs and they thought it was chaotic and noisy. I don't think those songs are chaotic and noisy at all, but still they're not pop neither, I think.

HAHA i remember reading this article awhile back and thinking WTF?!?!?! like the obvious questions come to mind as how does one rate the existence of music on a scale? so what defines a 10? how do achieve a rating of 10? and how does Pitchfork know what a 6.8/10 means on the whole progressive history of music??? music is ongoing and not "definite" it hasn't ceased so how can they rate it on a scale??? they aren't just rating an album on its own merits, that is different, they are rating the history?!?!? huh???

this is just one example of how pitchfork's credibitility is truly called into question and shows how ridiculus and foolish and to a degree how pompous snobs they can be about music, i mean exactly again WTF?!?!? so in this case who died made them "god of music"...

yeah i knew that, just saying...not everyone probably knows that still.

Well, I guess I'll repeat myself again too.. I don't see the point in their coverage when it's focused on some simple reissues.. if someone doesn't know the sun city girls but reads this Pitchfork article giving bad/mediocre scores to some reissues, they probably won't bother checking the band out. However, there was a just-released singles collection last month that is pretty much perfect, a "9.5/10" by pitchfork standards perhaps but pitchfork didn't even bother mentioning it... I was questioning moreso why they bothered covering some old dusty reissues rather than a brand spankin' new collection of hits. So, again, why bother covering them at all if you're going to be half-assed about it? It just seems silly. I wasn't trying to make some important statement or anything, just noting the humor of the situation.

Anyway, regarding last.fm and completely off-topic here, I just started using that site a couple of months ago, and I don't really use it like most people do (I don't "scrobble"), but I reccomend everyone go to that site if they're interested in hearing new music. I just go around and search for similiar artists to bands I like. I've found so many amazing bands on there in the past 3 months that it's mindboggling.

Last.FM rules, period.

other people suck. fuck their fucking opinions.

when i think of michigan i think of the mc5, the stooges, and half japanese

I used to quite often buy albums because the reviewer entirely hated them. I remember buying a Stereolab album on the basis of a 0/10 review. Ok, pointless argument, you have your opinion, I have mine, one of those opinions is entirely right, but let's not argue over who that is [me].

the Onion is FAKE NEWS, satire.

how could i forget mc5 or the stooges! i don't know what i was thinking. i thought half japanese were from maryland.

I love how the east coast media created the idea that michigan is MIDWEST. Ridiculous stupid shit (completely off topic I know). from michigan to maine is just the eastern THIRD of the USA, with massive vast stretche of continent to the west. Midwest is a stupid term and I hate it and I wish it would disappear from our lexicon.

there is nothing west about any state east of texas, much less, midwest.

just another pointless rant by me

funny you mention wolf eyes, they are playing here in two weeks, they are playing a venue that's hosting cat power and coheed and cambria later on and has hosted stuff tones of fusion jazz and stuff. in short, it's a huge place.

that they brought wolf eyes to this venue means that they must expect to fill it. and to clarify, i have never seen a wolf eyes cd on a record store here, nor have a seen them mentioned in a national magazine or anything; in fact, i might know personally 20 people who know them, but then again, i don't know everybody who listens to sonic youth in mexico.

yes, but the noise scene in michigan is one of the worst in the world, completely insular, very much driven by ego and nepotistic as fuck...some guy drops in to a sick llama gig and smoke dope with lambsbread and all of a sudden you see his releases talked by everybody and getting glowing reviews in scenes...and why? because he is from michigan and hang out with wolf fucking eyes.

like this dude here who makes hundreds of dollars by buying every american tapes/hanson/gods of tundra/aryan asshole/fag tapes release that comes out and then waits for a couple of months to sell it on ebay to people he knows alreaady have said releases. i wish i was making stuff up.

this is the fucking most pointless arguement i have ever seen. "obscure" means rare, or relativley unknown. if an ablum is sold at something like, i duno, srawtberries records, it aint fucking obscure! bands on major labels are not fuckin obscure! bands who play at lollapooloozaaaaa at fucking obscure!

like I previously stated, it all depends upon your frame of reference.