How were you introduced to Sonic Youth?
 

Back in 86 or 87 I was a huge Stooges fan. I listened to Iggy all the time. I was splitting my time between two groups of friends. One was the Lower East Side and Queens hardcore punk scenes and the other was a group of gothy friends.

My friend Giovanna looked like she really rode the line between the scenes. She wore pointy women's Doc Martins and dressed all in black. She always wore red eyeshadow that gave her kind of a sickly, sexy, appearance. I was driving her in my beat up Grey Ford Granada and popped in an 8-track that I recorded of the Stooges and she had this look that she used to get when she was passionate about something. "Frank, you HAVE to check out Sonic Youth!" she continued "They make the most amazing music and if you love the Stooges you're definitely going to love them."

and I did.

I checked them out after seeing them on The Simpsons when I was 12 or 13. I knew I had something special then.

The year was 1986-87. I was 13-14, at a friend's parent's house. I picked up an issue of People magazine. In it was a review of sister.
it said that the band was the aural equivalent of spending time in an automobile wrecking yard.
The pic looked like 4 serial killers, not like "rock stars"
I bought daydream nation when it came out, based solely on that. I knew no one that listened to them

saw the sugar kane video on TV in 93

Was convinced by reviews of music i was into at the time that i should have a go. Bought Daydream Nation. Wasnt hugely amazed. Bought Evol and Confusion is Sex. Was.

Heard them on John Peel, ATL-era. I'd read articles and thought they sounded like a good idea, but took a while to hear any actual music.

Reading magazines around the time of Evol.

someone lent me sonic death sometime around 91/92 and that was that.

Bought "Sister" in 1987, haven't looked back since (except for all the times when I have).

cufs and sleves

then it was butons and clis

i saw them on letterman playing bull in the heather. i saw thurston moore on 120 minutes interviewing beck and mike d and then i read something abut them also, so i decided to order daydream nation for free from columbia house. i quickly had to buy a bunch of their stuff so i already had like 8 of their cds in less than a six month time period.

growing up with the radio in the early 90's was impossible to escape "kool thing"; it was also impossible to flip through spin and not see them mentioned every three sentences as the kings of kool and how kool they are and how great musicians they are because they are kooler than you. i hated "kool thing".

years later, while getting into at the drive-in, jesus lizard, drive like jehu, jimmy eat world, mineral, etc. i would see sy's name being tossed around by band members and the press to describe the skronky, noisy moments. checked out "teenage riot" and "schizophrenia" and thought they were like r.e.m. only slightly better.

afterwards, i saw a clip from later with jools holland of the band playing "sugar kane"; i pretty much watched it like 20 times in a row trying to figure out if it was the same band and getting my mind blown for every time i kept rewatching it. not long after, i bought dirty.

the radio. i was newly arrived to amerikkka in the early 90s and i heard kool thing in WHFS (said station no longer exists). while everything else in that "alternative' radio was fun yet forgettable, kim's horny voice struck a chord deep in my soul. so i found out the name of the band, went to the record store, and picked up a copy of whatever they had-- EVOL-- which blew my mind. EVOL has been my favorite youf record ever since.

Sugar Kane on MTV when Dirty came out. It was love at first sight.

87...friend had Daydream Nation on tape.

Providence spoke to me, deeply.

I had a friend who was in to them when I was in high school, and I'd heard that Kurt Cobain really liked them. We were in a really shitty punk band. I went to Hastings and found the 100% cd single. "Genetic" is still my favorite SY song.

you may be floatzing there but, seriously, the first time i listened to daydream, "providence" was the only track i liked.

totally not floatzing.

if mammary serves me, I thought that some of the songs were too long. [tonguesmilie:emote]

at that time, most of my favorite songs clocked in at under a minute...

I was young and foolish then. these days, the diamond sea isn't long enough.

i used to be like that, hated the long songs.

when i first heard ddn, i was already very familiar with sy but a) the remixing/remastering on my dgc cd copy was awful, very slick and samey and b) most of the songs don't seem to be songs but jamming with attempts at songwriting on top of it, with the jamming not deciding whether they still want to be atonal noise explorers or rocking out without the "rock".

my.
next.
band.
name.

I kept reading about Daydream Nation in various "Top 100 Albums Ever" style lists, so I checked it out, and here I am.

My oldest sister liked a bunch of that stuff. When she was in her mid-late 20's she moved back in for maybe 6 months and tought me about music, me being 16 or 17 and my favorite bands being Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, the Who, The Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix.

I remember hearing/seeing 100% on MTV at the age of about 5-6.

Fast-forward a decade.
I bought DDN on a whim after hearing the name being thrown around by people with similar musical tastes, but much more into AC/DC than Pixies. They found it "too noisey" and "weird". That was enough for me.

I was reading articles on Kurt Cobain(NFC), and a lot of those articles he spoke how SY influenced him, and getting Nirvana a record label. So I check out 100% online, it was on the old board. That was in high school.

SY entered my life when I thought there was more to music than what was on the mainstream.

I went from being into the whole metal thing in the late 80s (The reason I started playing guitar was because of Guns'n'Roses' "Sweet Child O'Mine") to wanting to expand my musical tastes in the early 90s.

I wasn't really into the Indie scene as such - but I knew a few people who weren't into the whole mainstream scene and liked stuff like the Ramones, Mudhoney and Dinosaur Jr.

I kept seeing these bands on Rage which is an Aussie late nite music video show with no hosts, no advertisments and just music. Every now and again, I'd see the same two Sonic Youth clips - 'Kool Thing' and '100%' and I thought, I'd like to have those songs in my collection.

As it turned out, they were on different albums so I got 'Goo' and 'Dirty' on the same day. My friend told me to check out 'Daydream Nation' because that's what his mate reckoned was their best album. Apparently, this mate of his got into the band when they first started and had every album on vinyl including the very first EP.

The more stuff I got, the more I got into them. I suppose I love the fact that they're so multi-demensional. They're super neat!

I was in my Freshman year of high school and my brother came back from his first year at UCLA with a bunch of indie rock "essential" albums. One being Daydream Nation. Little while later, I took a summer job and Daydream Nation became pretty much the only thing I would listen to plus Loveless and Without A Sound.

Wake up to Teen Age Riot, driving to work at 4:30am to The Sprawl, Cross The Breeze, Eric's Trip, and Providence, then drive home in the blistering So Cal heat at 3pm with Candle and the Trilogy songs on full volume. Great times. Since then, I've been looking into them.

Did you sign up for the message board? If so, what was your username? I've been on the NFC board for years.

I never signed on to that board.

i first heard them when i was a scruffy pot head skateboarder hardcore kid obsessed by the bad brains and nwa. i was watching the toy machine video "welcome to hell" (a classic) and there was a sonic youth song (cant remember which one) used as the music for ed templeton's part. i was a huge nirvana fan too, and i remember reading about kurt and him talkin about them, so i then bough daydream nation and fell in love.

sonic youth is such a great "gateway band" too, because they play so many styles of underground music and namecheck so many great bands. i probably would have never gotten into no wave or noise if it wasnt for thurston talking about mars and whitehouse.

I heard the 100% music video about 1000 years ago, and thought it was awesome. Just a bassline, drums, and this weird guitar noise that wasn't really playing any notes but still sounded super kool. But, I never really was able to buy a lot of music until recently, so I stuck to things I knew... But I found about 5 sonic youth tapes at Value Village (thrift store) for a buck each a couple years ago. Of course, I bought them all, being such a value, and knowing they were supposedly huge icons of the '90s who were more on the noisy Nirvana-y end of the Grunge spectrum than the Soundgardeny end... and I've been hooked ever since!

Dirty was prob my fav album.

I was browsing OiNK and saw their name come up, remembered hearing their name a few times before and arbitrarily decided to download Goo.

Someone gave me an indie compilation with Saucer-Like ( 1998, or something like that). I immediately loved this band. It was the best song of this compilation.

I heard them first when my sister brought home Dirty back when I was about 11 years old when it first came out. She heard of them through a music review of new albums in Waves magazine which is a surf magazine (she used to surf back then). We didn't know anyone else that liked them but I just remember thinking the music was awesome and so different to anything I had heard.

Read about them and a friend shortly after lent me ''Daydream Nation''. I can still remember how good it was spinning it for the first time.

My uncle was a huge fan
When I was a kid, he'd give me cds/cassettes for christmas and my birthdays

On my 11th birthday, he gave me Daydream Nation.

that is the description of EJST&NS!


Daydream nation is GOD!!!!!

pot head

I played Bad Moon Rising to death after I got into SY. The stooges snippets made me smile.

I love the endless loop at the end of EVOL.

When Daydram Nation finally hit it was weird. I got to hear them perform it live at Maxwell's in Hoboken before the album came out.
After everything else they'd put out it sounded like a really good pop album. I played it to death...and I still have my original CD.

It was around 1999 or so ... I saw some Sonic Youth special on German TV and all those songs (I remember a lot of these weird Goo videos being played there) totally blew my brains out. The next day I rushed to the store and bought Washing Machine, which made me listen in a complete amazement, like what the fuck is that?, but with every other I spin I got deeper and deeper and deeper. And the next day after I went to the store, bought Dirty and Evol and there I was. Trapped.

i had heard of the name Sonic Youth before 96, cause i knew of the name when they appeared on Homerpalooza, just not sure how i knew that

i didn't start to get into them until about 2000 after watching some thing on tv that featured them on a rock list and clips of their vids and song