[silverfreepress (sdasher)]

Sonic Youth Interview

by Matthew Fritch


Call it optimism, but it feels like a new day is dawning on Daydream Nation. This is not to say Sonic Youth’s avant-rock province ever felt hopelessly dire or divided against itself; but the Jim O’Rourke era—during which instruments were stolen (1999) and a studio destroyed on 9/11 (resulting in 2002’s Murray Street)—lacked a certain teenage excitement that even iconic, 25-year-old bands need to survive. That electric charge arrives with a surge on the new Rather Ripped (Geffen), in the form of opening tracks “Reena” and “Incinerate.” The former song might be the most accessible Kim Gordon-sung track ever, and it nimbly plants a concise, Sister-era 16th-note riff breakdown in the middle. Meanwhile, “Incinerate” firmly nets the pop hooks—on both guitar and vocals—that Thurston Moore usually short-arms. Imagine “Teenage Riot” as performed by Brighten The Corners-era Pavement, and you’re close. But so what if a Sonic Youth album gets off on a hot foot? Go ahead and speculate that it has to do with SY being a four-piece again (O’Rourke does like to experiment), or that it’s the band’s bid to sell a few more records. More important, the rest of Rather Ripped turns out to be filled with delicate, pretty—some would say pretty tame—songs devoid of squall and doused in mellow melody. Even if Sonic Youth is reaching out a little by being conventional, it’s still nice to be invited in.

MAGNET called Moore at his Northampton, Mass., home to discuss the surprising source of Rather Ripped.

The way Rather Ripped begins, it’s very catchy, very inviting. Was that intentional? I mean, “Incinerate” and “Reena” are summer jams.
Yeah, I guess we were kind of going for a summer-jam vibe. The band got into a kind of a new old head. Because Jim O’Rourke left the band, and all of a sudden we were a four-piece again, kind of O.G. style. But it was different because we hadn’t been that way in a while. It was a new thing for us, in a sense. It wasn’t, “Well, this is depressing—we have to return to our old thing.” Because we’d felt so reinvigorated with Jim. He added a certain significant step for us as a band. So we felt like it was a progressive move rather than a regressive one. I think the record has consciously less of a typical dark and twisty vibe that the last few records have.

I’m not suggesting that Sonic Youth has ever pandered to its audience. I think you’re above the law on that count.
[Laughs] I suppose, but we consciously did want to make more of a rock ‘n’ roll record. We asked John Agnello to mix it for us. He’s somebody we never worked with but we asked around because we were at a loss as far as [producers] were concerned. Having Jim in the band gave us access to a vanguard producer in the band. So there was never any question who we were gonna work with because we already had one of the best. So we took the advice of J Mascis, who lives near us up here in Western Massachusetts.

Well, John did the Witch (group featuring Mascis and members of Feathers) record, right?
Yeah. It’s funny. Actually, some of these songs were taken from these short little cues I made for TV commercials. I got a gig early last year to do some TV commercial cues for HSBC bank. I think they used one or two.

Like, little instrumental passages?
Right, like 10-second pieces. So I have this whole grab bag of sonic riffs and I did these miniature jams, really concise. For the TV commercials, they said, “We want something that’s like ‘Kool Thing,’” you know? I think that’s what was being used in the temp track for the images they were using. I could write “Kool Thing” all day and every day, but I choose not to. [Laughs] But I really liked making all these miniatures. I thought maybe we should make a whole record of these 10-second songs, that’d be awesome.

So did these miniatures turn into songs on Rather Ripped?
Some of them were riffs that I fleshed out into songs. I would bring them into rehearsal and the band would develop them into songs. That’s the genesis, certainly, of the first song, “Reena.”

So this really is your commercial record.
It really is [laughs]. But we did have this vibe where we felt like we wanted to make a record that had some kind of hopeful and positive vibe to it. I mean, not every song is an accessible jam, but it does come out of the gate with some boogie.

I can’t resist asking you about the lyrics on the last song on the record, “Or.” (“The plan is to go to D.C. and hang out,” sing-speaks Moore. “Go see girls rock … What comes first?/The music or the words?”)
That was a song I’d been doing at solo gigs. The words were taken from a collection of poetry I’d published—I’ve done a few books of writing. The last one I did was called Nice War. They’re self-published books; I sell them on tour and on the Ecstatic Peace Web site. But that was a poem that I didn’t rearrange at all. I wanted to recite these words not as a spoken-word reader but as a singer. I mean, that’s the total Patti Smith inspiration from back in ’77.

Or even a Jim Morrison thing, if you can forgive me for saying that.
Well, Patti comes out of Jim in a way—she idolized him. Jim Morrison is a little scarier to me because it’s more acid visions in a college bungalow. [Laughs] I’m more into Patti Smith hanging out in the Bowery than that. But the lyrics to “Or” … I’d helped put together this concert in Washington, D.C., on the second Bush Jr. inauguration day a couple years ago. I gathered all these outside noise groups together, like Nautical Almanac, Hair Police, Chris Corsano and Paul Flaherty and To Live And Shave In LA. Kim (Gordon) and I played in a duo we do sometimes called Mirror/Dash. So we did a concert at the Black Cat and we called it Noise Against Fascism. We weren’t up there doing any political proselytizing, it was just a gesture of community.

Just making some noise.
So those lyrics kind of reflect on going down to D.C. and talking about seeing girls rock. That refers to activism. I think of women as natural anarchists and activists—certainly the ones I know. I live in a very feminist household, so I tend to have an appreciation of such.

Speaking of D.C., the Library of Congress added Daydream Nation to its registry. How’s that feel?
It feels a little weird. It really happened all of a sudden. We got some e-mails about it, asking if we could come down to the induction. And we couldn’t, because we were rehearsing for some gigs overseas. It’s an award. It’s always an honor to get an award, unless it’s some kind of turkey. [Laughs]

Well, it’s you and Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis.
I know Nirvana is already in the registry. We have the same management company as Nirvana, and I remember asking them about it: “Is this serious? Is this some kind of event we need to go down and deal with?” But they don’t even give you a plaque. [Laughs]

But you’re in the card catalog now.
[Laughs] As an archivist, that’s totally cool with me.