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Originally Posted by Cantankerous
that made me laugh
the beatles kick ass
so if sonic youth are the beatles..who's the stones?
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Well, back when SY kept claiming they would be recording a cover of the White Album from beginning to end, Pussy Galore beat them to the punch by recording all of Exile On Main Street. So in the world of the "pig-fuckers", there was your Beatles and Stones.
However, if you go beyond the noise-rock world and look for a reasonable analogue, then SY are certainly NOT The Beatles. They would be the Velvet Underground of our time. Never making the charts, yet hugely influential, making at times very pretty pop music and straight ahead rock out of noisy drones and weird tunings. Obviously, I'm not the first to make the comparison (the first I heard it was from Bruce Pavitt when Sub Pop was a column in Seattle's Rocket magazine in the mid '80s, and Thurston has essentially said as much himself) but it completely fits.
As a drummer, Steve is much more the equivalent of Moe Tucker than Ringo Starr too. Ringo was mediocre enough that McCartney played a lot of the drums on Abbey Road himself because he couldn't get Ringo to do them right. Moe plays what is seemingly very basic, but provides the rock solid back bone that anchors the Velvets songs from escaping entirely into noise-drones, much the way Steve does in SY.
Since the Beatles there has never been a group to do what they did coming out of the straight ahead pop/rock world and taking on all sorts of avant garde and experimental techniques and influences at the peak of their popularity. The closest I could think of would be Radiohead, but they haven't maintained anywhere near the type of momentum that the Beatles did.