[Moshe]

http://www.canada.com/cityguides/mon...82af58&k=31074

Place bets on Sonic Youth
A quarter-century of melody and mayhem has made the band an odds-on favourite for listeners who prefer instinct over formula
MARK LEPAGEFreelance

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Thurston Moore is calling from Harrah's Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where, it will relieve some in his fan base to learn, he is not pumping hard-earned skronk dollars into the slots.
"I can't afford to do it," Moore says. "I gamble enough buying records and books."
As anyone knows who has watched Moore alternately ravage and caress a quarter-century's worth of Fender guitars in the pursuit of the perfect wave, those bets have paid off. Sonic Youth anchors the Osheaga festival this weekend as a kind of anomaly in plain sight.
Set aside their complete disinterest, not in melody, but in music careerism, and consider the lineup: Two of these people have been married for 22 years (Moore and bassist Kim Gordon) and have a child. Now name all the other bands ... no. So do they know something that no one else does?
"Well, I don't know what we know," Moore says, amused. "For all intents and purposes, we should not be a functioning band."
That's right. They should have broken up sometime in the late '80s, and "that would have been good, because then we could have done a reunion and it would have been a really big deal. We could have made millions of dollars like the Pixies."
Instead, their accomplishment is significant. If the stated goal, for many, is to balance artistic self-respect with making an independent living, with minimizing the necessary intrusions of commerce and compromise in a calling that is a career, then we have been listening to it happen for the last 25 years.
The night before our interview, I'd watched the band play the Jimmy Kimmel show. "It was totally fun to do that and meet him and Sarah Silverman, they were all really nice," he says. "Those TV shows are kind of a rush because basically you play one song."
They played Incinerate, one of the melodic ones from the latest, Rather Ripped. The album doesn't necessarily stretch their sonic palette - they've been playing meditative airs amid the planet-crashing clangour for ages - but confirms their refusal to submit to the oddsmakers.
"It's certainly more of a song-focused record. But we've always mixed it up. We've always done Sonic pop songs with our own sense of melody. That was sort of something we wanted to do. When we were recording, we knew we weren't laying down any extreme noise action on this record. We're so expected to do that, but it's such a de rigueur thing for bands these days to be noise-oriented, so we thought, 'Let's not do that.'
"Experimentation, for us, is sort of an investigation into pop and melody."
Moore's sentences sometimes seem to run backwards, which makes sense. The approach is intuitive, probing and testing at boundaries without an agenda or plan. Needless to say, record executives do not build empires on that pattern.
"This record hasn't been huge," he says. "It's done as well as the last couple of records. But it's hard to sell records unless you have a hit song or you're on The O.C. or something. I don't think we fit that demographic - our music is a little too left-of-centre or outside the margins."
He says that "anybody can win the lottery" writing a formula hit. Can, but won't. "I have no interest in being a technical player like that. It's all very genuine. We don't do it for any other reason.
"We have to rely on whatever natural tendencies that we may have. I'd much rather create music that way as opposed to trying to figure out what will appeal to anybody at any given time. I think that's a death knell for a lot of bands, because it's a real abstract situation. Unless you're buying into industry manipulations."
Or expectations. Even as skronk royalty, Sonic Youth can't count on any real loyalty from the cognoscenti.
"It's weird because most people who want us to be a radical avant-garde noise band, a record like Rather Ripped, they get really snooty about. It's not like we're not doing what we've always done, which is take chances, but I generally get more across-the-board positive response for doing song-oriented music than for more expansive feedback-laden kinda stuff. You always get the Wire (magazine) turning their nose up at a record like this."
Some pop fans are more tolerant?
"Yeah, it's true. I think anybody who generally likes to listen to and follow experimental and noise music - if that's all they're into, then they're kinda poseurs in a way."
For Sonic Youth, then, this is clearly not the last Harrah.
Sonic Youth performs Saturday at the Osheaga festival in Jean Drapeau Park. The band is scheduled to play from 9:45 to 11 p.m. on the River Stage. Osheaga tickets cost $60 for one day, $95 for two days. Call 514-790-1245 or visit the website www.osheaga.com for more information

[Richard Pryor on Fire]

Yeah BOY! AND YOU DON"T STOP!