This post is a response to this Guardian blog post by Simon Reynolds: Sonic Youth are caught under the influence and this response by K-Punk: My mind it ain’t so open.
I find myself very much caught under the influence of Sonic Youth, not the band but the members. I do still listen to them occasionally, whilst listening to all the stuff I have discovered through them, but I should also say with Sonic Youth. I should qualify that when I say with I do not mean exactly contemporaneously with Sonic Youth as themselves but with as in the unfolding of my music life contemporaneously with my experience of Sonic Youth as the band and as individual members.
As members those who have most influenced me are Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo. In these states they have been occasional portals, but also through other portals I have rediscovered them.
I first came across Sonic Youth in the late 80s when they released Daydream Nation, as did many, my epiphany came when in the midst of a 48 hour speed, beer and music binge after my girlfriend had walked out on me I realised that in my last three relationships I had been trying to live Eric’s Trip, unsuccessfully. It helped me get over it, laugh at myself, move on and was a part in forever changing my approach to relationships.
However partly as a consequence of previous and later speed binges as well as other issues covered by this blog I lost the ability to listen to music for several years. During the depths of my psychosis, where every note, bassline and misheard word was sending me secret messages and telling me lies about my life, the face of music changed. However during that time I discovered a new relationship with music myself.
Just before I had my crisis of being, and whilst the cracks were starting to appear things were changing. Kurt Cobain killed himself and with that event all politics in alternative rock music seemed to be sent scampering to the fringes. A new DIY aesthetic was appearing in the form of hardcore techno and the free party scene. Then I had to withdraw.
When I started to recover enough to reconnect the rebellion had again been successfully commodified; Spiral Tribe and others had escaped to France, alternative rock had become Limp Bizkit. I needed to find something new. Supportive friends introduced me to electronica and I came across the Wire writing about Andrew Weatherall. Here was music i was able to listen to without sending me mad, especially when I discovered the fringes from Skam to Raster-Noton. Things were OK, but I was still searching for something that spoke to me intellectually and politically. The Wire was working as a conduit for me but I was still trapped by it’s language. It was yet to work as a portal.
As I mentioned earlier in the time where I was apart from the music world I’d rediscovered my own language in music. Before my crisis my dad had bought me a bass. However, forgetting, or perhaps considering it unimportant, that I was left-handed he’d bought me a right-handed one, a black yamaha. I started to play it, but I was hearing words in the notes I struck. i had also bought an Alesis drum machine but everytime I programmed it the sounds coming back argued with me. As I was in control of my movements with the bass I had a certain control over the wording with the Alesis I had none, no matter how I programmed it I couldn’t control what I heard. Music in this sense was a conduit for the voices, not a static text. So I stuck with the bass. When I came out of hospital back into the diagram of the community with the help of the apparatus of medication. I returned to the bass my psychotic symptoms were down; delusions, significance, paranoia etc. But the the voices and telepathy seemed to still be there. However with the bass I started to communicate with them. I would play some notes, let the voices come through, then I would reply, with the bass, controlling the words it produced. Bearing in mind that I was playing a right-handed bass whilst being left-handed, this was not the normal way of playing, I was unable to keep up a steady rhythm, my rhythm (wanking) hand was busy on the fretboard, and so with the call and response and fretboard fiddling I developed, what I thought was, an idiosyncratic way of playing.
Whilst reading about the electronic bands I was buying, I was also reading about other music in the Wire, I had already accidently discovered experimental turntablists such as Janek Schaefer and Philip Jeck, and I was reading about this music called free improvisation. So one day in a record shop tucked away upstairs from a Goth clothing store in Brighton, Edgeworld records. I picked up a copy of a record with artists I’d only read about. It was a piece of vinyl by Derek Bailey, Pat Thomas and Steve Noble called “,and”. I put it on to listen to this strange new music. And had another epiphany (not the only one since gurning in my living room at 4am with Sonic Youth but the next relevant one here); this is what I had been doing on my bass. With the help of the Wire, Edgeworld Records, and other online establishments I started looking for more of this magical ether. The Wire had finally stopped being a conduit and become a portal. In the words of a punk girl years later who came up to me Djing in a pub whilst playing some Thelonious Monk, ” I thought all these punk bands were anarchists but they’ve got nothing on these free jazz and free improvisation groups”.
Whilst searching for this gorgeous nectar I came across the SYR records collaboration between Sonic Youth, ICP and the Ex. Not only was it a return to punk for me through improvisation but an event occurred that meant a lot to my consequent recovery; I was living on a road in Brighton called Queens Road, it is the direct road between the mainline station and the seafront, not to mention it turns later into West Street the main street for commercial music night clubs. It was the height of summer and with thousands going past my door every day and still having the vestiges of the fractures between my conscious perception and the socially accepted reality due to unreconciled experiences, I would often get agoraphobic, however, again, as it was the height of summer I had to have the windows open. The constant noise from outside drove me to distraction, not least the drunken screams and shouts that went on till 4 or 5 in the morning. As my imagination has a tendency to fill in the gaps when a word is only half heard my voices increased. Then one day I put the Sonic Youth/ ICP/ The Ex album on, the fragmentary sounds, that being non repeatable were not in the least catchy, gave me a certain control over what voices I heard and perversely the documents of improvisation, reluctantly accepted as necessary for the furtherment of the style and necessary for monetary sustainability, yet derided as poor subsitutes for the actual moment, became therapeutic objects for me. At least until I moved to a quieter street.
In a way this was incidental to Sonic Youth but as I kept coming across the collaborations the members did, as following the trails of their collaborators bringing me back to alternative rock such as Mission of Burma and the Melvins whom I had cruelly negelcted, I discovered a world where fringe members of different subsystems of the musical world collaborated, discovering Klezmer through John Zorn or rediscovering Frank Zappa and then Shockabilly through Eugene Chadbourne as well as the new albums of Sonic Youth.
There is a certain contendedness to their work, but we all need a solid base. Working in mental health I know you have to look after yourself to look after others, having children I know you have to create a secure world for them to be whoever they want to be rather than making them behave to fit your world, even if the reaction to this authority those children have later in life may be more interesting. I am now married with children and I find it reassuring that Sonic Youth are still there. Our home lives are stable but we still venture out for adventure. But I’m older they’re older. I sometimes worry that this need for constant dysfunction as a form of transgression rather than doing so just by what you do and who you are, even if you do occasionally put your feet up and have some cocoa is a need for the reenactment those with stable lives themselves need to see in their heroes to justify the chaos and injustice in the world. A new mythology. But be your own hero, even if you have a stable life. Be radical yourself, in your head and with your influences. Careful you don’t fall into the trap that Bill Bailey parodied so well with his song that went, to paraphrase; ” How can I feel pain, when you’re so understanding.”
Any influence will remain a conduit if the person who discovers it doesn’t activate it by their own actions. Only then does it become a portal.
