We'll round up the Durham HC kids
and the Char-Grill Killers
Jessie H come into our pit
All ages show
Sonic Youth, unlike most indie bands from the 80s that made in big in the 90s, had a weird bifurcated existence, simultaneous narratives that never quite managed to overlap. In the first, they are of a kind with R.E.M., as bands that successfully made the transition from independent labels to the majors. They produced critically and commercially successful albums. They were cool and particularly indifferent to what others thought about them. In the other narrative, they were willful obscuritanists who played art-rock that frequently devolved into mere noise.
The artistic pretentions and posturing were difficult to accept for that portion of the indie scene that had started on punk. Once you start thinking of rock and roll as art and yourself as an artist, you begin to draw a line which separates the person who creates from the thing created. It's a very postmodern critique, offered in the name of authenticity. Punk, indie, rock and roll can still be elevated products, aesthetically, but their power is often a function of their having emerged from something real and organic.*
Daydream Nation, Goo and Dirty are the three great mid-period Sonic Youth albums, and each approaches the band's relationship between its artistic and its pop impulses in a different way. Daydream Nation cranks out epics--"Teen Age Riot," "Eric's Trip," "Total Trash," "Hey Joni" (Billy Corgan stole a lot from them)--and mixes them up with ambient songs, more likely to be forgotten than to offend. Goo is my favorite of their albums; it never reaches the heights of Daydream Nation, but it maintains a consistent level. It's the only record of theirs in which I never have to skip a track. Dirty is both the political record and the angry record. The highs are again impressively high: "Sugar Kane" is an improved version of both "Total Trash" and "Goo;" "Theresa's Sound World" gives their ambient music some greater direction.
"Chapel Hill" is that simplest of pleasures: a great rock song with a good riff, and a nice solo. There's not much more to it than that. It namechecks a bunch of things that would be familiar to those who have spent any amount of time in the Triangle, and it takes a gratuitous yet wholly deserved swipe at Jesse Helms.
*Case in point: Whiskeytown's "16 Days" is a great song; "Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart" is trying to be a great song, and so comes off as calculated.
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