The Fear Factory

K-Punk, in full-on concept-factory mode, taking down Tim Abrahams on blogs as 'nostalgic', and then later (he can't help it!) giving the weary limbs of Sonic Youth one more kick... Killer quote:

simply comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not nostalgic in any culpable way. It is the tendency to falsely overestimate the past that makes nostalgia egregious: [...] Conversely, we are induced - by ubiquitous PR, whose blank, joyless positivity has a crushingly depressing effect, even though (or rather precisely because) no-one believes it at the level of content - into falsely overestimating the present.

This is true – but (and this is something I often forget myself), nostalgia needs to be separated from sentimentality. Nostalgia is the longing for home (nostos = returning home, algos = pain). Nostalgia is a sickness – it haunts you despite your best efforts. Nostalgia has a long tradition: Joyce and Dublin. Wordsworth and his spots of time. Ulysses and Ithaca. Adam and Eve evicted from Eden. Sentimentalizing the past is the sin, the deliberate wallowing in a kitsch-en sink of schmaltz. When Mark writes about a 'false overestimate' of the past, what is a false overestimate but an idealization? What is an idealization if not a fantasy? And what does a fantasy do but comfort and sedate? (I've got a post planned on this subject in relation to Ashes to Ashes). This distinction still works for Mark's defence of hauntology though, because what is (an unsentimental) nostalgia for one's youth if not a mourning for lost futures?

Mark describes a culture industry which produces complacency, another false overestimate, but this time a false estimate of the present, something like a version of the 'end of history' for consumers, in which nothing will ever be at stake anymore, because we have reached the finish line and history can go away now. This is the trivializing blather of the complicitariat, in which reviews sound like press releases which sound like ad copy (...which try to sound like something someone cool would say (...in a world where the cool person works out they ought to like Grizzly Bear because the right reviews website tells them it's ok (which sounds like…)))))). This is the perpetually 'light, upbeat, irreverent' tone – that haunts colour supplements, culture sections, arts TV, radio. E4ification. The eroticization of shallow insincerity. The eroticization of glib. It's glibidinal!

But for me this misses something, or at least puts the accent in the wrong place. 'Light, upbeat, irreverent'. Permanent irreverence is not the same as complacency – it's a pose, a parrotting of the rhetoric of the complacent or confident. The mass media's perpetual irreverence is pure defense mechanism. There's an aggression in that kind of humour: gags that trivialize and belittle, that preserve the joker from commitment, deferring honesty and engagement by enabling an arms-length smirk (which should not be lazily equated with irony – irony is a weapon and a warning).

The irreverence encrypts pure fear. It's The Fear. Lily Allen is the pop star this country deserves, with her piss-poor strings of one-liners parading as lyrics, and her shabby facsimiles of whatever genre her producer thinks is timely that month. But Allen is right here. The real contemporary sickness is not complacency but fear and anxiety. The logic of the news bulletin is wholesale fear production. People crave and idealize the past partly because the present is (and always has been) confusing, overwhelming, uncertain – while the past can be demarcated, read and rationalized. So the past is consumed as an antidote to the present. But while Mark complains about the compulsive, cancerous commodification of the past, isn’t the selling of the future a bigger, more prevalent problem – the infinitely repeated promise that if you buy X you will become New You, Better You.

The selling of the future overlaps with the selling of fear. One of the most depressing aspects of New Labour (and the Bush/neocon era) has been government by management consultancy, and with it a whole new approach to managing voter expectations. Managing expectation is an art. You keep people 'happy' with your performance through constant alarmism, so that any small success acquires disproportionate cachet. Imagine you're a government responding to a terrorist incident or a flu epidemic. Rather than (as seemed to be the response in every disaster movie I ever watched as a child) appealing for calm, you do everything you can to scare the shit out of people. (My mother, a district nurse, was solemnly informed by a senior PCT exec last month that she would unquestionably lose friends and family to swine flu). It's a win-win. Disaster? Told you so. No disaster? We saved you!

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My final thoughts on Sonic Youth. I still find Mark's SY critique inconsistent, or at least incomplete. Its the temporality that's awry for me. In an earlier post Swans are used as a stick to beat SY with, to break their collective arm presumably. But Swans v Sonic Youth: Whose Year is Zero-er? is a disaster for Mark's argument. Swans repeated themselves over and over as if Year Zero meant annual recording-studio amnesia: terminal stasis. Swans' leader Michael Gira then gave up, gave up the very post-human severity which Mark lauds (and ended up by '04 putting out… Devendra fucking Banhart. Oh how the mighty, etc.) In the same period of the '80s, SY put out six very different records: from the debut EP to Daydream Nation. They moved on (...and this is why their current stasis is disappointing). It was SY, not Swans, who restlessly moved forward into new futures. But this is the crux of Year Zero. How can you make it look like Year Zero without summoning by negation whatever history you want to shed? Put another way, if you want to escape repeating history, you must define yourself by what you are not, and your negative aesthetic space ends up describing Year Minus One. You can only reject it by holding it very clearly in your mind. As Modernist battle-crys, don't 'make it new' and 'remake/remodel' avoid this trap? How does one go about being a good Modernist, erasing the traces and declaring Year Zero, while digging hauntology? Lots of traces there... traces all the way down...

[NB - I've edited out a para here which I didn't really agree with – but might return to]

One final thought: referring to Starbucks' SY comp, for me, is a palpable hit by Mark. I was shocked they did it... But isn't K-Punk against ideology's shifting of the ethical burden onto the subject away from social structure, the dogmatic insistence on the individual as the dutiful citizen-recycler, as the ethical shopper? If it's missing the point to refuse to drink Starbucks, because you thereby acquiesce in ideology's passing of the buck onto the subject, then why shouldn't Sonic Youth accept the offer of a compilation CD? You could insist they live to a higher standard than their fans, but isn't that, like... rockist? Artist as heroic Romantic martyr?

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next up (maybe): the unbearable quantity of the past, post-human cultural memory, generational disconnect, the Struldbruggs, natural resources

No Eno Wave

Over at Blissblog, Simon has flagged up a few new posts on the Sonic Youth debate (the unexpected good news being that Matt Ingram, having detached Woebot from the blogosphere to launch it into the sphere of the blogged-about, has made a quiet return to blogging here).

Picking up on a comment at Airport Through the Trees, Simon mentions John Lydon's notoriously detourned Pink Floyd t-shirt, the one on which he scrawled 'I hate...' (perhaps the definitive punk gesture in the way it hijacks a readymade, defacing and desecrating a complacently commodified consensus?) . . . the challenge being, what would you graffiti 'I hate' onto in 2009?

I considered free jazz. As much as I love and listen to Ayler, Shepp, Silva, the whole BYG catalogue, some terrible things are done in its name / its honour by swathes of the free/weird/folk/noise/drone spectrum who know how to ape the sound of chaos, but not actually create any. Not barefoot in the head, even if they're barefoot on the analog delay pedal. And hiphop was another candidate. I used to love H.E.R. as Common put it, but it's getting harder every year to recuperate what was once so radical and intoxicating about it. Perversely I think this long decline has made me think about hiphop more than I ever used to, when its vitality could be taken for granted. But the winner:

'I HATE . . .'
Brian Eno. Again, I don't hate the historic Eno, the Eno of Roxy Music, the '70s solo records, the Ambient series, No New York, Talking Heads, is practically peerless, and even after that there are plenty of fascinating ideas at work. But isn't there something very odd about the perception of Eno, whereby he gets a free pass for his last 20-odd years spent producing U2, James (!) and now Coldplay. (And James!) The strangest thing about this period (JAMES!) is that in theory it really could be good. You would think that if you applied the oblique strategies of Another Green World, Taking Tiger Mountain etc to music as boldly unadventurous, as warm-water-bottle, as Coldplay, you might end up with that rare thing, a mainstream pop record articulated through genuinely forward-thinking sonics; that Coldplay might come up with, if not a Kid A, then something close. But instead it's like those U2 and Coldplay records inadvertently became the unacknowledged apotheoses of the (failed) Music for Airports project: rock windtunnelled into a frictionless form of non-denominational spiritual succour (to be pronounced sucker), emotional affirmation to be taken like travel sickness pills, packaged with a smooth pharmaceutical blandness. One day I'd like to listen through all those productions and write a long post about them from the perspective of Eno's earlier art-experiment incarnation – round up these big critical blindspots in the Eno discography into a kind of secret history (albeit of course it's a secret history hidden in plain sight, 'hidden' only from the point of view of say, a Wire subscriber).

On the beach

Late thought on Sonic Youth as the great unacknowledged Californian group (as argued below): that characteristic technique of theirs, that intense micro-thrash on one or two strings that blurs into a drone – the other place you hear it is, of course, surf rock: Dick Dale et al.

You can read Marcello Carlin's take on SY here.

Thurston Moore and his precursors

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem, 'Fears and Scruples' by Browning foretells Kafka's work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics' vocabulary, the word 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant. The early Kafka of Betrachtung is less a precursor of the Kafka of somber myths and atrocious institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.

This quote is from ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ by Jorge Luis Borges. The entire essay is less than a thousand words and can be read online here. The conceit is that while the idea of the ‘precursor’ conventionally suggests ‘progenitor’, suggests a lineage, a progression in which cultural ancestors beget new artists teleologically, the process is better understood in reverse. We read a writer, we listen to a band, we are reminded of disparate but similar work (Zeno, Kierkegaard, Browning say, … or Sun Ra, Patti Smith, The Velvet Underground, Glenn Branca) and then – only then – are these artists grouped together into a recognizable set: Kafka’s Precursors, Sonic Youth’s Precursors. The present creates it own past.

Now k-punk (in his response to my earlier post) is absolutely right about the current nostalgia circuit. (As Marx put it, rock history repeats itself first as deluxe CD reissues, then as inglorious reunion tours. Then as deluxe DVDs of the reunion tours.) And he’s right of course about the vacuousness of the allegedly ‘alternative’ music which prevails commercially; it’s unsurrectionary mallternative rock. But should Sonic Youth really have to carry the can for this stuff just because some elements within it hail them as precursors? Proverbially the sins of the father are visited upon the son. In cultural history though, the sins of the offspring are all too often visited upon the parents, as Nietzsche’s ghost would attest. The street finds its own use for things, and the same thing happens to music once it’s released; as Ian Curtis would no doubt realize were he around to suffer The Editors.

Sonic Youth may have ended up sounding terminally like themselves, but they are formally innovative, which even in the 80s is some achievement. And while they are unashamedly fans of other bands, writers and painters, as well as being musicians themselves, it’s not at all clear to me that they were the first to be so, nor the group who made it acceptable. They formed from the ashes of No Wave, an aggressively Year Zero project, but No Wave was such an extreme standpoint that it imploded almost as soon as it had begun – it was a scene that lasted barely months so stringent and un-livable was its own fragile logic. Punk, the real touchstone for SY (and No Wave), was rhetorically a tabula rasa, but surely everyone knows by now that punk was no Year Zero: it created its own precursors for you wholesale: Jonathan Richman, the VU, The Stooges, the mods whose drainpipe jeans and skinny ties Blondie would hunt down in thrift stores, The Who, covered by Patti Smith (in a b-side which pretty much invented, explored and foreclosed upon the entire musical ground of 90s riot grrl). And who compiled Nuggets? Patti Smith’s guitar player, Lenny Kaye. Now That’s What I Call Curatorial. I think SY’s undisguised fandom is something they carry over from punk, a demolition of the fourth wall of the stage of performance which is designed to have a liberatory, anti-hierarchical effect, putting the band down among the audience.













As an act of archaeology, to dig back to Bad Moon Rising, to find that brief sonic mirage of The Stooges’ ‘Not Right’ – revenant, disembodied, distorted, not right – and make it the onlie begetter of the necromantic rock heritage culture which summoned up and put on The Stooges circa ’07, is hideously clever. It’s a stretch though, and I would argue it’s only available as a claim because SY kept going and in a winners-write-the-history way, can be credited with exerting a gravitational effect on the subsequent musical continuum. There are swathes of SY’s 80s contemporaries who fell by the wayside and thereby escape k-punk’s censure, their demise saving them from being on the scene of the heritage-industry’s crimes in ’09. As Simon Reynolds points out in his response to Mark, The Jesus and Mary Chain were far more retro-necro: they took the Velvet Underground, added an 80s drum sound and some hairspray. The Smiths were deeply retrograde, and Morissey’s lovelorn desolation is equal parts starstruck fandom as it is interpersonal angst. Unrequited love is unrequited love, whether it’s for the person sat next to you in a darkened underpass or for a sordidly glamorous dream of a band or Sandie Shaw. Fandom is written into rock at the deepest level, with The Stones as blues scholars, Dylan recycling lyrics from Harry Smith’s (profoundly curatorial) Anthology of American Folk Music, McGuinn copping moves from Africa/Brass and Lennon’s dreams of being Little Richard. (I point this out not to excuse subsequent retro idolatry, but to erase any simple assumptions that, it was All Better in the Sixties; ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive…’)



















But let’s grant that Sonic Youth went too far when they ran that Stooges tape through their Marshall stacks. If that’s so, then what kind of crepuscular Pandora’s Box – forget Pandora, it’s Miss Havisham that’s needed here – has Burial opened, has Fennesz opened, has Joker opened? “Rock is necessarily tied up with a romanticism of youth (whereas electronic music isn't, in part because of its 'cerebral' nature, as Mike Banks observed when I interviewed him)” writes Mark. Up to the bracket, entirely accurate. Rock is the sound of teenage lust, teenage kicks, teenage riots, and the fact that the form is dominated by non-teenagers recalling the hormonal intensity of teenage experience only heightens the excruciating sense of elegiac belatedness. But what will the consequences be when hauntology’s second generation hits? Electronic music has been doomed to the same process ever since ’87 got branded as the second Summer of Love… ( ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,/but to be young was very heaven!’) And the current crisis over the ’nuum is simply the inevitable function of its age, as producers struggle to handle the ever-increasing weight of dancefloor history on their shoulders, to try and make sense of its proliferating off-shoots. Do they destroy in order to rebuild, declaring Year Zero and looking to build on scorched earth? Or do they remake/remodel and renovate? To return to taste, isn’t it the case that hauntology can be dangerously implicated here… doesn’t hauntology threaten to become an exercise in good taste, in the right kind of nostalgia?
















A penultimate point. It’s interesting to me that Mark presents the band as essentially record-collecting dilettantes, who know good music when they hear it, and are handy enough musically to knock off a reasonable simulacrum for their own releases, because it implies a certain sympathy with their taste and sensibility. Good taste has many meanings. Sonic Youth are banished from ‘mainstream’ taste forever: Kim Gordon in growl mode, the abstract-expressionist noise breaks, performance artists Bob Flanagan and Sherry Rose wiping their arses with stuffed toys on Dirty's artwork … And Thurston Moore’s taste is distinctly unreliable: look at the dreadful bands he helped sign to Geffen. And the postpunk ‘crystalline ascesis’ Mark refers to, the ruling certain bands beyond the pale… SY have always been despised by many precisely for being elitist snobs who look down on those who like the wrong bands, bands insufficiently weird or difficult. It’s actually this aspect which I’d like to emphasize. Having tried to put their ‘retro’ in a different context, I’ve come dangerously close to describing a po-mo mise-en-abyme in which everyone is freefalling into perpetual referentiality. I’d rather insist on their similarity to some of the postpunk ideologues, in that while their personal canon might have been different, they were equally insistent upon policing its edges.

So ... we have k-punk and Sonic Youth, sharing an admiration for whole swathes of postpunk, pop, and modernism low and high (Burroughs, P. K. Dick, William Gibson, Joyce, The Carpenters etc), a k-punk who objects to Sonic Youth because they have good taste, a k-punk bored moreover by Sonic Youth because the band’s aesthetic manoeuvres are so ‘easily verbally explicable’ ... their every move almost precognitively understood and decodable by him … Could it be ... that k-punk is repelled from Sonic Youth, so instinctively against them, not because they’re so egregiously wrong, but because he understands them all too well? That some of it is too close to heim? Could it be … that stalking k-punk through the halls and corridors of musical history is a Manhattanite double he dare not acknowledge, a double named S---- Y----?

k-punk strikes back

How irritating/enjoyable to defend something and then, in response, get the most convincing prosecution you've yet read of what you're defending... I side with Mark against the false 'alternative' culture he attacks; but I'd like to separate Sonic Youth from some of the cultural uses to which their legacy has been put... more on this to follow

Chthonic Use

Mark Fisher on the abominable tribute compilation Brand Neu! in this month's issue of The Wire (303):

Foals, Holy Fuck and LCD Soundsystem [. . .] only establish that there is no 'today' for rock. They are secondhand vampires, skulking round graves that were robbed long before any of them picked up a plectrum or clicked on a drum machine.
. . .
Sonic Youth, Primal Scream and Oasis all played their part in making this kind of retro-necro acceptable. As the most ostensibly credible of the bunch, Sonic Youth should arguably bear the most blame (indeed, if one were to locate the point at which rock modernism lapsed into curatorial postmodern pastiche, you could do worse than cite something like Bad Moon Rising.)

The elision of Sonic Youth with Primal Scream and Oasis is both boldly counter-intuitive and funny – though coming from Mark, undoubtedly no joke. It's unfair of course. I don't want to enumerate all the ways in which Sonic Youth are not Primal Scream or Oasis. But put it this way: if Bobby Gillespie's ultimate and explicit aspiration is to be some kind of golem made out of assorted body parts from Jagger/Richards, and Noel Gallagher's is to be the same but using the corpse of Lennon/Noddy Holder, you'd have to say Thurston Moore, if anything, aspires to being Patti Smith, which is at least more forward-thinking - not to mention transgendered.

I think Mark's accusation has some traction, but the time and topos aren't quite accurate. If Sonic Youth are guilty of postmodern curatorial pastiche, it's not from '85 onwards with 'rock' history as their palette, it's over the last decade, and the palette is their own back catalogue. The trajectory from the debut EP to Confusion is Sex, Bad Moon Rising, Evol, Sister and Daydream Nation is astonishingly inventive. From that point on the boundaries of their sound are largely fixed, and from Goo to A Thousand Leaves, they're essentially combining and recombining previously-deployed moves into technically 'new' but very familiar shapes. All these albums have high points which match the late 80s output, but also plenty of rote filler, Youth-by-numbers. At this stage in their careers (2009), they are afflicted by a kind of irrelevance which any band of their age and standing can hardly transcend – like The Fall, the unconscious operations of the PR machine sees every album willed into a return to form, only to be retrospectively nailed as mediocre by the time of the next album's review cycle. Sonic Youth in 2009 seems to be more of a side-project for its members than the nominal side-projects, a costume into which all four climb when it's time to pay the bills. (I think as well – and this is perhaps another post – that Thurston Moore has a definite idea about song-writing as a mode - one that declares allegiance to the impulse, and a fidelity to the instant, informed by improv and automatic writing, and as such, would probably disavow any concept of 'progress' or development, or duty to anything other than sounding like Sonic Youth has always sounded.)

But what I really want to talk about is this idea that from Bad Moon Rising on, Sonic Youth might be 'curatorial postmodern pastiche' . . . Presumably Mark has the referential/reverential aspect of the band in mind here. Because they certainly don't sound like nostalgic pastiche at that stage. In fact they sound extraordinarily new. BMR is the point at which their tunings, atonal and droning, blossom into dazzling synaesthetic iridescences. They sound, literally, uncanny – with strings tuned to the same note but fractionally apart, they create their own doubles, an unheimlich shadow sound, like a transparent overlay just out of position. Playing Stoogoid riffery in a harmonic template borrowed from free jazz and serialism, one that smashes the overdetermined limits of the pentatonic, they make discord sensual in previously unheard ways. Alex Ross may take issue with this, but I think BMR is the point where Sonic Youth in effect reconnect discord with the body, restoring to it a libidinal force which you hear in The Rites of Spring, but which the cold geometries of Schoenberg and Webern subsequently evacuated.

As for the re(v/f)erential fandom. It's too easy to cite 'Kill Yr Idols' (released shortly before BMR) as a reproof to Mark's accusation. So I won't – not least because it can probably be counter-cited as a subconscious act of projection, read against the grain so that Thurston Moore is lambasting not his hidebound retro peers but himself.

I'd guess that Mark would point to the band's fascination with pop culture and its operations, rules, secret dynamics as evidence for pomo pap churn: Bad Moon Rising is a title borrowed from Creedence Clearwater Revival; 'Death Valley '69' dwells on the Manson Family mythology; by EVOL the following year there's 'Starpower' and its meditations on Joan Jett, 'Expressway to Yr Skull' (also titled as 'Madonna, Sean and Me' or 'The Crucifixion of Sean Penn') and the disposable kitsch of the Kim Fowley cover, 'Bubblegum'. The Ciccone Youth side project repeats the deadpan Madonna adoration with 'Into the Groove(y)'.

For me there's no sense that that's all there is – secondhand, end-of-history, arms-length sifting through pop-junk detritus, the position of the aesthete ever ready to cry 'but I don't really mean it', believing that the glib smirking mask of nihilist irony can be passed off as the silver laugh of wisdom. As a title, Bad Moon Rising alludes to the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, but without depending on it for content – anymore than do Joy Division with the Ballard-borrowed 'The Atrocity Exhibition'. The point is not to tick a box for discerning record collectors or critics, nor to demonstrate good meta-aesthetic judgement by suggesting that perhaps, like all revolutions, the Year Zero of American hardcore has ultimately impoverished itself (by ruling out as untouchable any music predating firstwave punk, or indeed the first Bad Brains record). Instead it uses John Fogerty's title as a conduit through which to signpost and channel a version of American gothic, a means to reimagine, rewrite and make strange the surface environment of American life, unafraid of referencing pulp forms like horror and SF to tell a psychic truth glossed over by the smooth sedations of mass media, built over by the glossy tiles and sparkling water of the mall, the pulverizing singularity of the freeway. 'Ghost Bitch' -- which it's hard to foresee Primal Scream or Oasis covering any time soon -- is an uncanny revenant voicing, a spectral banshee wail which, like Stephen King's Indian-burial-ground devices, stages an encounter between massacred (Native American) and massacring (colonist). 'I'm Insane', 'Society is a Hole', 'Justice is Might'; these are postcards from the urban apocalypse of the Lower Eastside, a zone abandoned by local government and police alike.

Which brings me to David Peace... (whom Mark is certainly a fan of). Peace presents the Red Riding quartet as a kind of psychopathology of place -- not so much psychogeography as geographic psychosis, articulated through pulp modernism. The books map a site-specific horror, an internalized sickness unique to the books' Yorkshire setting. For Peace, Peter Sutcliffe is, could only be, the Yorkshire Ripper.














Mid-80s Sonic Youth does something very similar, but for California. They tend to be labelled as an archetypally 'New York' band, but from BMR through to Sister ('PCH' = Pacific Coast Highway, 'Hotwire My Heart' is a cover of a Bay Area punk band, Crime; 'Schizophrenia' and 'Stereo Sanctity' both reference Philip K. Dick), the West Coast exerts a weird fascination for them, as a terminal place, a utopia turned dystopia, spatially, temporally, psychically, culturally the End of the West, in which hippie eloi are feasted upon by Manson Family morlocks, and Laurel Canyon acoustic bliss-out is defaced by the return of the repressed (punk) and the unmasking of its own sexual logic (read Atomized and watch the documentary Mayor of the Sunset Strip in which Kim Fowley, svengali of The Runaways, features and reveals himself as a shameless sexual predator). 'Death Valley '69' is the obvious example of this kind of oneiric horror manifesting itself, but it's present too in 'Expressway to Yr Skull' - in which The Beach Boys are evoked lyrically ('We're going to kill the California girls...') before being detourned, reimagined as a death-drive sex-cult ('...We're going to fire the exploding load in the milkmaid maidenhead'), over an oceanic roll of a rhythm, which explodes into an orgiastic apocalypse before once more subsiding into waves of bass and underwater guitar. There are material connections too: the 'Halloween' 12" was recorded in Venice Beach, the band recorded a soundtrack for the film Made in America in LA in 1986, and from 86-87 were signed to Long Beach label SST, with Mike Watt (from San Pedro) making a cameo on EVOL and forming part of Ciccone Youth.















Ballard could perhaps be brought in here, to discuss the car-crash in 'In the Kingdom #19', as well as LA as a terminal site and the psychosexual dynamics of celebrity iconography – but I think he's more relevant to the persistent charge that's hung around Sonic Youth for not being junkie fuck-ups. Isn't it the case (not thinking of Mark here) that a wider critical subtext exists in which Sonic Youth are considered somehow inauthentic, for making weird, out-there music while not being weird or out-there in person? It seems like a lot of music writers assume that the biography betrays the music, that there's an obligation to live up to the sublime savagery of the music and be suicidally chemically dependent. Again, not ascribing this position to Mark, but there's an implication that because they aren't complete headcases, they don't mean it, man . . . And must therefore be idle dilettantes. But this is as absurd as objecting to Ballard's quiet domestic set-up in Shepperton; like Ballard, Sonic Youth are following the Flaubertian injunction to be serious and bourgeois in life, in order to be violently radical in your art.