Youth Against Fascism III: The Eternal

By May of 2009, I had been in culinary school for a year and I could feel the pangs of transition much like 12 months earlier beginning to press actions into motion. Several months prior as 2008 segued into 2009, I had grown tired of the job position I was holding as the manager for a coffee and smoothie kiosk on the campus of DePaul University. The upper management and owners were condescending to anyone below them and the customer base - comprised entirely of entitled DePaul students who placed their orders with sneers of intellectual superiority and blase contempt as they made their way to the gym for their daily workouts - had tried my every nerve several times over. Meer days after 2009 nestled itself in on the calendars of the world, I felt that all the said world wasn't enough to keep me from taking a match and a can of gasoline to the building I was working in. Despite my bank account not having the tidiest sum of money in it, I quit the job after a particularly trying day and smiled all the way home.

An oasis of over privileged jocks and future trixies.

The main reason I entered into culinary school in the first place was to become a private vegan chef - making turkey clubs and 'Blue Demon' (the asinine mascot of the university) protein shakes while being barked at constantly by over stressed bosses and entitled suburban kids was not my idea of working towards my goals. Within days of quitting, I had placed an ad in Craigslist advertising personal chef services, secured the domain for a website and gotten things off to a start with my first client giving me a call within days of my the ad coming into existence. At the beginning of January, fresh off of having quit a job and taking such a large risk with getting a business started (nine months ahead of schedule as well since I wasn't planning on launching it until after my externship with a local restaurant wrapped up in August), one wouldn't be faulted for wondering where exactly February's rent would come from, but in between clientele and what little we had in the bank, we didn't find ourselves on the chilly Chicago streets begging by month's end (as I had initially envisioned in my several moments of crippling self doubt in the weeks after I pressed the reset button on my career). As each month rolled into the next, parties began to be booked along with a client who covered nearly all of our living expenses due to her desire to have us cook for her entire family.

When May arrived, we realized we were at the end of our lease and began looking for a better place elsewhere. A friend from Indiana had expressed interest in moving to Chicago and we figured it would be advantageous to get a place with him as we were looking for a bigger place than the one bedroom we were currently in anyway. Settling fairly quickly upon a three bedroom apartment along the borderline of Wicker Park and Humboldt Park, we began making the arrangements and (despite a fairly stressful moving day) made the shift seamlessly. Considerably larger than where we had been staying for a year, Mellie and I settled in fairly quickly and as the private chef business was making enough at this point to be recognized as legitimate enough for me to use it towards my final class hours out in the culinary field (I was the only one in my class to work as my own boss for my externship course), my schedule was flexible enough to begin settling in to resuming my writing and art.

Around this time, I found Mellie's copy of 'Washing Machine' in our CD collection. Having not heard all that much of it, I put it on the stereo and treated it like background noise as I went about whatever I was in the middle of at the time and as is the case with all Sonic Youth up to that point, my first impression wasn't the fondest. Certainly their sound was more meandering on this effort than their prior trilogy of releases where their sound had more than its fair share of grunge tinged production tricks and dirge-y alt rock shackles, but as is the case with most things worthwhile, I felt the need to listen to it further and as I did, I came to understand the full palette the band were working with. When treating the band's more experimental output as background wall paper, it's easy to miss many of the elements that make the band so great.

What I genuinely believe about SY is this: they're at their most comfortable when stretching themselves to the point of snapping their already established elasticity in an attempt to wring out just an inch or two more of space. Listening to 'The Diamond Sea', the final track (and the micro opus of the record with its quarter hour run time), the observer finds themselves floating amidst the crystalline waters of drone Moore and Renaldo cast and like Poseidon's effortless control over the waves as they peak and fall, so too do the guitarists craft feedback in shapes so visceral you can practically see them trickling out of the speaker and soaking the floor. During this stretch of time, Gordon and Shelly - shapers of restraint and holders of orders - step back even further from their duties and provide instrumentation so minimalist that Edgard Varese would have smiled ear to ear if he were sitting in the production chair as the clock arms marked off the minutes comprising this epic.

Our roommate - a chronically absent fellow who fancied supervising youth camps and street busking more than actually finding a viable means of income to help pay his share of the bills - happened to be around during one of the times 'Washing Machine' was playing. His then girlfriend was visiting him from Indiana and as the two moved about the apartment preparing for their day, they took turns making faces at the sounds coming from the stereo. Despite his love for the faux experimental posturing of Radiohead, the roommate viewed most of the more non 4/4 aligned music I listened to with a thinly veiled contempt. At the time, his musical tastes leaned towards the more contemplative end of the spectrum, the usual line of suspects hubs like Pitchfork.com lose their minds over any time one of them so much as burps or reads a contact number from their iPhone into a microphone. As the roommate himself was a musician and played fairly generic folk music, I often suspected his tastes towards the quieter elements of indie rock had to do with him preferring to hear mainly voices over instrumentation largely because he so enjoyed hearing his own.

Watching the roommate and his girlfriend as their faces all but told the story of what they thought of the music, I felt a slight tinge of satisfaction. Here before me sat an example of the dividing line between Sonic Youth's adherents - those who preferred their excursions into the avant garde and those who would forever hold them to the handful of records they recorded in the early 90's during the alternative revolution (important to note: that roommate - now back in his safe confines in Indiana where everything is handed to him and he doesn't have to deal with the challenges a big bad city like Chicago threw at him - has recently expressed that over the last year, his tastes in music have crept more towards the avant garde and the weird. He now rattles off lists of acts he enjoys wholeheartedly when only a little under a year and a half ago, he verbally dismissed nearly every single one of them when I would listen to them. A real johnny come lately).

Listening to 'Washing Machine' piqued my curiosity in the rest of SY's output for the next several months, a week didn't go by where I wasn't adding one of their records to my shelf in a diligent attempt to chip away at their full discography. The trip from 1995 onward proved to be even more a litmus test for the ne'er do well fan base they had accumulated via Lollapalooza and '120 Minutes' as their SYR series saw them releasing recordings forty five minutes or more in length of guitar drones on par with the finest Merzbow while the fourth release in the series 'Goodbye 20th Century' saw the band confirming what many long time fans knew by making their admiration for the composers of the 20th Century evident by way of doing re-interpretations of many of their compositions. 2000's 'NYC Ghosts and Flowers' witnessed the band making a minor mis-step as they clumsily attempted to hone their admiration for the more literary side of the avant garde to tape. Instead of coming off like the second coming of Ginsberg, the group as a collective ended up sounding more like a parody ala Judy, the faux Beat poet older sister of television cartoon Doug.

"Really Doug, they're just viola drones. Stop being such a pleb."

2002's 'Murray Street', 2004's 'Sonic Nurse' and 2006's 'Rather Ripped' came to be their redemption and acted almost as a career retrospective for the group with the first disc highlighting long, ambient guitar work outs set to a rock solid rhythm section and the second disc fusing that refined drone with the modern rock they had been known for to a generation prior. 'Rather Ripped' simply ripped with its ability to turn on and alternately tune out. A monster of riffs, the record was the most straight forward set they had recorded in over ten years and perhaps the more traditional structures the band chose to dress the compositions within was intentional as a kiss off. With 'Rather Ripped' on the market, the band had fulfilled their contract with Geffen and were now free agents.

In the three years it took for the band to come together once more to piece together what would become their Matador Records debut 'The Eternal', their entire fan base were alight in speculation. Certainly the band's signing to an indie (albeit one of the larger ones on the market) came as no surprise, but most were prepared for something far less accessible than what 'The Eternal' actually turned out to be - a succinctly prepared sequel to 'Rather Ripped' that acted as equal parts accessible and 'Diamond Sea'. Sounding energized, refreshed and oddly youthful, the Youth proceeded to top critics lists with their latest recording while also setting about on a campaign to release the lion's share of their 80's out put, bringing newer fans such as myself into the fold and bringing themselves full circle with their roots.

When I look back on the summer of 2009 and I think about the strides my musical tastes (and my record collection in tandem) began to make, I attribute the lion's share of the credit to Sonic Youth. Certainly my interest in 20th century avant garde, classical and early electronics and musique concrete had been set in motion some time earlier, but hearing Sonic Youth's vast discography acted as the final push I needed to dive head long into the sounds that would forever mutate the way I look at music. While acts like Ke$ha, Lady Gaga and even Britney Spears with her more recent excursions into dub step tinged arenas are seen as the future of electronic pop by most (and make no mistake, I enjoy all of them much to the chagrin of many of my peers who accuse me of poor taste as a result), none of that would have been possible without the likes of Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen who had the notion to create sketches of melodies via non acoustic means (an unthinkable premise in their time) and while most who are producing the electronics of today would scratch their heads at the mention of such names, Sonic Youth can be thanked for clueing in atleast a certain segment of listeners to the oddities and experiments that if not done so many decades ago, would have meant that the music climate as we witness it today would not look remotely the same.