Youth Against Fascism

For the first time listener, the opening notes of Dirty Boots can be deceitful to the unadjusted ear. Unassumingly picked notes ride gently into audibility and shuffle quietly through the speakers without attempting to impose. Each note follows one after the other in reverence until a renegade chord comes shuffling through impatiently, pushing the single file notes in front of it to the sides of the path as it pushes its way out of the speaker. The first chord is quickly followed by a second and as they increase in number, they morph into a bed rock riff and Thurston Moore's voice begins to float out of the ether, carried by a vehicle powered by some of the mightiest drums of the early and then nascent indie underground. At this juncture, it's obvious that one may need to reach for the volume to take things down a notch or two before the entity that is Sonic Youth's 1990 opus 'Goo' explodes and splinters the speakers into wood and metal shards.

Every road in Georgia looks the same.

When I listen to 'Goo' or 'Dirty', I'm instantly lifted from my seat and placed into the passenger's side of my old friend Drew Cardin's car as we cut a path on the back roads of small town Middle Georgia in my junior year of high school. Clipping by corn fields and lone farms and silos, Drew and I would often ride for hours in silence with no foreseeable destination. I can't possibly tabulate the money that went into the gas tank as we tagged every back road within a 60 mile radius of our homes. While the two of us exchanged scant little in the way of words with each other, it was often times never due to conflict - we let the stereo provide the dialogue. One day, Drew slipped in copies of the two most bickered over recordings in Sonic Youth's oeuvre and for the next two hours, we sat and listened as Kim and Thurston did the lion's share of the talking.

Prior to meeting Drew, my knowledge of secular music was minimal at best. Sure I knew all of the supposedly cool Christian versions of whatever mainstream band had the ears of the mirrored underground (Goo's third track 'Mary Christ' was surely a direct line to the telepathic for noise pop nerds Pep Squad - a little known band who would make their first appearance on Christian record label B.E.C. Recordings eight years after Sonic Youth's ascension from indie darlings to mainstream pop cultural taste makers had first begun) but I was still finding my footing as I explored the crystalline caves of paranoia and ice spun by the likes of New Order and Nine Inch Nails. Any other knowledge of music outside of the church walls came courtesy of hours gorging on MTV (at a time when video clips by definition were literally becoming just that as the channel began reducing their airplay of a video from one end to the other down to a sixty second snippet in favor of increasing channel bumpers, ad space and poorly scripted 'reality' shows) and VH1's various rockumentary styled programs while I wasted the days away at my grandmother's house.

I had a small collection of secular music by this point, but I kept it all meticulously hidden behind a set of books in my room as I was scared of my mother and my grandmother finding the aural contraband and throwing the lot of it out. While my earthly guardians were supposedly oblivious (my mother informed me years later that she had known of my secret since I had begun doing it), God certainly knew of my misdeeds and I was convinced that the routine charlie horses I would receive in the middle of the night were calling cards of the Man Himself coming to visit and crack down on His wayward son. At the age of fifteen, I wasn't versed in the intricacies of nutrition and thus had no idea that my leg cramps were due to a deficient iron intake. For the longest time, I assumed they were warnings from a God angry that I would dare lend my ear to His arch nemesis Marilyn Manson. If I had eaten more bananas, perhaps God would have found other means in which to smite me. Curiously enough, the leg cramps never bedevilled me at junctures where my music collection wasn't squirreled away from the moral gestapo - was God more interested in disciplining me for my deception and less concerned with the lyrical content of what I was hiding? I'll never know.

"No Son of mine is listening to a record called 'Candy Ass'!"

These were the days before Starflyer 59 finally broke down my conviction spun walls of being an individual of faith who could also enjoy certain pleasures of the flesh. Drew was the levee actively breaking against those walls and the spiritually existential figures who had crafted them while his CD collection acted as the water bursting through the dam. Through him, I was first exposed to the later era works of Iggy Pop, a best of collection compiling the highlights of Patti Smith, my first heavy dose of staples such as The Misfits and Social Distortion and among a host of other things, the more mainstream era of Sonic Youth's discography.

When we first met, we bonded over a love for punk rock - by way of Christian pop punk clones The Huntingtons, I had already committed considerable time for a year and a half in my room practicing guitar to what few Ramones records I could find in my small and culturally deficient town - and formed a band in short order. Most of our conversations revolved around bass lines, finding a solid drummer and zeroing in our influences. We finally settled on a friend of his who - while certainly proficient - was more enamored with the works of Sublime and wasn't into our vision of a horror rock band in the vein of The Deadlines and The Misfits. He hated the eyeliner we wore and at one pivotal show, played shirtless while wearing a beanie out of revolt to contrast with the fake blood and ratty button down shirt image Drew and I were attempting to cultivate.

For me, Drew was something of a paragon - while he was hip to all of the crucial stuff that had shaped great music up to the present (his love for Tom Waits and Hank Williams continues quite strongly to this day), he also seemed to have his finger on everything that was happening in the present as well. Sitting square in the middle of 2002, we weren't paying attention to the post boy band dross being thrown at us. This of course left us with what MTV was so clumsily labeling "The Return of The Rock". What they were placing most of their air time and programming dollars on at that point were bands of somewhat dubious origin whose sound was sometimes amazing at best and suspect at worst. Acts such as The White Stripes were channelling sonic waves of Leadbelly and the more subdued tones of the MC5 while The Hives were at the time digging through their collections of Back From The Grave compilations and piecing together skeletal little bursts of garage punk equal parts The Count Five and The Buzzcocks. Other acts like The Vines however certainly didn't have many of the same obscurely placed reference points and were lazily dubbed by many critics to be the second coming of grunge giants Nirvana in large part because of the vocalist's poor annunciation skills and his narcoleptic-ally tinged stage presence.

It was within this renaissance of the electric guitar as sole voice of reason on the musical landscape in a world that had finally cast off the chains of Fred Dust and his nu metal monkey ilk that Drew and I were living and in this environment of discovery, it seemed the introduction to me of Sonic Youth was especially relevant.

Upon listening to 'Goo' and 'Dirty' for the first time, I instantly took a liking to the voice of Thurston Moore. For a 17 year old boy, the guitar explosions happening in the background were particularly revelatory. Each hit of each drum was like a missile zeroing in on a target and everything about these records felt perfect to me - except for one thing, Kim Gordon's voice. On 'Goo', it didn't bother me too much, but when Drew played the band's Geffen companion piece "Dirty", I was turned off by the gritty texture of her voice on "Drunken Butterfly". Upon first impression, Gordon sounded as if she had single handedly funded the Capo based homes of every eight figure salaried American Spirit executive and that annoyed me. As is the case with most things worthwhile, repeated listens opened my way of thinking and I began to see that gritty texture as an attribute, I saw the richness that it brought to her voice (and upon seeing pictures of her, my adolescent eyes weren't altogether displeased either) and came to enjoy the smoky quality of her vocals even more so than her husband's more nasally, Gen X drawl.

For a boy entering his senior year in high school, these Sonic Youth records were more artillery in the belt - another marker to distinguish from the drones I felt I was shoulder to shoulder with every day. Oddly enough, my final year of high school began at a new one and I quickly fell in with a group of friends who in fact knew who Sonic Youth and other major movers and shakers of the early 90's alternative nation were. By meiosis, their older siblings had passed down their tastes and I found for the first time in my high school career, that I wasn't alone in my music wanderings. (One of my friends from this period, a girl named Brittany, had an older sister named Heather who I had admired every day on the school bus when I was in the seventh grade. Her gothic tinged make up - well, gothic in the way that a naive fourteen year old would perceive it atleast - and endless array of Smashing Pumpkins t-shirts were more than enough to keep m mind occupied on the rides home from school every day as I attempted to look at her while avoiding eye contact. None of my thoughts were particularly disdainful (what with all of the church based mind molding I was being subjected to at the time, I knew well enough not to lust as Hell was/is/will be certainly filled with those who couldn't control their evil urges!), but certainly I found a strong infatuation with a girl who was unafraid to stand out amidst a crowd of suburban kids listening to the latest CD by Puff Daddy - as he was known then before changing his name two more times - and discussing the latest plot points of 'Dawson's Creek' with one another.)

Looking back at the summer of 2002 as my I slid into my eighteenth year of life, those Sonic Youth records are some of the strongest musical memories that stick in my head. As life went on and I discovered No Wave and all of the musical mischief created by the cretins of the late 70's downtown New York scene, I came to enjoy the rest of SY's discography from the Christgau described 'Pig F*cker' violence of 'Confusion Is Sex' and 'Kill Yr Idols' to the more subdued material they released post 2000 when their work splintered into two separate entities - the tranquil, almost ambient work of their studio albums post 'NYC Ghost and Flowers' and their more straight ahead experiments in pure texture and 20th Century based composition with their ongoing SYR series (the latest installment being their most conservative yet - a sound track to a French film. In between that release and Thurston's latest 'Demolished Thoughts' - it's looking like the Youth in 2011 are seeing that perhaps part of their name sake is fleeting, though none of what makes them interesting has been depleted in the process of growing older).

In accordance to my current musical preferences, 'Dirty' and 'Goo' both rank fairly low on my laundry list of favorites when it comes to SY, but they hold a special spot for being the only ones within the band's vast discography to have such a well preserved snap shot of the closing scenes of my teen years. Looking back, I find that the memories have preserved wonderfully.