By Mitch Myers
I was strolling through Tower Records at 4th and Broadway last night when the strangest thing happened. It was closing time and I had been desperately searching for a disc to buy for my parents' wedding anniversary. Ironically, I was the only one browsing in the classical section and I guess the Tower employees were in a big hurry because before I could get downstairs and out the door, they locked up the store and accidentally left me inside.
Now you might imagine that being trapped overnight in a record store would be a dream come true for a music fanatic such as myself but you have to remember, I was stuck in the classical section and couldn't get anywhere near the stuff I really liked. Yes, instead of digging around the import section for vintage reggae recordings or grabbing a copy of the new Mekons disc, I was forced to amuse myself examining the likes of Bach and Chopin. And me sitting there on the floor with my portable disc player right in my pocket-it didn't seem fair!
Just as I was getting totally depressed and a little bit uncomfortable I looked up at a nearby wall display and couldn't believe my eyes. There, in the classical section, was a Sonic Youth album that I had never seen before. The cover was psychedelic in an understated sort of way and the words "Goodbye 20TH Century" subtly peaked at me through a spiraling purple vortex. Upon closer examination I saw that this was a double disc on the band's own label and there were all sorts of special guests involved in the recording. Without the slightest hesitation I slit open the plastic shrink-wrap with my car key, pulled out disc one, popped the little sucker into my disc player and put on the headphones. "Finally," I thought as I closed my eyes and leaned back against a shelf filled with Beethoven's 9th. "Some rocking entertainment to help me make it through the night."
Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. The disc didn't rock, as a matter of fact; it wasn't rock at all. It turns out that Sonic Youth were actually paying tribute to a bunch of conceptualist avant-garde composers and most the tunes were "written" during the 1960's. I say, "written," because there's a whole lot of noise involved here and if not for the use of electric guitars, you wouldn't even know it was a rock band was performing this crazy stuff. Still, the night was passing slowly and I couldn't sleep so I listened to the misguided Youth perform bizarre compositions by people like John Cage, Steve Reich and Yoko Ono.
Now here's the strange thing. The more I listened to this unusual collection the more I liked it. It seems that the band has a succinct understanding of the conceptual artistry (sonic variety, of course) that emerged during the latter half of the 20th century and while the music doesn't have a backbeat, it does contain some interesting textures and wild effects. Using ultra-modern sampling technology, freaky guitar riffs, tape loops and other electronic noises, Sonic Youth embrace the intellectual/classical avant-garde's groundbreaking reconsiderations of abstract atmospherics, repetition-of-sound-as-art, unorthodox rhythms, atonal colorings and white-noise-as-entertainment.
By the time Tower Records opened up the following morning I was a changed man. You can imagine the staff's surprise when their first customer of the day emerged from the classical section rather than the street. But there I was, standing at the check-out counter with a huge batch of CD's by people like Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, James Tenney and the other artists whose work was interpreted by Sonic Youth on "Goodbye 20TH Century." Now don't tell anybody, but I kept the copy of SYR 4 in my pocket when I left the store. I mean, you've got to be a little bit of a rebel in this world, don't you?
This article appeared in the June 2000 issue of Smug Magazine.
