Sonic Youth – Hits are for Squares / 1991: The Year The Punk Broke

Could Sonic Youth‘s 30 year journey be nearing its end? The outlook is certainly not promising.

Apart from the driving of a stake through the heart of any indie-rocking believers in true love, the recent announcement that guitarist Thurston Moore’s and bassist Kim Gordon’s near-30 year marriage was over could well mean that the art-rock band, no,the art-rock institution who have long since outlived their youthful name is nearing a shock retirement. Allowing a general release for Hits are for Squares, originally available only via Starbucks’ Hear Music series, meanwhile, could well indicate the kind of creative standstill that’s usually the motivation for putting out a Greatest Hits, as well as being totally at odds with the ever prolific habits of Sonic Youth.

If it really is curtains, the decision to put out the compilation and DVD ( 1991: The Year Punk Broke) on the same day is a fitting parting shot. Ever since their inception in New York’s skronk-infested ‘No Wave’ underground in the very early 80′s, Sonic Youth have inspired extreme reactions. People tend to either absolutely adore their experimentally noisy ways, lauding their durable creativity and role in nurturing and paving way various movements in alternative rock, most notably the early-90′s Grunge outbreak (more of which in a minute), or are detractors that despair at the band’s rigorously maintained air of unflappable cool and what they see as pretentious, emotionally ice-cold, self-consciously ‘edgy’ experimentation.

Looking at these two releases, they’re both right.

Hits are for Squares provides a compelling case for the defence. Chosen by such notables from the world of music, literature and cinema as Beck, Radiohead, Dave Eggers and Gus Van Sant, you might well doubt the wisdom of the cherry-picked selection that covers the band’s entire career (no ‘Diamond Sea’?), but you can’t really argue with the level of innovation and songwriting - an often overlooked aspect of Sonic Youth – on display. By the time 1986′s truly psychedelic totem to extreme guitar abuse ‘Expressway to Yr Skull’ (cheers, the Flaming Lips) rolls forth, we’ve covered every phase of the band’s existence, from the early days of uncompromising (and at times hard-going) noise-mongering to the punchy near-hit (Heaven forbid) days of Goo (1990) and 1992′s Dirty, ending up with the hypnotic three-guitar web-weaving of the early 00′s Jim O’Rourke assisted five-piece line-up responsible for career peak Murray Street (2002). Even the worryingly meandering, obligatory new track ‘Slow Revolution’ doesn’t spoil this from being a good introduction for newcomers, even if Sonic Youth’s appeal has always been based on whatever mutation their sound’s undergoing at any given moment rather than ‘hits’, meaning that the band’s wares are best sampled in album-length doses.

1991: The Year the Punk Broke is a more troublesome beast. Capturing Sonic Youth and pals on their 1991 European festival tour, any hopes that the amiable, shambolic lo-fi film might offer some into insight into why punk attitude-inspired rock action had finally started to venture towards centre-stage from the margins, courtesy of a band who had even at that point been around long enough to discuss the topic with some authority, are quickly disposed of. The opening scene – Moore reciting Beat poetry-inspired gibberish as Gordon and tour buddy Kurt Cobain mug along – sets the tone for what’s essentially a home film posing as a bona fide documentary. Watching ‘alternative’ musicians ridicule foreign journos from beyond a protective language barrier in between bouts of dressing room wreckage is really no more edifying than sitting through footage of mainstream privileged rock monsters indulging in the same time-honoured, tiresome pursuits, even if many of the abusive set-pieces seem mercifully staged.

The live cuts are largely excellent, with Dinosaur Jr and Nirvana – literally days away from the era-changing release of Nevermind – on especially fierce form. Strangely for a band who’s live prowess has never been in doubt, Sonic Youth come across as a surprisingly disengaging presence on stage here, almost as if the large audiences the band was exposed to for the first time following the release of Goo had thrown them off balance. Selling out definitely appears to be on the band’s collective mind, with Moore banging on about destroying record labels to bemused fans, almost as if he’d momentarily forgotten that both his band and support act Nirvana had recently signed with über-major label Geffen. Who knows how he would’ve reacted to news that the compilation this DVD release is coupled with was initially only available in the outlets of a certain global coffee retail giant.