Sonic Youth Quotes
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The Strokes will never get anywhere after that first record.
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I never do releases to try and make or break some contemporary band.
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I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.
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There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.
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I like that show 'Ray Donovan' - I'm obsessed with that. He's in Hollywood, he's some kind of a fixer, but he's also kind of a thug. And 'Scandal,' the D.C. one with Kerry Washington.
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It's hard to get hot over a painting; there's no equivalent for teenage obsessiveness. Art obsession is ideology. Ideology can be made sexy, but it's easier in music.
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We're obviously not a platinum-selling band, and yet we've managed to maintain a career on a major label through all this time, and I think we always felt like we were, to a certain degree, infiltrators there. And it's been an interesting thing. It's all been like a big art project for us.
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But everything has been so gradual that it's sort of all come from, just hard work and basically being at it.
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In a certain way, we felt almost like spies in the major label world. We were coming from some other world, and we somehow got our foot in the door and crept in and were prowling around, checking things out and taking back reports from the front.
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I'm very interested in the distance and the space between those two poles: very concrete, song-based stuff on the one hand and very improvisational, abstract stuff on the other. I don't see any reason music should exclude one or the other, and I think the pairing of them together makes for very interesting music in a lot of ways.
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It's amazing how many things you can do when you're just pretending.
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It is fun to smash guitars.
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Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.
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Certainly our records could be found in most of the mom and pop indie stores, but we still found there were a lot of major stores that weren't on the tip of knowing what was happening and weren't stocking our records as readily as they were stocking, you know, Guns 'n' Roses or Billy Joel or whatever the hell. That certainly changed, and it changed rapidly after Nirvana's rise, that's for sure.
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You can't be a strong or cool woman and be represented except in a harsh way, looking mean and cold and hard. It's like reverse sexism.
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In the early eighties, there were a lot of artists involved with the music scene. All those young artists, before their careers took off, were into music. Robert Longo used to play some guitar. He had a band for a while. Basquiat had a band. I mean, people were always trying to mix music and art - in fact, I'm guilty of it myself.
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Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There's three people writing now, and we've all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words.
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We've been around long enough that there have certainly been people at every stage of our career telling us about one or another record being influential to their lives in one way or another. It's always nice to hear that stuff.
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Signing to a major label was an experiment for us. It was a challenge: working in a big studio with a producer was a challenge in a lot of ways. It all shaped what the band went on to become through the '90s. After we made 'Goo,' we went out and toured with Neil Young in ice hockey arenas for three months, and that was the same kind of thing.
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I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn't meant to be done for 25 years.
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Of course you want to keep making good records, but I think there were certain aspects to the indie rock situation at that point where we were pushing the envelope a little bit too far. We weren't happy with the distribution we were getting, and a few other things. So for a lot of ways it made sense for us to jump to a major label right then, and it made sense in terms of challenging ourselves to put ourselves in new situations.
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We're playing all these weird festivals, usually outdoors.
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We're like old people now playing music. I'm so glad we stuck it out because it's a lot better. I used to feel kind of anxious. Now our apprenticeship is over.
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It's not like we set out to antagonize the audience in any way. We're just presenting our music; it's really much more innocent.