Sonic Youth Quotes
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It's amazing how many things you can do when you're just pretending.
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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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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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There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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'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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My main pedal is the Ibanez Analog Delay, the AD9 or the AD80, whichever one it is. That's my go-to pedal for short delay. I don't think I could live without that pedal.
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Signing to a major, there weren't many bands from our sphere that were doing it. I mean, obviously R.E.M. had done it, and Husker Du and the Replacements had done it, and maybe Soul Asylum, but that was probably about it. Those four bands were pretty much the only ones from that milieu that had signed to a major.
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I went to art school, and I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. I basically moved to New York to do art, and I just sort of fell into doing music at an early age.
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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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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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I'll leave a store if I hate the music. If it's just, like, techno, I feel like my brain is going to explode.
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We're all very sensitive that Jim has the shortest history with the band. He wants to be somewhat of a free agent. I'm just going to let time dictate how Jim's future evolves.
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You're always going to feel like you're catching up, and part of that is just balancing work and motherhood and the whole feeling of needing to please, which I do think girls and women feel more than men.
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And for me, I think of the group as one in which there's always this pendulum swinging back and forth between writing shorter, more concise pieces until we get kind of sick of it and then writing pieces that get more sprawling and experimental and explore in different directions.
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It's hard for bands to stick it out because people grow up, and it never really pays off. If you're looking for some sort of payoff, it's not gonna happen.