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The Strokes will never get anywhere after that first record.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
I always use the Rolling Stones as the whipping boy for this, but they still play old songs as 90% of their set, and we would die if that were the case.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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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.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
I've never been good with structure - doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I'm supposed to do.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
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.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
It's easier to write about a celebrity, a personality, than it is to dig in and write about the music.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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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.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
I don't really feel comfortable anywhere except when I'm working alone at home. It's exhausting to be out around people.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
I certainly don't sit around in the morning making pancakes listening to Whitehouse or anything.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth
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I mean, most of it is probably more obscure and just more noisy than either of those two bands, but Thurston has stuff all the time that he's involved with that is fairly obscure and experimental.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
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.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth -
I saw the Dead in '73 at Nassau Coliseum, and that same year, I saw them at the crazy, big Watkins Glen festival. It was just outrageous. It was amazing to see the reciprocity between them and their audience.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth -
Rock'n'roll saved my soul.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth -
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.
Thurston Moore Sonic Youth -
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.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth
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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.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
I love Northampton. As exciting and glamorous as New York can be, I'm always really relieved to get back there.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
And then, I was thinking of doing a record just like starting with voice, because I did this one song that was just kind of a cappella, and I did it for this art piece I did where people could come and play music to go with a voice.
Kim Gordon Sonic Youth -
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.
Lee Ranaldo Sonic Youth