Sonic Youth Quotes
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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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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.
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I've never been good with structure - doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I'm supposed to do.
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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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There is still nothing under the sun quite like a Grateful Dead concert.
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When I was in the first years of university, I fell in more with the visual arts crowd because it was more interesting than where music was.
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The Strokes will never get anywhere after that first record.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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I don't really feel comfortable anywhere except when I'm working alone at home. It's exhausting to be out around people.
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It's easier to write about a celebrity, a personality, than it is to dig in and write about the music.
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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'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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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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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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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.
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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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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 certainly don't sit around in the morning making pancakes listening to Whitehouse or anything.
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I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.
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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.