What Price Sonic Youth? Are You My Angel?

What Price Sonic Youth? Are You My Angel?

Sonic Youth’s concert will be an exercise in the collective longing for a radical past, brought to you by cell phones and event planners.

Written By

Ted Gordon

Anybody want tickets to see Sonic Youth at McCarren Park Pool on July 28? I’m selling. Well, I should amend that—anybody want tickets to see Daydream Nation? It almost breaks my heart that I’m selling these tickets—tickets that I bought six months in advance, tickets I’ve been saving in my drawer, reverently, thinking that they would let me in to what surely would be a monumental concert, a liberating event, a show that would validate and re-inspire my love for Sonic Youth.

When I heard that Sonic Youth would be playing their most acclaimed album, Daydream Nation, from start to finish in a live concert setting, I almost couldn’t believe it. For a band that has put out over ten albums since, and for a band that constantly tours playing songs picked from over 26 years of composition, to play an album as a discrete unit was a definite statement. It’s Gestalt theory-lite: proposing that the value of this collection of music, not as individual “songs” but rather as a complete unit, is more valuable than the sum of its parts. I put on my headphones and listened to Daydream Nation once more, listening for the Gestalt, looking for something to hit me, and hit me hard.

It did. Daydream Nation is an album full of wild experimentation, showing strong influences of musique concrete and Cagean aleatorics—an album that combines 20th century experimentalism with the idiom of rock music, mostly with overdriven guitars, Sprechstimme and a screwdriver (stuck into the neck of Lee Ranaldo’s guitar). Now the band wants to present Daydream Nation as a complete work, not broken into “songs.” For any proponent of Sonic Youth’s inclusion within the loose canon of “new music,” this would be seemingly ideal: not songs, but movements; not a collection of movements, but a unified artistic statement.

So why do I want to sell my tickets?

Seeing a performance of Daydream Nation in 2007, for $40 a ticket, is nothing like what Sonic Youth created in the studio in the late ’80s. The two events are radically different, both artistically and politically. This Daydream Nation concert is Walter Benjamin in reverse: the original recording’s aura is stripped away by the mimetic, nostalgic attempt to re-create it 20 years down the line. It’s an unlikely phenomenon, but it’s more wide-spread than one might think. To members of a generation raised on iconic recordings, live performances many times fail to deliver the authenticity of our listening experiences. This even carries over into the classical world: performers take fewer risks in interpretation, relying on tried-and-true replications rather than risk hitting a “wrong note.”

Works that are rarely performed, such as a rock album in its entirety, run this risk as well—except that in this case, the “interpretation” of the “work” is entirely separate from the original album, which exists not as notation but as a record of creative studio work. What was crafted in a studio in 1987 will be inexorably changed in 2007.

Don’t get me wrong—I love Sonic Youth’s post-Daydream Nation work, but I’m just not sure I want to contribute my $40 to Sonic Youth (and their sponsor, a new wireless phone company) in order to attempt an experience that I, and most of the other people of my generation, missed out on. Instead of reifying my impossible nostalgia, I think I’ll just listen to the album, at home, instead.