Confusion is Next: The Sonic Youth Story
Alec Foege
Quartet pbk, 276 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)
It's not easy from this perspective to see how history will view the American band Sonic Youth. Maybe the whole face of 'alternative' rock would be different without them. Maybe. They played a not inconsiderable part in the nine million-selling Nirvana's move from indie Sub Pop to the major corporate machine of Geffen. Where would Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins be without them? Certainly without them Paul Smith would never have established the seminal Blast First Records (to release the band's Bad Moon Rising LP of 1985) and the extraordinarily influential roster of bands - Big Black, Head of David, Dinosaur jr, Butthole Surfers - attracted moth-like to the label's bright flame might never have found such a potent home. We - and this book - know that Sonic Youth are important even if neither of us is entirely sure why.
Not that Confusion is Next is just the history of one band. Author Foege, through documenting Sonic Youth, concisely documents the whole New York No Wave movement and beyond, up to grunge and college radio in the mid-90s. Clinton Heylin's invaluable book of a couple of years back - From The Velvets To The Voidoids - offered a potted diary of 'alternative' US rock starting with the Velvet Underground, Stooges and MC5 in the late 60's, through to the birth on New Wave in the late 70s. Foege takes the baton from Heylin as bands that grew to prominence under the New Wave banner - Television, Talking Heads, Suicide - went on to in turn influence the so-called No Wave with its punk-noise glee but also a rigorous, buttoned-down, almost academic edge that has further developed to the point where an early scene-name like Glen Branca can now gain his epic, punishingly loud guitar symphonies Radio 3 acceptance. (The scholastic emphasis Sonic Youth places upon microphones, tape speeds, guitar tunings and studio atmospherics - favouring old valve set-ups over modern multi-track digital - often belies the raucous noise-making of the recordings.)
This is all very chronological but particularly good in positioning names within a cogent portrait of the No Wave scene. Thurston Moore (singer/guitarist) and Lee Ranaldo (guitarist/singer) passing through the ranks of Glen Branca's guitar ensembles, somewhere between punk band, performance art and electric chamber orchestra. Or the band's association with New York's terrifying hard-bodied art-noise band Swans. (Who would have thought that the dour art student and lead Swan Michael Gira would've struck up an initial friendship not with the Sonic-boys but bassist and singer Kim Gordon?) This book usefully establishes the hows as well as the whys of oft-bandied names like Branca, Rhys Chatham, Lydia Lunch, Mars, and the Coachmen (an early Moore band).
Where the book really scores though is in their later, more difficult phase. The departure for headier climes with Geffen after the relative success of the Daydream Nation double (1988) effectively marked the beginning of the end for Paul Smith's empire. Others split (Steve Albini's Big Black and Rapeman) or jumped ship - Dinosaur jr, Butthole Surfers. (Blast First has recently reinvented itself as a smaller avant-garde/jazz outlet.) The parting of the ways was, if not acrimonious, at least frosty. Smith: "This band had changed my life, on many levels. To have them leave would have been bad enough, but the way they left - they didn't deal with it at all well."
And Foege thankfully doesn't blindly talk-up the band's first two, problematic LPs for their new pay-masters. Even with ultimate artistic control (a prerequisite of their signing) name producers and half-spoken tensions help explain the patchy, workaday quality to Goo (1990) and Dirty (1992). Gordon's increasing radicalization of herself as a woman in an essentially male environment (she has since taken on almost iconic status to the likes of Hole and Babes in Toyland and the so-called "riot grrrls") and the realisation of Moore and Gordon's control over vocal duties (Ranaldo gets maybe one or two each LP) suggest a friction not always immediately obvious to the outside world.
But Foege can't have it all his own way. Like Jon Savage's essential punk history England's Dreaming, Confusion is Next is sorely lacking even a rudimentary index. And there are niggling errors - John Peel's radio show is "taped live", whatever that means; the band appeared on The South Bank Show and not a BBC documentary. And even though the author tries to cover himself - "omissions are inevitable" - the discography is irritatingly uneven (no Screaming Fields of Sonic Love; no Made In USA; missing compilation tracks; erroneous information).
Whatever its flaws though, the value of Confusion is Next is not in dispute. Alongside the Heylin and Savage books, smaller but no less significant texts like Kevin S. Eden's Wire: Everybody Loves A History, Greil Marcus' In The Fascist Bathroom, and even the recent, controversial, gender-deconstructing The Sex Revolts, it constitutes another piece in the elaborate jigsaw of contemporary post-punk. And the final answer to the question of the band's importance is that it remains to be seen. Certainly Moore says at the end that he cannot envisage a time when the band won't exist, even if any lurking thoughts of mega-stardom have been relegated to a back-burner. Greil Marcus: "...it seems really dubious to me that they're ever going to be able to enter into the mass consciousness - I mean, they're a very bohemian band in their ambitions and their view of the world."