This is the third installment of my "20 Years Ago Today" series, where I write about a life-changing album on the exact date of its 20th anniversary (you can check out the 1st one here and the 2nd one here). 20 years ago today, July 21, 1992, Sonic Youth released their 8th studio album, “Dirty”.
The inherent problem with memory is that its fuzzy quality lends itself easily to gestalt revisionist history. As we move farther away, our rearview mirror fogs up, where we are forced to replicate the bleary images with form-fitting narratives whenever we “remember” the past.
This could ostensibly mean that our Pinoy grunge-era generation is faced with a more extensive reconstruction because our visual experience with music was already fuzzy to begin with. Back then, MTV was being broadcasted on a UHF channel with a signal so weak, the picture quality vacillated between grainy and “what the fuck is that?” Every music video we saw looked like an impressionistic painting smudged in the rain. I saw Sonic Youth’s video for “100%” on MTV’s 120 Minutes one very late night in ’92 (or was it early ’93?) and I could vaguely make out the shape of the lead singer’s head, the image of young stoned-looking people swaying to the band’s music inside some vaguely-open bare house, some young punks skateboarding outside, and the shape of a svelte blonde bouncing up and down as she played her bass. I couldn’t see her face; all I saw was a hint of flesh between grainy streaks of yellow – but I already decided that she was gorgeous.
Because I was an adolescent at the time, and therefore was just starting to become aware of things, and one of these things happened to be Sonic Youth at a time that was perfectly made to like Sonic Youth, I am aware that what I am about to say has no objectivity whatsoever, but I will say it anyway because I’m confident that it is absolutely right: that was the proper way to experience Sonic Youth for the first time.
It was serendipitous, the way the technological limitations of that era enabled my first viewing of the “100%” music video to perfectly match Sonic Youth’s music. Like spotting a beautiful woman within the violent, random strokes of an impressionistic painting, I saw an infinitely cool culture within the graininess of late-night UHF television. That’s what I found beautiful in Sonic Youth’s music, hearing it for the first time – the way the violent, haphazard noises somehow formed a general harmony, an arresting melody. From that night on, until I eventually bought a tape of their “Dirty” album, Sonic Youth became the coolest thing in my little 14-year-old universe.
Much has been written about the importance of the Alternative Music explosion of the early 90s but one thing that can never be overstated is how jarring it was at the time. It’s never going to happen again (the internet will never allow anything to be “underground” ever again, so there will never be anywhere from which to emerge anymore), so I’ll try describing it to today’s generation the best way I can: imagine that, for the last five years, all you heard on the radio were Carly Rae Jepsen, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, and Katy Perry. “Rock music” is a term exclusively reserved for the likes of Coldplay, Train, Linkin Park and Paramore. That’s it. That’s “popular music” for the last FIVE YEARS – there’s no such thing as “indie rock” or “chill wave” or “disco punk”; even that stupid “Pumped Up Kicks” song doesn’t exist. Everything literally sounds the same.
Well, that was basically pop music from 1985 to 1990. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991 was akin to a freak sex show crashing a children’s birthday party. The transition was drastic and blunt. It was so alien and so unprecedented that no one even knew what to call it (that’s how the vaguest musical genre ever – “Grunge” – was coined).
But by 1992, I was already bored with grunge. I was tired of all my classmates talking about Nirvana, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and Pearl Jam. I was so annoyed that all these bozos who were just a few months removed from worshipping Bon Jovi were now suddenly into “alternatib”. I hated it because being different was supposed to be my thing. I took pride in being the only one in my grade school batch who listened to The Smiths, The Railway Children, and The Cure, that when I met a girl in 5th grade (or was it 4th grade?) who shared my musical tastes I instantly had a crush on her (her name’s Rowena Estavillo, by the way, so wherever you are…yeah).
Sonic Youth in 1992 was my Nirvana. It was my jarring paradigm shift that shook me off of my boredom. “Dirty” was the album I listened to that made me feel, once again, superior. I could listen to it everyday and revel at how all my classmates were idiots who didn’t know what they were talking about. Everyone is at their pettiest and shallowest at 14; so imagine me as a music snob at 14.
“Dirty” is filled with anti-grunge otherness: there was the occasional jangly guitar (“Wishful Thinking”, “Theresa’s Sound World”, “Chapel Hill”) that sounded welcoming to my new wave-weaned ears, there was Kim Gordon's ultra-cool spoken-wordish vocals that sounded so dirty and beautiful at the same time, and of course their signature noise that sounded so subversive at the time. Where grunge’s noise was more muscular, aggressive, and measured, Sonic Youth’s was loose, chaotic, and surreal. They didn’t use distortion in the traditional way. Feedback wasn’t noise; it was their way of inventing notes and melodies that didn’t exist. Their music sounded so refreshing in its beautiful and artful degeneracy that they became so infinitely cool. It sounded as if they weren’t blasting noise so much as just effortlessly oozing it.
I wouldn’t call Sonic Youth’s guitar sound “fuzzy”, that’s a term I reserve for My Bloody Valentine (which I would discover a year later and instantly replace Sonic Youth as my new “coolest band on the planet”). It’s more spastic; the feedback doesn’t give off a fuzz, so much as a drone that wavers between a screech and a burst of thunder. They had a shambling, relaxed carelessness then that we’ve never heard of before or since and can only be approximated by the likes of Pavement and Broken Social Scene (when they’re at their best, at least).
Today’s indie rock is characterized more by a steely, eager calculation (as perfectly illustrated by the Raveonettes’ cover of “100%”). Sonic Youth was the David Foster Wallace to this generation’s Chuck Klosterman of music designed for hipsters (this is not a dig on Chuck, whose work I love; it’s just a necessary analogy) – yes, Klosterman’s logic is cleaner and more accessible, but Wallace was more passionate and unrestrained that it seemed like he didn’t write his words and ideas, so much as he vomited them into his pages, and he was also the more intelligent one (Klosterman even concedes this). The idea of “coolness” today is disturbingly formal; the way hipsters have an established code for dressing and doing stuff. Watch that video of “100%” again – those kids couldn’t give a fuck what they looked like.
Maybe it was because punk was more recent back then, and therefore less deconstructed, but there was more emphasis on dirtiness in “Dirty”-era 90s. Look at Sonic Youth’s videos – they’re always set on graffiti-stained, unconsciously unkempt suburbia. And it wasn’t just them; it was basically the early 90s Alternative Music aesthetic, borrowed from the likes of R.E.M. (“It’s the End of the World as We Know It”) and The Replacements (“Bastards of Young”) from a decade earlier. “Cool” meant not caring. Hipsters care way too much (about things that really don’t matter).
The farther away I move from my early teen years, the fuzzier my memory of them becomes, and therefore, the more idealized it gets. I am often tempted to say that our era was the best time to be young, because it captured a certain innocent grubbiness and earnestness that is intrinsic in adolescence. But I’m sure lots of other generations would make their own cases – the hippies of the 60s, the punks of the 70s, or even today’s hipsters 20 years from now. Every generation’s youth was awesome when remembered, and the current one always sucks. This is a cycle that will continue forever.
I’ve actually grown weary of claiming that “music was better then”, which is why I was dreading to write about Sonic Youth because I knew it would only reawaken my inner, dormant snob. What’s great about this though is that it has forced me to unearth my old “Dirty” tape, look at its bad-ass sleeve again, listen to it (I have mp3s of the entire “Dirty” album but they don't have the lo-fi, time-travel appeal of my old tape) and see if I can somehow hear my 14-year-old self amidst the avalanche of noise and old-tape hiss. And I’m glad I did this, because it allowed me to forget about the other stuff that don’t really matter - about this generation versus our generation, about what Sonic Youth “means” - and just get lost in the noise once more. Some memories don't need to be reconstructed; they're just perfectly hazy the way they're supposed to be.
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