every one's a winner: the sonic youth syndrome

(haha - yeah P-Funk fans don't agree about anything either)

Because they released this one album called Sister....... (and so it degenerates).

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my favorite sonic youth album, for some reason, is washing machine. But I love them all like they were my children. Definitely top ten best bands of all time, not up for debate, all those who disagree lick godhead style

I tend to agree that this is the obvious choice - though of course there will be dissenters.

But no one thinks NYC Ghosts and Flowers is the best SY album, either.

I think the Pixies are a little more unassailable. I wouldn't condemn anyone for thinking any of their albums are the best, whereas I would have to introduce someone to the warm jets if they swore by Dirty.... (or maybe that means they'd like it?)

There must be better examples.

i didn't think anyone honestly thought the "3rd phase" SY (washing mashine on, let's say) was really really best. who are these people? the argt was between the pre-geffen and the grunge ones (and then which of those).

f--gg - i'm not prepared to defend Washing Machine on any critical level, I'm just saying it's my favorite.

I take it you've never visited the Official SY forum?

I never said it was!!

i accept that you're far from alone in having blood on the tracks as your fave. what i meant was that if you poll a thousand dylan fans, a lopsidedely higher percentage will name an album from his volcanic mid-'60s outburst: most likely blonde on blonde, highway 61, basement tapes or bringing it all back home. i'm pretty sure there is at least that much of a general consensus on dylan.

what i want to know is
i. are they really the most extreme example of this? (i think they may be tho the fall wz a pretty good counter-call) (so wz parliament etc)
ii. can someone name an OBVIOUSLY more extreme example?

"this" kinda does equal what shakey summarised it as: "the fans don't agree on ANYTHING" — but specifically "what it is that is good about [xx]" is what i mean; or what it is that is TYPICAL abt [xx]" or "what it is that [xx] DO that no one else does" (see this last wd not be so true of the fall surely?)

i imagine there are [xx]'s where there's more agreement abt "best LP" maybe but none at all about that last question

whoa xposts. my fave sy is sister, and i won't hear a word against the butch vig ones. i guess i'm agnostic about the recent jammy stuff, i never listen to it. and lee was always going on about the dead! i thought that was always their cool-not-cool knight's move secret weapon since forever.

(the post above this — mine i mean — is CLARIFICATION OF WHAT THE THREAD IS ABOUT disguised as a SLIGHT CHANGE IN WHAT THE THREAD IS ABOUT)

i think the beatles are the most extreme example of this. they are loved -- and sometimes hated -- for a hugely diverse number of reasons, and while the polls pretty much always come down to sgt. pepper or revolver, that's only because polls, by their nature, have to come down to something. there are at least 10 beatles albums that you could very easily name their best (and you'd be right) if you were inclined to have that argument.

my distinction is "most" dylan fans. obviously, anyone who's released dozens of albums is going to have fans attracted to him for various reasons, various eras, etc. but there's almost always going to be a general consensus, and i think if you put a thousand dylan fans in a room, that's what the clear consensus would be.

Meet Jeremy. Jeremy likes Sonic Youth. His favorite album by the Youth is Goodbye 20th Century, their self-released cover album of avant-garde works by various modern classical composers. The CDs currently in his five-disc changer are Shalabi's St-Orange, Xiu Xiu, Merzbow, the Boredoms, and Fennesz.

Meet Erica. Erica likes Sonic Youth. Her favorite album by the Youth is Dirty, the band's most direct flirtation with mainstream rock. The CDs currently in Erica's five disc-changer are the Breeders, Blonde Redhead, Wilco, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Sleater-Kinney.

Oversimplified personifications? Sure, but chances are, if you're a fan of the twenty-year-old Sonic Youth franchise, you probably exist at some point on a continuum between my little creations above. The band itself has been running a zig-zag pattern on the same scale its entire existence, constantly oscillating between their art-noise laboratory and major-label rock band personae while covering all points in between. As a result, you don't see the Jeremies and Ericas of the world coming together over a single Sonic Youth record too often-- if one is jammin', the other's likely scoffin' or wincin'. Not since the sprawling Daydream Nation (and arguably, its predecessor and follow-up) have the two been able to slow-dance to the same song collection.

I think this is bullshit.

that's quite an expansion from people not agreeing on a single "best album". And I think there may be more consensus among SY fans in this respect than there is about particular albs (eg, most fans - myself included - would say "revolutionary guitar arrangements/approaches"/"guitar 'noise' as central instrument", or something like that). I think most fans would agree on key aspects of the Fall as well (ME Smith bitter weirdo beat poetry, repetitive song structures, etc.)

(in other words "slight change" = understatement)

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i'm this close to saying it's "merely" the wierdo tunings, but i can't cos Kim is such an incredible vocalist. funny that no other band has made much hay with made-up guitar tunings since!

I love you.

haha xposts.

THEN BACK TO THE QUESTION

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(ps I hate the Dead. really!)

no can do, sorry. i'll be too busy practicing "kissability" for when my turn at SY karaoke comes up.

Stereolab: before/after "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" = Sonic Youth before/after "Daydream Nation"

this is closer to what i wz getting at: i realised after i read it

(haha ok i *did* put in a joke abt yr logic first time as it was a bit of a jump from what i'd put, but since the jump wz in the right direction and i'd not said what i meant i changed it to "well done") (so chill out d00d i'm not at war w.you)

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(Miles Davis is a great suggestion, I think - but the multiple band angle muddies the water a bit)

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i third miles: the muddying is no prob w.me

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What is the best Zeppelin album? That would be hard.

and the best Zeppelin album is... ALL OF THEM.

Stereolab: before/after "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" = Sonic Youth before/after "Daydream Nation"

-- MindInRewind (bruner@physics.utoronto.ca ), March 8th, 2005.

pretty much. i have a special place in my heart for dots and loops (my introduction to the band) and aluminium tunes... though i think i listen to the abc sessions more than any other album of their's these days

I think Pixies fans are pretty evenly distributed across their four full-length albums.

Daydream Nation ... PROVEN BY SCIENCE

Sonic Youth Top 10

(xp) (great points, Shakey)

Where is the love for SONIC NURSE?

whereas a band that has a more focused, consistent aesthetic like say the ramones or slade or jesus & marychain or something isn't going to generate the same diversity because basically you either like em or you don't and if you do, you're probably going to like the band at their MOST focused and defined, which is usually one of the first 3 records.

funny though, i think the stones and the kinks fit into the first category for the best part of their careers - but lost it when they tried to become focused & consistent "give the people what they want" types.

...though there auckland 2004 concert was phenomenal

pavement, yeah, every album feels like a difft. period. same with velvets, & same with lou reed solo. elvis costello?

alt. artists with "one" period but no clear pattern of refinement, but rather variation -- i.e. too $hort. alt. artists who release something new and difft each *rare* time? missy elliot, outkast (both prelapsarian, of course, tho the fact that some don't recognize the lapse underlines the argt.) yo la tengo? madonna! (singles-driven artist whose albums age more quickly than the attendent singles [by virtue of the latter's cultural impact], and style-switching like crazy) who else fits the madonna mold? ARE there other long-lived style-switching singles-artists, or is that HER definining characteristic?

(another key point of sy vs. beatles -- beatles fans are expected to be all wishy-washy "each period is so great, oh i can't choose" while sy fans feel *betrayed* almost by ppl. who make incorrect choices -- the partisanship is what kicks it up a notch.)

compare to "acoustic vs. electric" and "nighthawks vs. swordfishtrombones".

New Order sprang to mind (with the obv disclaimer that EVERYBODY agrees that Hooky's bass/baritone guitar is unique/defining and what they do best). Things that non-one can agree on : Barney's lyrics (crap or as important and wonderful as Hooky's bass - I think the latter), Movement (miserable finding-of-feet, or majesty. The latter clearly), Blue Monday (a pioneering recd or a horror - the former), Get Ready, and on and on...

I have to confess that I spend a bit too much time in the cockfarm that is NewOrderOnline a while back - this opened my eyes to some interesting differences of opinion about NO. Maybe all fansites are like this though, I wouldn't know, not being loyal enough for such fora.

Confusion is Sex - Bad Moon Rising

EVOL - Daydream Nation

Goo - Washing Machine

A Thousand Leaves - Sonic Nurse

When I clicked on this thread, I was gonna use the Miles Davis comparison that someone else used -- but the diff band thing is an appropriate point. I ask you, what's your favorite Van Halen album?

the amount of uncertainty (disagreement) you consider there is about what artist x's peak is directly proportional to* how interested in (obsessed with) x you are personally?

it would never have occurred to me that this is SY's defining characteristic but then I'm not that keen on them. the stereolab divide I'm very conscious of because i love them dearly.

*what's the mathematical symbol for this?

(or x = ky if you want to specify the degree of proportionality)

A Thousand Leaves - Sonic Nurse

That sounds about right, except you could even break those last two categories down further.

1) Confusion is Sex, Bad Moon Rising
2) EVOL, Sister, Daydream Nation, Whitey Album
3) Goo, Dirty
4) Experimental Jet Set, Washing Machine
5) A Thousand Leaves, NYC Ghosts & Flowers, SYR1-3, Goodbye 20th Century
6) Murray Street, Sonic Nurse

washing machine
daydream nation
murray st
bad moon rising
evol
sister
nyc ghosts & flowers
confusion is sex
a thousand leaves
nurse
experimental jet set..
dirty
goo

That said ... I don't think most bands have serious fans that agree on their peaks. Part of fandom is that someone will defend almost everything.

anyway stop putting SY lps in difft orders and answer the thread!!

mark s, there's nothing to answer. You made an amorphous and partially sensical statement (SY's greatest characteristic is that their fans can't agree on the best LP???) and ilxors are commenting as they see fit. Did you have a question?

(and if that isn't it, I haven't a clue)

Has to be The Fall then - plenty of albums to disagree on. (Oh and there are surely 3 periods : pre-Brix, avec-Brix, post-Brix - ignoring the fact that she came back for a bit)

On "Murray Street" and more successfully on "Sonic Nurse" SY try to mate the two tendencies, which they tried once before on "Sister" and "Daydream Nation."

In retrospect, "Washing Machine" is where they started all over again.

Hi there!

see, here's the problem with answering mark's question. i hold the exact opposite view because i am a stereolab geek (and bristle whenever "the uncommitted" moan that the new one sounds like the last one when obv. it doesn't) but i have only dipped into SY's discog and my vague impression is that it's all much of a muchness

We need a superfan (or Mr. Christgau) to decide this FITE!

I'm one of these folks who straddles the fence a little bit ... i think Blood is in fact Bob's single greatest record ... but '65-'66 is an extraordinary creative blur ... where he's traveling at light speed and tearuing down convention and all the other important stuff ... my thought there, though, i don;t think you can credit Bob with a cohesive vision in that time other than the mess itself, if that makes any sense. Individual songs and lyrics are mind-blowing, but there's a lot of shitty shit mixed in ... tis why I think Blonde on Blonde is rock's most overrated album.

I stand by Transient Random Noise-Bursts as the best Stereolab album. It's hard for me to imagine a musical thrill as keen in their work as anticipating the opening drones of "Jenny Ondioline" while sitting through those two songs leading up to it.

Many of these do have an overwhelmingly big album though. I'd say easily Paranoid for Sabbath and Moving Pictures for Rush. They're by far their biggest sellers and have many of their most famous songs and also seem to 'sum up' the band in a way. It doesn't mean that lots of fans might have a different album as their personal favourite but there is a certain level of consensus around these as key albums. If classic rock radio's going to play a classic album side, you know it probably won't be from Sabotage or Hemispheres. Even with Miles, I think Kind of Blue has a comparable status (though I like the 70s stuff myself). I don't think Daydream Nation (or any other SY album) really has even this level of consensus around. It is, or at least was, an indie and critical fave but it just doesn't have that level of popular recognition. Most people know SY more by the 90s hits, which seem to me to get the biggest cheers at their shows.

and I'm not sure mark is even talking about popular recognition among the wider public here (but I may be wrong)

the dead would have been a good answer, except mark doesn't like any of their records.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), March 8th, 2005.

athousand leaves (and moores' psychic hearts) should really fit in section 4, as they're both accessible poppy albums

btw, im a stereolab super-fan... they have a TON of variation in their albums, from the early guitar drones, through their experimental and then funky/eclectic middle periods (which are two distinct periods), through to the bossa nova period which became a bit self-indulgent and stagnent, before the most recent pop and groove orientated revitalisation of the last few releases.

so I get the thrust of the q (or at leats i did from ms' post on the 'murray street' thread - maybe its become something else): some fans will dig certain bits but not others, and those 'fans' will lose faith, they'll think it indulgent, and go somewhere else, and others come in as replacement. I get the sense that in the beatles you were taken on a journey and you would not let go, you'd forgive them, and its the same with coltrane: he was a saint ('ascension' is his 'revolution no9').

cecil taylor and art ensemble I think of as concepts and sun ra went back to the beginning toward the end of his life: he was circular. Miles is the nearest so far...he and sy wnated to be far bigger than they ended up being. but in rock-land I think the dead C are quite near: a brush with gtr lo-fi pop, reaching a midway point, then going through sheer lo-fi-ness disguised as improv, finally improvising song on 'repent', while 10 or so fans learned to play dead C music, with the result being their last rec 'the dammed'- amm goes DIY.

Actually, I think Silver Session for Jason Knuth (which I don't think anyone's mentioned as of yet) is pretty damn awesome.

1a. or, whadda you mean, 'fan'?

2. anyone with a long enough career and big enough catalog will suffer slightly, i think (as far as the possibility of this syndrome being real is concerned), from having their career reduced to its highlights by the canonization process. which is to say: i'm sure there are 'a lot' of people who have listened to every sonic youth record and have pronounced daydream nation to be the best, but i would expect there also to be plenty who have come up with that one somehow due to it being what they were led to, just as there will also be some (i would think fewer) who are more drawn to more recent records for similar reasons. i don't know what effect this might all have, but my hunch is to say that it means you should discount the distorting effects of canonization slightly.

2a. i wonder whether this isn't worse for miles; as was pointed out above for a different reason, he went through a number of very distinct periods, which i think probably makes the attrition in what of his the canon says you should listen to even harsher (not having any convincing way, like a 'fertile period' career-arc story, apart from the not very useful 'protean genius at home in whatever he tried' line, to say to the newcomer or casual fan 'each of these nine wildly distinct records is perfect and indispensable', it - the CANON - is forced to fall back on standbys like 'kind of blue' and then some mumbling).

2b. or: on the other hand, this periodization might make it way easier for a long career like this to be recommended to listeners (i am still thinking about the influence of reputation on mark's question, here) of different profiles. the miles album for rock fans, etc.

3. what kind of a consensus would say what about mark's question (like, whether there was one about sy or not)? some people have talked as if when tallied up daydream nation, or whatever it is that would win, would have at least a plurality of the votes, possibly a majority (depending on the boldness of the claim). but the talk of periods in sy's sound implies that, if records from different periods were to prove popular enough choices, they would at least be represented by significant chunks of the fanbase, even if those weren't sufficient to win the plurality. (so i guess i'm asking, since i don't know anything about voting procedures, ha, is how much of a win would a record need to count convincingly as a consensus favorite? more than a sixteenth of the votes? an eighth? etc. i reckon this is complicated by the fact that we're talking about records here and not elected officials. the losers don't have to make do with the winning record, and so their choices have a different significance.)

4. there's a weird flipside to mark's question: the fan who likes them all. i like them all. i don't really know which i think is best, though i have preferences for some over others for different reasons that change over time. but, at least on the basis of remembering what it felt like when i was younger, with different bands, i don't feel like i like them all just because of my fannish blindness, let's say. i've always thought that had something to do with mark's syndrome.

5. 'open' bands (or sounds of bands, or outputs of bands) vs. 'closed' bands - compare to open texts vs closed texts. (if this makes any sense then i think it's closely related to what amst said about jazz. but then if that's so, i don't think it necessarily has anything to do with improvisation per se. i'm weirdly inclined to note instead a similarity between jazz and western classical music in this respect: that if the music is 'pure' enough, in the condescending music-theoretic sense of being only about harmonies and rhythms and stuff (or being able to be persuasively, if incompletely, talked about as if it were just about harmonies and rhythms and stuff), then it's much easier to keep making interesting new music for years by tooling around with your basic materials. cf. miles, monk especially. this is probably also related to the weird tunings deal, to their being an 'art' band, to their sort of formalist bent (if i can say that - which, apart from the more high-arty kind of formalism, probably is very tied up with their place in the 80s and their performance art streak). also of note probably - for sustaining this particular kind of peripatetic career, i mean - is the importance of their regular stance of cultural distance, of being at a place from which they can incorporate or transform products of a culture seen as in some way a long eternal present that stretches back to the fifties, more or less. one kind of trajectory this seems to set them apart from is a progressivist one, but i think that's probably not necessarily the case - maybe there could be a band that has a lot of there characteristics but is the kind of band about whom one could end up saying, they took it so far and then had nowhere else to go, or, they bled that well dry.)

I don't think this happens with many classical composers

is this still the case

e-s-dn period seems rather calcified as their 'alt' apex w/ some more 'mainstream' crix liable to express prefs for dn-g-d

boredoms? kate bush? scott walker? bee gees? f mac?

agree SY doesn't fit the bill

i don't think the thread's premise was particularly true even at the time, but not necessarily any less so now

More true than for most bands/artists though I think.

In addition to the artists mentioned ITT these two also come to mind:

Steely Dan
Prince

with the caveat that in both cases the era of assumed greatness (by most critics) really covers a period of about a decade or so whereas Sonic Youth managed to double that.