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).

x-post

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

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.