Sonic Nurse

Their music is strangely calming for me.

Hi Son,

Toward the end of my graduate career, I received some mp3s from a friend of mine. First thing to mention is that I have no idea if mp3s are used anymore. It was a thing during the late 90s and for most of the 00s. Secondly, the music that he had given me was a bunch of tracks from several different albums of Sonic Youth. I had heard a few songs by them and knew of them growing up. At one point before receiving the music from my buddy, I tried to get into them but had a hard time doing so. Their sound is not for everyone. A while back I wrote about Radiohead and how I had put them off for so long because I considered them "too weird.” While Radiohead can seem abstract to many, Sonic Youth may be a step even further away from “the norm.” They have a lot of songs that are fairly popular and pretty pallatable to mainstream. However, if you delve into their discography, you will find they push the limits on what sound you can get guitars and sound equipment.

The band started out the year I was born (1981) out of New York City. By the mid-80s they settled with the lineup of Thurston Moore (lead guitar and vocals), Kim Gordon (bass guitar and vocals), Lee Ronaldo (rhythm guitar and vocals) and Steve Shelley (drums). Thurston, Kim and Lee would rotate on lead vocals where a majority of their songs were led by either Thurston or Kim. I’m going to skip over the 20th century, because I don’t want this to turn into a full on history of the band. That’s something I could go over with you when you’re older, if you’d like. When the band came into the 21st century, they recorded with a fifth member for the early-to-mid 00s named Jim O’Rourke. He would be involved in three records: NYC Ghosts & Flowers, Murray Street and Sonic Nurse. NYC Ghosts & Flowers was a record some considered as a reaction to the theft of some of the band’s equipment the year prior. When I used the term “pallatable” earlier, this was probably on the low end in relation to the rest of their discography. However, the other two were much more listenable.

The collection of music I had just inherited did not include Murray Street. I wouldn’t come to listen to that record until your mom and me started to stream music. It’s one of their better records and some considered it to be their best work since the late 80s (Daydream Nation). Luckily, I did have all of the tracks to Sonic Nurse. The tracklisting has 10 songs which average about 6 minutes per song. Normally, when a Sonic Youth song goes for that long you can anticipate about 2 minutes at the end dedicated to a jam session of weird guitar tunings, and objects used to make just loud noises come from their instruments. There is plenty of that in Sonic Nurse, but not so much that it leaves you with the impression the record is saturated with it. The mix of pallatable sound and lyrics to “lets see what strange sounds we can make our guitars make” is just right.

The first track is “Pattern Recognition.” It has a pretty interesting backstory where the song was originally named “It’s the Mayhem.” When the chorus, “It’s the Mayhem! It’s the Mayhem!” by Thurston was sung, it came off sounding like “Instant Mayhem!” There was a potential conflict with one of the producers, Don Fleming, who had a personal record label called “Instant Mayhem.” To rectify this, Kim reworked the song using the inspiration of a novel called “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson. The new version pretty much changed the lead vocals from Thurston to Kim and had a completely new message in Kim’s vision. The reason why I bring this up is because I respect the hell out of Kim Gordon. Kim was a trailblazer. When Sonic Youth started, Kim was not in the typical image of a “Girl In a Band.” For the record, I did just used the name of her memoir to make a point. She was/is a feminist who more personified the punk and alternative scene. Kim’s vocals are typically sultry, but she could also just cut loose and whale about as emphatically as any lead vocalist of the 20th century. I own her memoir, but have not finished it yet. I need to pick it back up again.

The next two tracks are “Unmade Bed” and “Dripping Dream.” Both are lead by Thurston vocally. I love both tracks. “Unmade Bed” is just a really cool, somewhat loungy type of sound. “Dripping Dream” starts off with some feedback and a “staticy” type of sound, but continues to “mature” in sound and comes to fruition by the middle of the song. Then we’ve got “Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream.” The original title was not “Kim Gordon” but it was to be “Mariah Carey.” The band couldn’t use Mariah’s name in the title out of legal concerns. I’ve had a tough time understanding or finding the motivation of writing this song with Mariah referenced. It has been speculated that it was motivated by an interview she did on Larry King in 2002 after her “emotional and physical” breakdown from so much going on at the beginng of the 00s for her. The lyrics are fairly direct and scathing, sung by Kim. The song was initially released as a B-side on a 7’’ vinyl with Erase Errata as the featured single. The band used a photo of Mariah from the back of her 1999 release “Rainbow” as the album art.

The next track would not only become my favorite track on Sonic Nurse, but is also my favorite song of theirs. “Stones” is a seven-minute track that does not waste a second on random noise jam sessions. Thurston sings lead with a moderate tempo from the music in the background. I love the main guitar riff throughout the song. It eventually hits a crescendo two-thirds of a way into the track then comes back down to the original sound and tempo it started with. The lyric in the chorus “Dead of alive, there’s danger. The Dead are all right with me,” is a line dedicated to Jerry Garcia. They have a lot of great songs. Many that have surfaced to mainstream, where Stones never did. Still, there isn’t a better seven minutes of my life spent from their catalog than putting on this track.

I’m going to skim over the next three tracks, “Dude Ranch Nurse,” “New Hampshire” and “Paper Cup Exit” given how long winded this note is becoming. The last two tracks “I Love You Golden Blue” and “Peace Attack.” The first two minutes of “I Love You Golden Blue” is mainly noise, but not a chaotic sound. When it begins to settle into the main guitar riff, it becomes very calming. Kim then comes in with her lead vocal almost whispering into the microphone. In her memoir she talks about the feelings she had when singing this song.

"I also loved singing 'I Love You Golden Blue', though I was often on the verge of tears whenever I sang it. It's a song about somebody who believes he can't show himself to the world. Believing he'll only destroy the people he cares about, he avoids all intimacy. He's stuck. I couldn't help thinking that was true about a lot of boy-men I'd known in my life."

It’s a very deep song. You can feel it while listening to it. Everything that Kim just mentioned in the quote above can be felt during this recording. Then the record finishes with “Peace Attack.” The lyrics seem like they are putting out an anti-war cry. Thurston does lead vocals and the way he sounds is almost pleading. Here’s the chorus below.

Of the great
Of the great anti-hate
Springtime is wartime
All eyes to the crime boss
Electric guitar string
Belly flowers

The music is a really cool way to finish out the record. There’s no noise in this track. It’s all composed and cool.

So how does this album affect me? While I was writing my doctoral thesis toward the end of 2010, it was the soundtrack most of the time. I must have listened to Sonic Nurse dozens of times while typing up the five years of time I put into my graduate career. There’s something I’ve learned over time as I’ve gotten to know Sonic Youth’s catalog. The most stressful times in my life, their music seems to strike the perfect nerve. For the longest time, my best focus is found with noisy and melodic sound that drowns out the surrondings I am in. It’s always worked better for me than silence. It’s controlled chaos in a time where I feel life is out of my hands. It helped get me through the battle your grandmother (my mother) had with cancer. I knew there was no good outcome, so listening to the band who “redefined what noise meant within rock & roll” helped me navagate those times.

Right now I am leaning on Sonic Youth again. Your mom is undergoing tests to see how the flow of blood through her brain is going. It’s a follow up from a surgery she had seven years ago to preventatively avoid another hemmoragic stroke from occurring. We don’t know if she will need the surgery a second time. That answer should come by next week. No matter what the outcome and decisions are made in response to these tests, the music of Sonic Youth will hopefully provide some equilibrium for me.

Love,

Dad