Thurston Moore – Sonic Life: A Memoir (2024) Review by Jonathan Thornton
“Any great musical collective recognizes the intangible magic that occurs when they play together, creating original colors and dynamics, forging a group personality. Kim and I innately sensed the way we could exchange musical ideas. There was no need for discussion or analysis.
With Lee, it worked the same way. We would all fire up our amplifiers and begin effortlessly playing off one another’s actions, decisions, responses, vibrations.”
Thirteen years after the dissolution of Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore has released Sonic Life: A Memoir (2024), documenting the life of one of the key experimental groups of the post-punk and alternative eras. Sonic Life not only chronicles the life of Sonic Youth, formed in 1981 by Thurston on guitars and vocals, Kim Gordon on guitars, bass and vocals, Lee Ranaldo on guitars and vocals, and going through a series of drummers before finally settling on Steve Shelley to complete the classic line up. It also chronicles Thurston’s life growing up in the 60s and 70s in Connecticut before being drawn by the siren call of punk rock to New York, and follows both his journey as a unique artist and an enthusiastic record collector. As such, it’s not only a valuable insight into one of the most exciting rock groups of the 80s and 90s, it’s a chronicle of the journey of punk, post-punk and alternative music through the emergence of punk and hardcore as genres, the post-hardcore experimental scenes, the rise of independent music and the world-conquering success of Nirvana as they finally brought this music crashing into the mainstream.
Sonic Life is a long book that takes its time – it’s over 150 pages before Thurston meets Kim and decides to form Sonic Youth – but this is no bad thing as it allows us to see the world through a young Thurston’s eyes. His enthusiasm for music is infectious, and his accounts of being one of only two punk rock fans at high school with his best friend show us where that enthusiasm stems from. Indeed, throughout the book Thurston comes across as still this endearing wide-eyed, aww-shucks kid at heart, unable to believe his luck that he gets to play and contribute to the development of the music he loves throughout his life. The long setup also allows him to fully set the context of 1970s punk-era New York, which is crucial to understanding Sonic Youth’s cultural identity and heritage. In breathless prose, Thurston conjures the dilapidated, deprived and dangerous New York City of the 70s, a place of ruin and poverty unrecognizable from the slick, gentrified city it is today. This NYC was full of danger, but it was also the remarkable cultural melting pot where musicians, artists, poets and various miscreants met and hung out, leading to the musical revolutions of punk and hip-hop. It was this context that birthed the No Wave scene, out of which Sonic Youth and their contemporaries emerged.
No Wave, downtown NYC’s experimental music scene, was galvanized by the energy of punk rock but took that genre’s nihilism much farther, creating atonal soundscapes which threatened to rewrite music’s approach to compositional noise. Pioneers like Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and Mark Cunningham destroyed rock and roll cliches whilst inventing a new and scabrous language for the electric guitar. They made brilliant, challenging and inspiring music, but were never going to enter the mainstream consciousness. Sonic Youth’s brilliance was in taking No Wave’s avant-garde techniques of producing guitar noise, alternate tunings and “prepared” guitars strung with barbed wire and played with drills, and marrying it to Thurston’s love of rock and roll, creating a vitally experimental kind of music that could still appeal to wider audiences. Thurston has his mind blown by No Wave, and is opened up to the experimental techniques he will use later in his own band, but equally important is his devotion to Patti Smith, the Ramones, and later hardcore, heavy metal and hip-hop. Thus, able to straddle both worlds, Sonic Youth make their journey from early experimental classics (read: no one apart from myself and a handful of like-minded weirdos actually listen to them) like Confusion Is Sex (1983) and Bad Moon Rising (1985), through to their trilogy of iconic and vastly influential post-punk albums EVOL (1986), Sister (1987) and Daydream Nation (1988), to riding the alternative rock boom of the 90s and nearly breaking the mainstream with Dirty (1992) and then settling down to become venerated elders of the experimental music scene with late masterpieces like Murry Street (2002).
Along the way, inspired by his love of music and punk’s DIY ethos, Thurston befriends, mentors and tours with pretty much everyone in the history of American alternative rock. In the early 80s, before there was much of an infrastructure for the promotion and distribution of independent music, Sonic Youth and friends would all cram into a tiny van with all their equipment and drive across the USA, stopping off in every town on the way to spread the gospel of punk and alternative rock. They tour with fellow post-No Wave NYC noise rock titans Swans, meet up with deranged Texan psychedelic post-hardcore noiseniks The Butthole Surfers in Texas, play shows with post-hardcore proto-slackers Dinosaur Jr and their softly spoken guitar genius J. Mascis, Kim serves as an inspiration to a new generation of punk women in Olympia as the riot grrrl movement kicks off, and in Seattle form a bond with grunge pioneers Mudhoney and a promising unknown band called Nirvana with a charismatic and troubled lead singer. So as Thurston tracks Sonic Youth’s journey, he also chronicles the journeys of his friends and contemporaries, as alternative rock develops and diversifies and eventually is catapulted into the mainstream with the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991). Thurston’s first-hand accounts are insightful and thrilling, his perspective allowing him to relate the story in warts-and-all detail.
\While Sonic Life is impressive, detailed and impassioned, it feels unlikely to be the final word on Sonic Youth. This is very much Thurston’s story, from his own perspective, and especially towards the end, as the band drift apart into various solo projects and Thurston’s extra-marital affair destroys his marriage to Kim and ultimately spells the end of the band, there is a sense that Kim, Lee and Steve’s perspectives are being sidelined. But this is perhaps unsurprising as it is Thurston’s book at the end of the day. None of this is enough to detract from the book’s brilliance as a document, and its sheer readability. It’s a must-read for Sonic Youth fans, and also anyone interested in American alternative music and its history.
Thurston Moore – Sonic Life: A Memoir (2024) Review by Jonathan Thornton
A Sunday Times, Times, Irish Times and Mojo Book of the Year
Rough Trade #1 Book of the Year
Resident Music #1 Book of the Year
‘Were you there? Well this is as close as it gets! Thurston Moore’s compelling and spirited account of the streets, the songs, the clothes, the clubs and the contenders! A sensitive and authentic testimony to Moore’s life lived through art and music. Beats with the heart of a true artist and mutineer.’ Viv Albertine
‘Downtown scientists rejoice! For Thurston Moore has unearthed the missing links, the sacred texts, the forgotten stories, and the secret maps of the lost golden age. This is history-scuffed, slightly bent, plenty noisy, and indispensable.’ Colson Whitehead
A music-obsessed retrospective, beginning with his childhood epiphany of rock ‘n’ roll in the early 1960s into an infatuation with the subversive world of 1970s punk and no wave blasting forth from New York City – where he eventually runs off to join a band in 1978. By 1981 Moore would form the legendary and notorious experimental rock group Sonic Youth, who proceeded to record and tour relentlessly for almost 30 years, always progressing, always exploring.
Along the way we meet a constellation of artists and musicians who colluded and collided with Sonic Youth including Velvet Underground, Stooges, Patti Smith, Television, Sex Pistols, Clash, Nirvana, Hole, Beastie Boys, Neil Young and a cavalcade of other musical visionaries, as well as figures from the art world – Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Gerhard Richter.
Simply put, Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth changed the sound of modern alternative rock music and opened the minds of a generation of artists to new possibilities within the form. This is essential reading.
‘I thoroughly enjoyed Thurston Moore’s trip down the gauntlet of memory lane, dodging beer bottles and pools of blood as he balances the demands of art and survival. Plus I’m a sucker for anyone who name-checks Saccharine Trust. A raw, rollicking document.’ Nell Zink
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