Originally published in The Guardian, 21 July 1992

Thunderous mantra-grooves and jagged fanfares of atonal brass boom across the parched grass of New York’s Central Park, though it could equally well be Monterey or Marrakesh. Dancing women in gauzy veils spin across the stage, whirling in front of drummers in purple and gold kaftans, brushing the sawing elbows of turbaned violinists. A motionless figure in a wheelchair bends over the piano, plonking out a star map of unearthly chords.

The crowd bakes beatifically in the afternoon sun, delighted that the forecast—­clouds, rain, wind—has proved libelously incorrect. There are couples with kids, Agassi-coiffed youths with back-to-front baseball caps, greasy metal heads in Bermuda shorts and Nirvana t-shirts. They’re stuffing themselves with hotdogs, frozen yogurt, and lukewarm Miller Lite. Even the fat, sweating city cops indolently guarding the crash-barriers are nodding cautiously to that extraterrestrial beat. On Independence Day, in the middle of the planet’s foremost urban jungle, everybody is on the verge of total bliss out. It’s all because of the cosmic bebopper, Sun Ra.

But Ra and his wandering tribe are just the support band. Topping the bill is Sonic Youth, New York City’s decibel-battered veterans of what their bassist Kim Gordon deftly summarizes as “third generation no-wave.” While genre-librarians would file the Youth between “grunge” and “hardcore,” the band harbors a few modest pretensions towards reviving a now-dead tradition of mixing up rock with a splash of jazz and chasing it down with a shot of avant-garde.

“We’ve been wanting to play in the Park for the last couple of years,” recounts Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth’s beanpole guitarist who can barely conceal his enormous boredom with interviews. “We wanted to do it with Sun Ra because he’s a master musician who’s still alive. He did shows in the ’60s with the MC5 and the Stooges, Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp in Detroit and New York, and that doesn’t happen any more, that kind of interracial, intermusical thing. We finally met Sun Ra, and he was definitely from Saturn. You couldn’t really have an earthling talk with him.”

This is the kind of provocative otherness Sonic Youth has been seeking out ever since they formed. Moore: “We came out of the downtown New York scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s. I remember when we first started we played a show with the Blue Humans. It was this fellow Rudolph Grey, and his drummer was Beaver Harris, who was John Coltrane’s drummer at some point, and the sax player was Arthur Doyle, and they were just a power trio who did this free-jazz noise thing. This was like 1981. They were coming out of a whole legacy of late-’60s, early-’70s high-energy improv-jazz, and I found it very entertaining. Even if you’re not aware of that legacy it has an effect on you to some degree.”

While there are those who will tell you that New York is sinking slowly into a stinking mire of crack, AIDS, and racial war, Sonic Youth takes a more sanguine view of their hometown. “New York offers you a freedom that other cities don’t,” argues Gordon, a refugee from the “police state” of Los Angeles. “People sort of leave you alone, and because of how cosmopolitan it is, it’s not a very MTV-oriented city. From the very beginning, we started making music in expression of some kind of fun out of boredom. That hasn’t changed much.”

The Youth’s problem, if it is a problem, may be that while they’re revered as trailblazers for an entire genre of American alternative rockers, it’s the likes of Nirvana who are scooping up the platinum discs. This probably wouldn’t be a bone of contention if Sonic Youth hadn’t given Nirvana a leg up by offering them a tour support slot, and if they didn’t share the same manager, Jon Silva. In fact, Nirvana—”the N-word”, as Gordon ruefully puts it—haunt the Youth around the clock. Both bands are signed to Geffen, and Sonic Youth finally succumbed to the inevitable by hiring Butch Vig, production-hero of Nirvana’s Nevermind album, to produce their new album, Dirty.

To get a hit record, perhaps? “We were just really sick of mixing by democracy, it’s not the best way to mix a record,” argues Gordon. “We’d seen Butch do all these crappy hardcore records through the ’80s, and he knew where we were coming from. He worked out great.”

She’s right, because Dirty is a heavy-hitting collection of roaring guitar noise, wedded to lyrics which snag like tumbleweeds on the cactuses of the brain. In “Youth Against Fascism”, nominally about teen-protesters outside the White House, Moore expresses hatred of protest songs because they shouldn’t need to exist. “Creme Brulee” is a reflection on Sonic Youth’s tour with Neil Young last year, where the Youth were nonplussed by the ’60s-style attitudes of Young’s crew.

Gordon’s song “Swimsuit Issue” boldly tackles sexual harassment, an issue suddenly making big news in the States. “I was trying to equate secretaries whose idols are maybe models—models are so popular now in our culture,” Gordon explains. “Models end up in a magazine, having men masturbate. The secretaries are in offices and have bosses who jerk off on their desks. It’s really about the attitudes in corporations towards women. I wasn’t really aware of it until we signed to a major label.”

Sonic Youth’s bludgeoning music and barbed messages don’t make complete sense on a sunny day in the park, but the night before, they’d warmed up at the fabled CBGB’s. The club is a dank tunnel festooned with rusting pipes and rising damp, like a rotting U-boat dredged out of the East River. Just the spot for the Youth, who whipped out a short but crunching set of mostly new songs, before climaxing with a 10-minute deluge of feedback that set bottles and ashtrays jittering across tabletops.

“I believe in music first,” Gordon elaborates. “The music in itself should be some kind of political statement. Lyrics are secondary to that.”

There’s food for thought for all you apprentices of grunge.

Watch: “100%” [at youtube.com]

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