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You still aim to transcend the ‘usual’ with your standard
rock format; “uh-huh”, and a guitar is still not just
a guitar right? “Of course”.
So, I push on encouraged by such a wonderful, and
compliant beginning to the ‘difficult Thurston Moore
interview’, overlooking Moore’s cruelly un-ironic
streak: …and what has been your greatest ‘rock’n’roll
moment’ of recent times?
“Well, I was watching the Spice Girls movie” Moore
recalls, turning unpredictable all of a sudden “and when
they cover Gary Glitter’s ‘You Wanna Be In My Gang”
I got goose-bumps. It was chilling. When they came
out in those costumes with all the dancers I thought to
myself, this is as great as the first time I saw Blondie at
Max’s. This is as exciting as sitting behind Sid Vicious
at CBGB’s right after he lost his mind. I could just see
being an eight-year-old girl, and wanting to be that.”
“At the same time, there was something freakish
about it, and it struck me as this completely total rock
thing. God bless them all, that’s what I say.
You’ve often exalted music as a ‘magic’ medium of
information, one which is often more than just the sum
of it’s parts, does that apply to what happened between
you and the Spice Girls, in that plane somewhere over
the Atlantic?
“Hmmm, yeah, it kind of relates to my attitude to
music other people call ‘clichéd’ or ‘recycled’. In my
eyes you don’t need to be so spiritually involved with
BUY Sonic Youth music online from and
music to be considered a valid musician in my eyes.
Some of the most wonderful moments for me musically
were machine made and plastic.”
“You ask me about Matchbox 20, and bands like that,
and I say what about Matchbox 20? I don’t know much
about them, but they seem to me to exemplify a group
of people getting off on the sudden rush of making
rock’n’roll music, and I think that’s wonderful. Maybe
I’m wrong, maybe they are something put together by
a machine and then plugged in, I don’t know, but they
don’t offend me.”
Surely corporate punk bands like the Offspring who
resort to plagiarising themselves to make hits must offend
you…
“It does, they do, and you know what? Forget the
Spice Girls, it’s American Alternative radio stations,
not mainstream rock and pop stations that bug me.
We’re considered, in a broader sense, ‘Alternative’,
but don’t expect us to be played next to Blink 182 and
Offspring. Those bands cater to people their age, and
we’re hardly of that generation. We’re parent rock in
a way. Musically we’re a lot more extreme and radical
than a lot of those bands that seem to cater to the safest
aspect of Nirvana the verse/chorus/verse thing, which I
always found kind of disappointing.”
“That was an aspect of Nirvana’s music that Kurt told
me he wanted to get away from. So I find it discouraging
to see all these bands taking this really simplistic
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