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element from Nirvana and employing it to their own
success. I don’t really care. I’m not bitter about it,” he
laughs sensing the heat of his own diatribe, “but it’s
not very interesting to me. That’s what they’re calling
punk rock, but to me it’s as prevalent and as annoying
as disco was in the 70s. There’s this whole underground
of lo-fi cassette-label musicians who are really good.
So I like that stuff, but those kids think of us as being
totally over the hill.”
And also, while Offspring rant about “flys” and
“white guys”, Sonic Youth are singing free-style lyrics
in a stream of consciousness winding well away from
the mainstream. Is it true that, when you’re working
with an ambiguous message and the masses, you gotta
keep ‘em separated?
“Not always. Our ‘big hit singles’ gave nothing
away, but their popularity probably had more to do
with the music, and the fact that they were ‘weird’
sounding by contrast. Every now and again, the
‘alternative culture’, by way of momentum swing, is
cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than
how it should be like the mainstream popular music.”
“Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic
Youth. There’s three people writing now, and we’ve all
had a lot of interest and involvement with expression
through words, or poetry or whatever. I hardly think
we’re the only people writing lyrics with that frame of
reference or that frame of mind, but our fusion of styles
BUY Sonic Youth music online from and
in this framework is interesting.
“Most people can’t tell now who wrote what, and to
make it more confusing, I wrote some lyrics that Kim
sings, and vice versa. I like that blurring of identities
within the band, because it becomes a unified thing that
can’t be related to other forms of historical poetry.”
How do you respond to detractors when they criticize
your lyrics as “staggeringly pretentious, and meaningless
psycho-babble” (NME)?
“A lot of the lyrical ideas [that run] through Sonic
Youth and my solo record [Psychic Hearts] do have
a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat
abstracted,” Moore says, unfazed by the quote. “Especially
when you’re writing them. They’re written
down with just the poetic sense. They have some kind
of meaning to you because it’s emotional, so it’s like
trying to translate that emotion literally beyond the
poetic sense of the words. You don’t want to analyze it
so much because I just like the abstract nature of it, that
it can take on any shape that you might feel it should
take on.”
You speak a great deal of poetry and it’s place in
music, I’ve often wondered to myself if Sonic Youth’s
album title, A Thousand Leaves isn’t a coy play on
Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass?
“You know, you’re right, and the first person to
pick that up. (Spike blushes) I didn’t want to draw
attention myself to the reference, but yes, that indi-
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