Intellectual noise-rocker Thurston Moore’s long-awaited memoir offers much more than a recounting of his 30-year tenure in the band Sonic Youth. Encyclopedic and capacious, Sonic Life is no less than a history of U.S. underground arts and culture, from ’70s punk to ’80s hardcore, from college rock to grunge and beyond, told through the prism of one band.
Moore’s sentimental education took place in late 1970s New York City, when suburban teenagers could educate themselves by hanging around record shops and bookstores or venturing out to nightclubs like Max’s Kansas City or the Mudd Club. Musician-poets like Patti Smith offered a gateway drug to what Moore calls “rock ’n’ roll transcendence,” a mystical devotion to sonic creativity.
Sonic Youth’s influences were eclectic, rooted in the apocalyptic noise of No Wave, but also inspired by free improv jazz, poetry and the visual arts. The early section of Sonic Life tracks these influences in exquisite detail, evoking a lost era of New York’s then-gritty downtown music scene. Once Kim Gordon enters the picture, the narrative zooms in to vivid descriptions of the off-kilter tunings and experimental musical chemistry between Moore, Gordon and Lee Ranaldo, the creative nucleus of Sonic Youth.
Sonic Youth’s 30-year passage through the music scene sees the band move through record labels and music festivals, evolving from noisy enfants terribles to influential elder statespeople. When the band broke up in 2011, along with Moore and Gordon’s marriage, a generation of fans were devastated.
Any band’s story is a collective story. Sonic Life offers Moore’s perspective on rock music as a quasi-religious vocation; it belongs on the shelf next to Kim Gordon’s own 2015 memoir Girl in a Band. Both books offer a prismatic view on the musical democracy that was Sonic Youth.
