Take two

OK, so I'd already reviewed Thurston Moore's memoir for Buzz, but when the opportunity arose to do a significantly deeper dive into Sonic Life, I was hardly going to pass it up. And here it is, my debut for Punktuation.

This seems an apt place to also link to Michael Azerrad's piece on Sonic Youth's legacy for the Yale Review. His suggestion that "[n]ot many bands were directly influenced by Sonic Youth in a musical sense - the band's sound was too idiosyncratic to copy" is weirdly wide of the mark (I hear their echo in bands all the time - Bar Italia most recently), but the article is otherwise spot on in discussing how they reshaped the rules, developed mutually enriching relationships with artists and filmmakers and gave countless other bands the "priceless benediction" of their endorsement. As Azerrad argues, they "came to embody for many musicians and music fans an aspirational ideal of creative freedom - and, by extension, freedom in general".