Whether you've heard of the band or not, whether you're a fan or only dimly aware of their 25-year existence, you've probably felt the effects of Sonic Youth. For a band that never reached popular success or put out a top 10 album, Sonic Youth made themselves known in the art and music worlds as cultural icons during the 80s and 90s. If the names Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley don't ring a bell, then Kurt Cobain, Beck, Sophia Coppola, Spike Jonze, and Chloe Sevigny might. Like Gertrude Stein to the lost generation, the four members of Sonic Youth either directly paved the way or actively encouraged the young careers of the grunge generation.As biographer David Browne makes clear in his new biography, Goodbye 20th Century, this is a band whose passion for music and the arts inspired others to achieve more recognition and success than the band themselves would ever know. Some might view such stagnation as tragic or, at the very least, frustrating, except for the fact that the band's muse-like power was based in an unwavering sense of integrity. As one record label executive put it, "I don't know if [mass recognition] was necessarily important to them. Or all four of them at one time, let's put it that way."
Though the band's obsession with uniquely innovative sounds (the noise coming out of a deli refrigerator was once recorded for a song) was considered too chaotic by the mainstream public, Goodbye 20th Century shows how their personal lives were as traditional as their music was revolutionary. Browne, a longtime music journalist, warns in his introduction that, "You also won't find the usual litany of rock-star foibles here: no car crashes, drug overdoses, hotel room trashings, and other tales of excess that sustained Behind the Music for years."
Sound boring? It would be if it weren't for Browne's ability to portray the band's very "lack of cliche" as such an exceptional feat. In Browne's words, it's a story of "stability and relative well-adjustedness, of creating chaos onstage but not off it. In its contrariness, it's almost, well, punk." Few other bands can boast that.
