CONTEXTUALIZING THE BEST AND WORST SONIC YOUTH SHOWS I’VE SEEN WITHIN 24 HOURS by matt vadnais

I once walked at least 8 miles in Doc Martens to see Sonic Youth—a band I was pretty sure I didn’t actually like very much—at First Avenue in the heart of Minneapolis. Beyond it being unusual to go to such extremes to see a band I wasn’t sure about, it was especially superfluous to go because I already had tickets to see them open for R.E.M. at the Target Center the next night. To be fair, my friend Ant and I were dropped off and had to make the walk after the show because we refused to leave in order to catch the last bus, so it wasn’t really a case of us walking uphill both ways in the snow or anything. If we had needed to walk to get there, we likely wouldn’t have. However, if we hadn’t gone, we wouldn’t have seen a show that was among my very favorite two-hour-periods of my life, absolutely worth sticking around for, last bus be damned. The Sonic Youth that came out, post-modern warts and all, managed to sound simultaneously like a collection of car alarms skeptical of music, love, and an interventionist god but also like a band that wrote three-minute pop anthems about the goodness of otters and sloths. I’m not sure that I’ve ever experienced a less complicated bliss at a show. It was truly thrilling and everyone there was feeling it.
My interest in this supplemental Plaidness essay, though, is that walk home, when my friend Ant and I couldn’t stop gushing about how great Sonic Youth was and how we had been mistaken to have resisted seeing them before. We were electric and superlative, using the language of zealots whose scales had just fallen from their eyes. I remember us laughing and singing the whole way home, despite our viscous footwear and having to cut across an elevated highway at 2 in the morning in a move that I can’t be remembering correctly: I remember walking up an entrance ramp to a freeway, driven by the kind of decision-making that twenty-year-old white kids exhibit, particularly on nights where they’ve just come close to slipping the surly hands of fate and touching the face of god or whatever.
     But really, my interest in Sonic Youth isn’t about how we felt that night, walking the light fantastic in a surprisingly empty Minneapolis, so much as it is to think about how fleeting that feeling was in the face of, twenty-four hours later, Sonic Youth playing many of the very same songs in front of a much larger audience that—whether it was the lack of intimacy of the venue or bad sound engineering or the Michael Stipe of it all—had no interest in extending the kind of generosity and love that had helped gild the band in angel spit the night before. Seeing Sonic Youth do the same thing two nights in a row in front of very different audiences felt, at the time, like it was just about venues and gigs and people maybe not being good listeners when they don’t want to be. At worst, it was maybe about Sonic Youth not being for all markets.
In hindsight, the experience makes something else clear for me: the audience is always partially responsible for a band being good, not simply by being into it, but by being it, or at least the real it that matters.
     I bring this up here because almost seventy writers, including myself, passed on the opportunity to represent Sonic Youth in a tournament about a sound that likely wouldn’t have existed without Sonic Youth; this, in 2021, isn’t especially surprising. Thurston Moore has proven to be something of a creep and it’s pretty easy to see that lingering in the periphery of their catalogue; what felt like the democratization of rock feels now a *lot* like entitlement. As such, it’s tempting to think Sonic Youth has aged poorly or was always overrated, or that the real band was the one I saw drowning in front of 15,000 people who were so very bored.
I suspect all of that is true.
     But it’s also true that the set at First Avenue was every bit as good as I thought it was. To pretend otherwise isn’t about being honest about Sonic Youth but about making excuses for myself. Our problematic faves were always problematic. We, once, occupied a frame of mind to look past it, probably because we were problematic too. I think we tend to say “x has aged poorly” when what we really should be saying is “I was a different person and maybe had shitty values and a lot of work to do in therapy I wasn’t ready for just yet.”
This is an attempt to stop projecting: Sonic Youth played one of the best sets I’ve ever seen probably because I was absolutely in love with the idea of having suffered to see a transcendent show that no one but Ant would believe was as good as I said it was. For about two hours, the band and Ant and I and about 700 other sweaty, suffering people in dumb shoes were perfect together.

Matt Vadnais teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He is the author of All I can Truly Deliver (Del sol Press, 2005) and essays about early modern staging practices and Shakespeare's printed plays (Shakespeare Quarterly). He can be found writing about music at covermesong.com and comics at Solrad.co, yourchickenenemy.com, and comicsmnt.com. He has said "grunge saved my life" and meant it.