Sonic Youth are completely finished and this is still hard for me to come to grips with

Last year saw the release of albums by Chelsea Light Moving (Thurston Moore), Body/Head (Kim Gordon) and Lee Ranaldo and the Dust. I tried to listen to each but it was boring and I was shocked at how little I cared anymore.  

Now if you took the best songs from each of those and tried to make a Sonic Youth album out of them, would it have been any good? Even if it wasn't, would we have liked it if "Sonic Youth" was slapped on the cover? There was a time when there would have been multipage message board threads about just that but it seems like no one else cares anymore either because I never saw any such threads out there or even hardly any discussion about any of those albums themselves at all.

It's one thing for Sonic Youth to break up, another for Thurston and Kim to get divorced and for the depths of how shitty things have gotten between them to come out and pretty much make it clear that this is not a hiatus and that there will never be another Sonic Youth recording ever again, but it hit me hard when I realized that their future endeavors would not even come close to filling the void that they left as a band, and that they might as well have died in a plane crash or something.  

I know it's weird to complain about a band breaking up after they were together for 30 years but they were still making long-players that I enjoyed up to the very end.

Couldn't stand a note of that Lee Reynaldo thing.

Duff... wrote:Couldn't stand a note of that Lee Reynaldo thing.

Do you have any thoughts about his hair?

Gonna put on Bad Moon Rising right now.

it is strange to think that they're gone forever and how big of a fucker thurston was in the last decade, indeed.

but, it doesn't much bother me that there will never be another sonic youth LP.

and yeah all their side projects were p boring / bad

undo wrote:There was a time when there would have been multipage message board threads about just that but it seems like no one else cares anymore either because I never saw any such threads out there or even hardly any discussion about any of those albums themselves at all.

A large part of that is because message boards are dying in general. It's shame that most online discussion has moved to social media, because it's currently a piss-poor substitute for the nuanced interaction and broad range of expression available on web boards. Even the best facebook comment threads pale in comparison to an average JDFF thread circa ten years ago. Either technology has taken taken a giant leap backwards, or worse, people no longer have an appetite for complex multithreaded discussions about art, culture, and jort sharting.

Where is the next generation's Andrew Unterberger going to sow his wild oats?

@AUGetstheGold shits on most other NBA bloggers precisely because he was well trained in the art of long-form bullshitting on message boards

undo wrote:

Duff... wrote:Couldn't stand a note of that Lee Reynaldo thing.

Do you have any thoughts about his hair?

Still nailing the meticulously unkempt look, according to publicity stills anyway.

I wish Ranaldo had written more songs in his (Sonic) youth. 'Mote' is a stone cold classic.