Thurston Moore has said that although he's flattered when younger bands cite Sonic Youth as an influence, it would be nice if the group were rewarded with greater record sales. Of course, Moore knows well why his group has a limited audience. While artists as diverse as Nirvana, the Beastie Boys and even Nine Inch Nails borrow from the Sonic palette – the feedback, dissonance, improvisation and sublime textures – they also employ the kind of pop hooks that Sonic Youth have consistently subverted in their own music. Even the Sonics' most easily digestible songs – "Kool Thing," "Sugar Kane," "Self-Obsessed and Sexxee" – ultimately consume themselves: a devastating blast of
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distortion here, a jarring tempo change there, a crescendo into total chaos. To question why Sonic Youth don't sell as well as the Beastie Boys is like wondering why Sun Ra was never as popular as Miles Davis.
The analogy isn't entirely gratuitous. Like the late Sun Ra, Moore is a total freak who takes great pleasure in mocking both the elitism of the avant-garde and the anti-intellectualism of pop culture. So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone who has followed Sonic Youth that Psychic Hearts, Moore's first solo album, puts rock on trial in the High Court of Art.
Using pop culture – particularly cheesy 70s rock – as a metaphor for society as a whole, Moore castigates those who abuse the counterculture's most vulnerable denizens: young girls, sensitive boys, misfits and loners. In the title song his protagonist tells a girl who has been emotionally wrecked by her parents and peers: "My prayer to you is that you do all the things you set out to do/And live your life the way you love/But will you remember one thing for me?/I will always love you." It's a tender moment (despite the potential irony of that last line) for the sometimes hard to peg Moore.
Moore also attempts to restore rock's counterculture identity throughout Psychic Hearts, dropping the names of Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler in "Queen Bee and Her Pals," christening Yoko Ono the Queen of Noise in "Ono Soul," citing such 70s titles as Hotter Than Hell and "Fox on the Run" in "Cindy (Rotten Tanx)" and quoting, note for note, the gloomy melody from the Stones' "Moonlight Mile" in "Female Cop." In doing all this he plays a kind of Robin Hood, using his major-label status to return the music to the real underground, latter-day indie rockers such as the Grifters or Smog, who make low-fi music in their bedrooms.
Such gestures offer proof that Thurston Moore is the soul of Sonic Youth. That doesn't mean, however, that Psychic Hearts works like a Sonic Youth album. What makes the Sonics tick is their all-consuming band sound, the warm yet intimidating cavelike atmospherics, the ringing harmonics and microtonal interplay between Moore and guitarist Lee Ranaldo. Without bassist Kim Gordon's dark, moody and very female ruminatio
