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Synopsis:

From the founding member of Sonic Youth, a passionate memoir tracing the author’s life and art—from his teen years as a music obsessive in small-town Connecticut, to the formation of his legendary rock group, to thirty years of creation, experimentation, and wonder

“Downtown scientists rejoice! For Thurston Moore has unearthed the missing links, the sacred texts, the forgotten stories, and the secret maps of the lost golden age. This is history—scuffed, slightly bent, plenty noisy, and indispensable.” —Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Underground Railroad and Harlem Shuffle

Thurston Moore moved to Manhattan’s East Village in 1978 with a yearning for music. He wanted to be immersed in downtown New York’s sights and sounds—the feral energy of its nightclubs, the angular roar of its bands, the magnetic personalities within its orbit. But more than anything, he wanted to make music—to create indelible sounds that would move, provoke, and inspire.

His dream came to life in 1981 with the formation of Sonic Youth, a band Moore cofounded with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo. Sonic Youth became a fixture in New York’s burgeoning No Wave scene—an avant-garde collision of art and sound, poetry and punk. The band would evolve from critical darlings to commercial heavyweights, headlining festivals around the globe while helping introduce listeners to such artists as Nirvana, Hole, and Pavement, and playing alongside such icons as Neil Young and Iggy Pop. Through it all, Moore maintained an unwavering love of the new, the unheralded, the challenging, the irresistible.

In the spirit of Just Kids , Sonic Life offers a window into the trajectory of a celebrated artist and a tribute to an era of explosive creativity. It presents a firsthand account of New York in a defining cultural moment, a history of alternative rock as it was birthed and came to dominate airwaves, and a love letter to music, whatever the form. This is a story for anyone who has ever felt touched by sound—who knows the way the right song at the right moment can change the course of a life.

Review:

Sonic Youth has been a part of my life for over thirty years, after I bought Dirty when it first came out because I read a review in Spin or Rolling Stone. I have spent my entire life looking for new bands, and while Nirvana was starting to blow up, I wanted to be adjacent to this change in music culture, focus on bands that inspired Nirvana and/or were contemporaries. Sonic Youth was the best band for me, and Dirty is the album that changed everything. 

It is no surprise that I was excited about Thurston Moore’s new memoir, Sonic Life. We get the story that he wants to tell in the way that he wants to tell it. The main focus of the book is the early days of him discovering the New York music scene, falling in love with bands and songs (“I Wanna Be Your Dog” being the best song ever written), and experimenting until he finds his musical voice and vision. In the five hundred pages, Sonic Youth is not even a blip until about a quarter of the way through, and the 90s are not mentioned until close to the 75% mark. The focus on the earlier albums, the touring and the reception, seem to be more important to Thurston’s story because these are the albums where he learned about himself and the band. This is when the music is more a labor of love than anything. 

He talks freely about the music, the bands, and the musicians that he loves, but he is very reluctant to talk about himself. Toward the end he glosses over the fact that he has poor memory when it comes to Sonic Youth lyrics, that he has had the words posted behind the monitors or amps. He also talks about the last decade of Sonic Youth in the last twenty pages, and the disintegration of his band due to him and Kim getting a divorce in the last ten. I know that this is Thurston’s story, and he tells it the way that he wants, but there is very little time spent on anything other than the music that he creates and the people that has met and learned from. This skirting of the personal makes Sonic Life feel a little shallow for a memoir and more of a history of Thurston Moore, as if many of the stories that he tells could be stories that we could learn if we researched hard enough. There could be a second part, a sequel that focuses on the second half of Sonic Youth, but I also know we probably will never get it. 

What we do get is a greater understanding of the music scene that nurtured Sonic Youth. Those early albums, from Sonic Youth to Daydream Nation are informed by Avant Garde art and noise rock. Moore mentions hundreds of bands that are worth checking out, and the whole idea of Sonic Life is that Sonic Youth and Thurston Moore is as influenced by as many bands as they have influenced. This is  not Thurston Moore’s book about Thurston Moore as much as Thurston Moore’s book about Sonic Youth. There is a definite distinction, and those who are looking for a tell-all book about Moore’s personal life are going to be sorely disappointed. Instead we are given a testament of his recollections of being in the most influential noise rock band of all time. 

I received this as an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.