Sonic Youth pushed Warhol into the red.ĮVOL has a seductive, uncanny ease, which makes its violent undercurrents even more frightening. The atonal sorcery of “Marilyn Moore” was inspired by Norman Mailer’s book about Marilyn Monroe, but instead of a shiny portrait, Moore sings of how she’s “full of disorders,” with a “hammer in hand and her head to the floor.” A great photograph of Sonic Youth from this era, by SST’s Naomi Peterson, captures their negative realism: The band looks depressed and disheveled in front of a Wonder Bread truck, Gordon with her back to the camera. Sonic Youth weren’t protesting American conservatism like their hardcore contemporaries, but EVOL was an affront to the American myths that fostered it. The ideas in “American Prayers” echo through EVOL’s doomy screech. Gordon wrote about Oursler-as well as Pettibon and the artist Mike Kelley-in a 1985 Artforum essay called “American Prayers.” Her article discussed the failures of Pop art (think of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans) and how these three men more successfully upended American iconography. The spooky EVOL title was inspired by the multimedia artist Tony Oursler, who in 1984 devised a black-comedy video piece, also called “EVOL,” offering a hallucinatory critique on the construct of love. ![]() (The title is “love” backwards.) The destructive force of no wave and hardcore was cast as a new kind of sonic conceptual art. EVOL is a graveyard for 1960s peace-and-love idealism. ![]() EVOL might have a cheeky Richard Kern horror-film still on the cover, it might feel like the most dissonant passages of the Grateful Dead’s Dark Star held captive and tormented in a cavernous haunted house, but the album was beyond a “faux-goth” record, as Gordon once described it. A college syllabus could revolve around its vast allusions to Marilyn Monroe, Charles Manson, The Great Gatsby, and Alfred Hitchcock. The entire record is a shadow.ĮVOL was not just a skewering of rock’n’roll but also of America. There’s a directness that makes everything feel close. If Daydream Nation is Sonic Youth’s opus, EVOL was crucial research. Gordon once called the sound of Downtown “abandoned,” and that fits here, too. EVOL is “underground” as both form and aesthetic: deconstructed and raw, dim and boomy. But on EVOL, the pieces were still laid bare: bent glitter-pop here, macabre spoken-word there, gauzy instrumental noise, a persistent clatter, all with a reverby DIY iridescence that sounds buried in the ground. Pettibon’s black-and-white cover illustration for 1990’s Goo became an eternal RayBanned shorthand for wry art-punk cool. In her liner notes to the 1993 CD edition, transgressive zine writer Lisa Suckdog quoted Moore’s lyrics: “‘I left home for experience’-me, too!’”īy 1988’s Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth’s deep inquiry into pop and the avant-garde-into Madonna on the one hand and La Monte Young on the other-had cohered into a fundamental sound. As if to assert their Downtown identity, the album opens with the somnambulant churn of “Tom Violence,” a song inspired by Television’s Tom Verlaine, which narrates a classic renegade pose. Sonic Youth was subterranean subway clangor windowless bohemia a fast-walking stomp on a sidewalk grate the hallowed doors of Trash & Vaudeville a secret. This ultimately showed how unmistakably East Village the Sonic Youth camp was. Sonic Youth began to fuse with lawless West Coast punk: Minutemen and Black Flag versus sadistic cops and sun-bleached strip-mall banality. ![]() EVOL, the band’s sordid third LP, released in 1986, was their first of two pivotal albums for SST. This clip from Weatherman ‘69-shot and directed by the band’s SST Records comrade and eventual art world fixture Raymond Pettibon-remains a shining document of Sonic Youth’s anarchic era on that L.A.
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