Sonic Youth – "100%" (1992)

I’ve been around the world a million times

And all you men are slime

I can’t explain why Sonic Youth is the best rock group of all time, but they are.

Their music is often loud and dissonant – the band favored cheap guitars and alternative tunings – and I take exception to many of the political sentiments expressed in Sonic Youth’s lyrics. 

Sonic Youth

Then there’s bassist Kim Gordon’s painfully (and intentionally) off-key singing.  Not to mention the group’s obsession with Karen Carpenter and Madonna – two artists who don’t rank among my favorites.

Sonic Youth is the best example ever of the whole of something being greater than the sum of its parts.

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I think I first became acquainted with Sonic Youth’s music through the 1992 edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide, which collected and summarized thousands of Rolling Stone album reviews.  I bought that book to smooth my transition from LPs to CDs – I went through it and noted all the four-star and five-star albums that I didn’t already own, and went searching for them in used record stores.

The 1992 edition of the
“Rolling Stone Album Guide”

I ended up with over a dozen used Sonic Youth CDs.  I once owned a similar number of Rolling Stones LPs, but I have no interest in ever listening to any of the ones released after 1974 or so.

That’s not true of my Sonic Youth albums.  Pick any one of them and I will happily sit down and listen to it.

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A lot of critics are as ga-ga over Sonic Youth as I am.  But their fan base is quite small.

One writer has estimated that each band member earned on average only about $30,000 per year from record sales during the almost 30 years the group was together.  They probably made somewhat than that more from live performances.

I think I bought only one new Sonic Youth CD – their 1998 album, A Thousand Leaves.  I bought it the day after I saw Sonic Youth perform live at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC – Washington was the first stop on their tour in support of that album, and it wasn’t available in local record stores before the show.

I’m someone who usually needs to hear new music several times before I start to respond to it, so I got very little from that 9:30 Club show (which I went to with my 15-year-old son) because Sonic Youth played almost nothing but A Thousand Leaves tracks that night.

Eventually A Thousand Leaves became one of my favorite albums – legendary critic Robert Christgau gave it an A+ rating, and he’s not the only critic to rate it among the best of Sonic Youth’s albums.  

I wish I could take a short trip back to 1998.  That concert would have been infinitely more satisfying if I had had a week to familiarize myself with the album before seeing Sonic Youth that night.

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If there’s another group more underrated than Sonic Youth, I don’t know who they are.

The band’s 15th and final studio album, The Eternal, reached the #18 spot on the Billboard album chart – making it their highest-charting album ever.  (That album was released two years before Sonic Youth founding members Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon split up after 27 years of marriage – which marked the end of the band.)

Today’s featured song, “100%,” was Sonic Youth’s biggest hit single.  It made it all the way to #4 on the Billboard “Alternative Songs” chart in 1992.  (Four other Sonic Youth singles made it on to the “Alternative Songs” chart, but the group never charted on the Billboard “Hot 100.”)

The “Dirty” album

Click here to listen “100%,” which was released in 1992 on Sonic Youth’s Dirty album.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Sonic Youth -- "Wildflower Soul" (1998)

Wildflowers 
For you today 

My oldest son (he was not quite 15 at the time) and I saw Sonic Youth perform at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC in the spring of 1998.  They were touring to promote A Thousand Leaves, their 10th studio album.  "Wildflower Soul" is from that album, which had a very odd cover:

A Thousand Leaves grew on me slowly.  It is quieter and more subtle than Sonic Youth's earlier music -- it's Sonic Youth for grownups.   (Thurston Moore was about 40 when it was released, and Kim Gordon was 45.)   

The band takes its time on most of the tracks, including "Wildflower Soul," which is over 9 minutes long.  There's another 9-minute-plus song on the album, plus an 11-minute-long track.

I'm not much of a gardener and I'm not much of a photographer, but when I'm on a hike or a bike ride, I take a lot of pictures of flowers -- especially wildflowers.  June is peak wildflower season in Colorado, and I came back from a recent trip to Denver and environs with a lot of pictures on my Blackberry.

Here's a blanket flower -- possibly the Gaillardia aristata, or common blanket flower:

I think this flower is a Gaillardia suavis --- also called perfumeball, or pincushion daisy --  a related variety with small flower rays but a large, fragrant seedhead:

Here's an orange Indian paintbrush (genus Castilleja).  I saw quite a few of these:

Here's a wild rose -- perhaps a Rosa woodsii (Wood's rose) or Rosa arkansana (wild prairie rose):

Here's another wild rose:

This bright yellow flower is the sulfur flower (Eriogonum umbellatum):

This is a plume thistle (genus Cirsium):

Here's a shot of this thistle from above:

This is the musk thistle (Carduus nutans), also known as the bristle thistle or nodding plumeless thistle:

Here's a yarrow (Achillea millefolium), also known as "nosebleed plant" and "soldier's woundwort" because of its astringent qualities:

I think these are dwarf golden asters (Hetertheca pumila), but I could be wrong.  Asters, daisies, and sunflowers are members of the Asteraceae family, which has more than 22,750 accepted species -- so cut me a little slack if I'm not sure:

Here's a harebell, Parry's bellflower, or something from the Campanula genus:

Here's the invasive Dalmatian toadflax flower (Linaria genistifolia, subspecies dalmatica), which is an escaped ornamental plant that is native to Dalmatia (a historical region on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea that is now part of Croatia.)

Here's a closeup of the Dalmatian toadflax's flowers:

This is a Mariposa lily (Calochortus gunnisonii):

Last but not least, here's what I believe is a scarlet globemallow (Sphaeralcea coccinea):

I like flowers of all kinds, but I have a soft spot for wildflowers.  You can never have too many wildflowers on a hike or mountain bike ride.  They're scarce enough to seem special, and you have to admire their self-sufficiency.

Here's "Wildflower Soul":

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon: