Sonic Youth's '90s singles

Given the caveat, I gotta go with "Little Trouble Girl".

Sunday, for the locked-in riff and awesome skronky breakdown. A 90s radio rock song dipped in Rhys Chatham.

Come to think of it, these are all pretty good songs. I remember when I used to adore the 'yoof...

i like little trouble girl but i think bull and disappearer edge it out

Yeah, I forgot how good "Sunday" was.

voted for "Bull In The Heather," with "Dirty Boots" and "Sugar Kane" as runners-up. loved the original SubUrbia soundtrack version of "Sunday" so much that the A Thousand Leaves version always felt like a letdown to me.

xp Honestly the jam part is like the most subversive thing I've ever heard on a 90s rock single...imagine the people hearing something like this for the first time O_O

*something like that

i don't think "Sunday" has the most skronky or subversive bridge out of just the songs on this poll

these are all good ... though drunken butterfly is a weird choice for a single methinks. is there a video?

apparently there was, and apparently it was directed by a 120 Minutes contest winner and involved puppets

lol here we go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhsT0sp0rqs

'dirty boots' for that transition from ominous verse to uplifting, vaguely surfy chorus to all-out rock jam.

would have voted 'the diamond sea' fwiw, even in its diminished 5-minute format, but that feels shallow somehow.

diamond sea is still great in its truncated form. but i think dirty boots is my fave here.
little bit off topic, but god, if they started playing diamond sea onstage again i would follow them on tour.

Dirty Boots.

sugar kane

sugar kane

YAF is the worst btw

that one's a close 2nd but for me worst is still "100%," which was the first SY song i ever heard and put me off checking them out for a couple years

"Kool Thing" is my least favorite here... I assume this is the edit version of "Sugar Kane"? Still probably voting for it.

Disappearer, though I think I'm in an ILX minority in my fondness for the singles off Dirty.

Disappearer for me too

this looks like a great compilation actually

'butterfly'—what an amazing racket

After carefully reflecting the choices above, I went with Sunday. Which is quite odd, since A Thousand Leaves is one of my less favored SY-albums.

Bull.

Kool Thing = meh
Dirty Boots = average
Disappearer = great
100% = blech
Youth Against Fascism = awful
Sugar Kane = good
Drunken Butterfly = can't remember this one exactly, should youtube it but lazy
Bull In The Heather = great, one of 2 decent songs off shit album
Superstar = this was a single? meh... hip todd haynes ref but otherwise whatevs.
The Diamond Sea = great
Little Trouble Girl = awesome
Sunday = never heard

ok, youtube'd drunken bfly... sokay, i saw them live on the Dirty tour and they really made it way more heavy/menacing than the LP version.

"Superstar" was the 4th biggest chart hit out of these songs!

was it a double a-side with the cranberries or something?

Richard Carpenter has stated that he "doesn't care for" this version of "Superstar."[1]

sugar kane but bull in the heather is a fav too and also kathleen hannah in the video = <3

no i actually heard "Superstar" on the radio a fair amount in '94. and that goddamn Juno movie has kind of retroactively made it one of their best known tracks now too.

YAF is the worst btw

Seconded.

"Sunday" narrowly over "Bull in the Heather" and "Kool Thing."

Lot of Kim on the singles eh?

not really no? voted little troubled girl, so weird and great.

Dirty was the first sonic youth album I owned and Drunken Butterfly was my first favorite sonic youth song, so I voted for that

I assume "The Diamond Sea" was released in a condensed form.

radio edit

disappearer, but boots and YAF are both great too

goo > dirty but i think dirty had the better singles

4 kim fox outta 12 is actually kinda low, compared to her percentage of songs on the albums

kim fox? freudian slip?

haha kim vox oops.

i remember one time in high school one of my friends was like i bet you wanna MARRY kim gordon and i was like eh not really she's kind of like a cool aunt?

haha, I confused "disappearer" with "tunic"... I think I like tunic better.

Drunken Butterfly is awesome. Skronk for strippers.

But, yeah, Disappearer, one of my favorite songs of all time.

Tunic is great too.

"Dirty Boots", but none of these are the best songs on their respective albums.

...except for Bull In The Heather. Could also make a case for either Little Trouble Girl or Diamond Sea as well.

"Diamond Sea" would be the caveat, but the single version isn't close to the one on the album. I like "Bull In The Heather" but there is other stuff on EJSTNS.

The Diamond Sea always & forever

sweet shine >>>>>>>>> bull in the heather

WOO. I'm CUMIN ho-o-o-o-o-o-o-m-e.

do you think yr my home
deep down yr just a little horny...

bull in the heather

do like both YAF and 100% (responding to much hate ITT). YAF's retardedness works in its favor, i think. plus sounds great.

Tell em bout it. Hit em where it hurts.

Voted Disappearer, harking back a little to the Evol/Beauty Lies In The Eye/Cotton Crown heyday. Dirty Boots has a cool breakdown too.

AFAIK 100%/Sugar Kane/Bull were all top 30 UK hits. Don't know why this surprises me.

Richard Carpenter has stated that he "doesn't care for" this version of "Superstar."[1]

He can do what he likes, he didn't write it anyway, and in any case he changed the title....

I love a lot of these songs, but I have to go with "Kool Thing."

YAF is a terrible MES homage, and I think the a lot of the reason that Dirty is underrated is bcz they see 100% & YAF as the album's key tracks, when in fact they are respectively the 11th and 15th best tracks on that album. Half-hearted stabs at writing alternaradio hit singles (though I've come around a bit wrt 100% in recent months)

yeah thread was inspired by reading Goodbye 20th Century and right now getting into the major label era stuff and seeing the band and label people talk kind of frankly about how these songs were written and what thinking went into them being singles (apparently a label dude thought the Anita Hill topicality of YAF had hit potential and the band correctly thought he was nuts). it is kind of sad that Dirty DID have some big wall of sound Butch Vig rockers that were almost as radio-friendly as Nevermind or Siamese Dream but instead they went with kind of clunky bass riff-driven songs as singles instead.

dunno, i don't have a problem with 100%. Not in my "favorite SY songs" list, but as a big riffy rock song it works fine.

i liked it more once i understood the Joe Cole backstory, but still prefer "JC" on that front

^OTMFM (though I'm not exactly sure how well it wouldve done on the radio)

(xp to some dude) right, I'm not sure which songs off Dirty you think had a shot at radio success, but imo in 92/93, songs like Drunken Butterfly (which received half-hearted promotion if any at all), Theresa's Soundworld, and Swimsuit Issue could've been big.

Fuck, Theresa's Soundworld could've broken shoegaze music into American radio perhaps

Dirty had a "Cherub Rock" or too on it - "Sugar Kane" might have had a bigger impact as a promo blitz first single than "100%" did but the lack of a "Today" or "Disarm" would have kept it from breaking through as big.

"sugar kane" and "drunken butterfly" were dirty singles, too, though i suppose the momentum was gone by then. "theresa's sound world" would have been a cool lead-off single, so long as huge sales weren't expected.

[ha, drugs xpost. would have made sense post-gish.]

if you lead off with Sugar Kane, then I say second single should be Chapel Hill

then Theresa's Sound-World, then maybe tail them with Wish Fulfillment and JC.

then you license Drunken Butterfly out to the End of Days sdtk.

yeah i guess the one thing missing from this list is a lee single! "wish fulfillment" would probably be the most obvious choice. maybe "skip tracer"? or "genetic"?

disappearer is on there

woops, for some reason I was mistaking it for "Mote"

"genetic" is such a weird song. i love it and think i get what he was/they were going for, but it's also weirdly disjointed, like you can see the lines where the bits were glued together.

as relatively accessible as Lee's songwriting and voice are in the context of the band, i don't know if he ever had a song that would've made perfect sense as a single, much as i love some of them. got pretty pissed reading the pat in G20C about why "Genetic" was left off the album, which still makes zero sense to me.

I adore "100%" but would never vote for it over other Sonic Youth singles.

Really, even in truncated form, "The Diamond Sea" is probably my favorite SY song.

yeah, was that when lee pretty much quit the band (over not including "genetic")? totally weird, considering some of the songs that were included. would be a better album with that one (and maybe one less kim tune).

yeah "Genetic" was the one. the stuff in the book is really risible because it explains why it was a personal song to Lee, and Thurston and Kim being all "this band isn't a place for you to work out your personal stuff, this doesn't represent the whole band" ugh.

yeah, weird -- funny to think that SY might've ceased to exist at that point!

iirc he was supposedly kinda dominating the song's creation, instead of the usual "we all jam on a riff and then somebody calls dibs on singing over it" deal. dean wareham's memoir also has some bitching about Sean Eden getting bossy and multi-take obsessed on his own songs (despite - or perhaps because of - their relative lack of importance to everyone else in Luna). Sounds like bands get weird and powertrippy over the 2nd (or 3rd) banana's contributions sometimes.

yeah totally. interesting that they still played "genetic" live on the dirty tour -- was just listening to a late 92 bootleg with that song.

I think if Sunday would've taken off (and I think if any leadoff single had a chance to take off, it would've been Sunday) then Hoarfrost would've been a pretty decent 3rd single from ATL--following the three-minute edit of "Wildflower Soul" of course...;)

"Sunday" is a nice song but it's way more far removed from the 1998 rock radio climate than the Goo/Dirty singles were from the early '90s climate

hilarious to try to picture it slotted between Smashmouth and Everclear, though

I heard the album edit of "Sunday" in a Modell's Sporting Goods a few months ago in between like Creed and Live, presumably on some digital radio station.

needless to say, the segue doesn't make any more sense a decade plus later

some of those digital radio stations really make for cognitive dissonance -- over the weekend in a coffee shop i heard modest mouse and blues traveler played back to back.

I remember seeing some tv-tabloid piece on it bcz Macauley Culkin was in the video, and he hadn't done anything in like 6 or 7 years; the video had been the first thing he had done in a long time. Plus he was making out with his new wife. I remember afterwards, thinking "Oh cool Sonic Youth is finally going to have a hit."

I was pretty stupid for a 16-year old.

"it" = Sunday, specifically the video

I liked Dirty Boots ok, though I liked the video better. In twenty years, I can't imagine anyone hearing this list of songs for the first time and being remotely impressed. The story of this band seems to be switching from Branca based arty angst to Chatham based jammin'. Branca should sue them to prevent use of his name in connection w/the band for anything after 1985. Band of Susans did Chatham a whole lot better.

So, Dirty Boots.

In twenty years, I can't imagine anyone hearing this list of songs for the first time and being remotely impressed.

you need to work harder at people imagining

wow. harsh. 90s Sonic Youth were an important part of my adolescence.

they were never a singles band, and this list skips their most vital years (arguably). i'd say that chatham was in their DNA from the very beginning, at least as much so as branca, and that they moved away from both influences pretty early on. certainly by the time of goo and dirty. agree that band of susans did pop chatham well, but that's all they did. comparison to SY doesn't flatter them.

they were never a singles band, and this list skips their most vital years (arguably)

the 2000's?

lol, everything they recorded prior to goo

alfred, lord challopsyn

Here Comes Success vs. Washing Machine. 1995. Oof.

I listen to the 2000's Yoof more than the eighties though.

i think that would be more noteworthy once we're further away from the 00s

i was thinking of doing a Screaming Fields Of Sonic Love poll after this to kinda cover the pre-major label singles, fwiw

and i thought about making this poll their whole major label era but as much as i love the 00s stuff i don't feel like anyone needs "Incinerate" or "Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)" as an option here

Hmm. "Sunday, "Bull in the Heather," "Kool Thing," and "Youth Against Fascism" would feel no shame beside "Incinerate."

oh i know, but since "Sunday" is kind of their last gasp of anything resembling a mainstream rock single i thought the decade would make a good cutoff point

cosine

I went with 'Sunday', Davek OTM about the groove (I like 'Bull In The Heather' for the same reason). 'Disappearer' and 'Drunken Butterfly' have both been favourites of mine at some point too.

I should get a copy of that Goodbye 20th Century book really.

this poll POV

Disappearer
Drunken Butterfly
Sunday
The Diamond Sea
Sugar Kane

xpost the book is pretty good, as rock bios go. not a great deal of insight into the music itself, but lots of fun info for fans.

http://www.wegotpowerfilms.com/archives/91_tour_diary.html

yeah I need this book. Should've gotten it when I had a chance, though I can probably buy it from Amazon.com if need be...

Courtney Love enters the room, with Billy Corgan {Smashing Pumpkins were playing too} and introduces him to everyone. I think everyone was vastly underwhelmed.

what would a sonic youth '00s singles list look like? a little bit barren? i was kind of off the SY ship for most of that decade.

were there actual singles? like physical CDs/7 inches?

not sure.

this thread is kind of hard to post on, which is not what I wouldve expected from a thread about SY in the 1990s

hard to post on in what sense? like lotsa xposts?

like that year that punk broke diary, am0n - such innocent times! is that movie available on DVD? used to borrow the vhs tape from my friend like once a week in high school.

xpost yeah

like that year that punk broke diary, am0n - such innocent times! is that movie available on DVD?

― tylerw, Tuesday, January 18, 2011 4:34 PM

i was in the understanding that courtney love has been the one holding up the dvd release

for real? does she come off poorly in it -- can't really remember. or is it just that she wants to beef with sonic youth?

it's gotta be available online ehhhhhhhh?

errr http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5074745239075255736#

yeah looks like it's on google video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5074745239075255736#

oh xpostsssss

lol forgot about the thurston beatboxing intro.

the vhs is available, the dvd will prob never happen

The work was completed on the DVD in 2004 by director Dave Markey, release pending, containing:

• 42 minute 1991 Bonus Movie entitled "This Is Known As The Blues Scale" with previously unseen mind-blowing Sonic & Nirvana performances (including "Inhuman", "White Kross", "Orange Rolls/Angel's Spit", "Eric's Trip", "Chapel Hill", and "In Bloom") and plenty of revelatory and rockin' (and hilarious) never before seen off-stage and on-stage material
• 2003 Panel Discussion (on the film) at the Arclight in Hollywood, with Thurston Moore, Dave Markey, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, and J. Mascis
• Running audio commentary track by Thurston Moore & Dave Markey
• A photo slide show
• Theatrical trailer
• More surprises

guh, bonus stuff sounds rad

"a dahnce-ah" lol so obnoxious

have this on in the background, i've already lol'd a few times... the tunes sound pretty great too!

http://www.sonicyouth.com/jukebox/jukebox.html
rarities mixtape up now ...

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I just finished Goodbye 20th Century. Is there really not a better Sonic Youth book than this cuz this is pretty poorly written stuff (not that my expectations were high given the author, but still)?

^^^

i'm only halfway through G20C but i like it a lot. not sure what you were expecting that it doesn't deliver?

[Mark E.] Smith has never really missed an opportunity to have a pop at the band [Sonic Youth] since saying their license to make rock music should be revoked, that he would never shake hands with them if he met them and that he would hire a lawyer to sue them if he could afford it. He even sacked Craig Scanlon for apparently playing like them and, perhaps most cuttingly, he still refers to SY's front man as Scott Thurston in interviews.

wow, very cutting to refer to him by the name of a moderately well known session musician who plays in Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

If SY were a band of squirrels, MES would kill them.

Good results.

my ranking would be like Bull > Dirty Boots > Sugar Kane > Sunday > Disappearer > Kool Thing > Diamond Sea > Drunken Butterfly > Superstar > Little Trouble Girl > YAF > 100%

Re: Sonic Youth book--thee's one called Confusion is Next I think? Came out during the 90s. Anybody remember this?

I liked the SY section of Our Band Could Be Your Life

i've heard way worse things about Confusion Is Next than i ever heard about G20C

"not sure what you were expecting that it doesn't deliver?"

Well my number one complaint is that I don't feel like he's a good writer (clunky clunky clunky) but beyond that I don't think the narrative he chooses is very interesting and the way he writes it is even less so (if you are going to write a book this linear and this analysis free, I'm not sure why you don't choose to just make it an oral history since it's not like Browne's bringing much to the table here and at least then you might get a full on juicy story here and there). There's way to much "this happened and then this happened and you know who was there yeah that guy and he became and also coincidentally enough he was the brother of and also he dated back in Encino where Kim Gordon once bought a milkshake at a Dairy Queen" and blah blah blah. The music is almost entirely lost in the Who's Who fog of scenesters and the sea of label A&R guys and tour managers. I know there has to be a certain amount of that, but for me there was too much bullshit drama about a bunch of people you aren't really invested in (heck it's hard to be really invested in Sonic Youth since they seem pretty distant in the narrative--a lot of the book seems like second hand speculations/versions of their motives/events.)

Not saying Confusion Is Next is any better btw.

sugar kaaaaane

yeah i really disagree with your take on the book. the writing is definitely not anything special but as someone who's obsessed over every little nugget of info on the band i've been able to find in liner notes and articles for years, i think he did a good job of kind of filling in the blanks and explaining the details of stuff i've always wondered about. and i think he manages some real insight when getting down into describing each album and explaining how it was different from the previous one. like, it's not a 10/10 ideal SY book but it's close enough for me that i have few complaints.

yr going to have to explain that dn

cuz if it's gucci then that's a bit idk

it's a luriqua ref: letz talk abt gucci mane

http://eleven.se/files/e/esoteric.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpx20yJ4KoA

their tv debut on letterman, playing '100%'

i enjoy that they took the trouble of making one of their catchier singles less listenable, classically stoopid

'are you all right, paul??!'

haha i haven't seen that since it originally aired. at that point all i knew of the band was the "100%" video and i thought they seemed like total idiots, wouldn't have dreamed that within a couple years they'd become my favorite band.

favorite part is how The World's Most Dangerous Band joined in on the performance, and broke into "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for the commercial break.

yeah i would sure like a more exact idea of wtf the m.d.b. were throwing into the mix there

i've never spent much time with this era sonic youth. my favorite of theirs is sonic nurse.