Sonic Youth

I need to say something about Sonic Youth, anything. It's hard to be at all concise about a band this great, but let me try.

First, they are the greatest band in the universe. They join The Beatles, who've mastered pop, Pavement, who've mastered their own style of suburban pop, the Stones, who've mastered rock (and its ego), and certainly others you can come up with, bands which never disappoint, which always do something new but discernible.

Second, in a 30 year existence, there is no weak album. Some I admit I haven't fully "gotten" yet, but it's obvious the potential is there. I've heard the usual love-of-dichotomy "SY is split on a continuum between artsy noise and hard-rock songs," but there is so much more than that. There is always ambience, and there is always some kind of melody. The rhythms are pronounced (sometimes the rhythms are the melodies), and there's almost always some kind of "noise," an all-encompassing term if ever there was one.


Mostly what I would like is for others to notice how fucking amazing this band can be, a hard task, admittedly. Their discography is huge, and ambient noise isn't always the easiest thing to notice, even if sometimes the songs are clearly in the pop form or the melodies are highly pronounced (Teenage Riot, anyone?) And while every album is indeed unique, at distant listens they all sound the same. And consider that every critic and fan out there has their own opinions about which is the best album. How diverse is their discography?

2000's NYC Ghosts & Flowers is pure ambient, while 1992's Dirty is a Butch Vig-produced noise/grunge fest (they're both wonderful). Their first 1982 album is no-wave. Their second, 1983, is ambient noise rock (check out the Stooges cover and the lyrics to Confusion is Next). 1988's Daydream Nation is about as catchy as they can get, while 1998's A Thousand Leaves is about as laid-back as they can get. I could go on. I used to think Thousand Leaves was my favorite, but really it's just my first vinyl fetish and the first SY that I truly got into, opening up this wonderful world. I could always go for parts of Washing Machine, Confusion is Next, Dirty, and of course, shuffling through the entire discography.


And so to close, if there is any doubt about the ever-constant strength of this band, listen to a song from each album:

1982 S/T: I Dreamed I Dream
1983 Confusion is Next: Freezer Burn/I Wanna Be Your Dog
1985 Bad Moon Rising: Death Valley '69
1986 EVOL: Shadow of a Doubt
1987 Sister: Schizophrenia
1988 Daydream Nation: Teenage Riot
1990 Goo: Kool Thing
1992 Dirty: JC
1994 Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star: Sweet Shine
1995 Washing Machine: Little Trouble Girl (or Unwind...)
1998 A Thousand Leaves: Snare, Girl
2000 NYC Ghosts & Flowers: Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)
2002 Murray Street: Sympathy for Strawberry
2004 Sonic Nurse: I Love You Golden Blue
2006 Rather Ripped: Jams Run Free
2009 The Eternal: Massage the History

Etude No. 1 in C major - Chopin (1830)

Chopin was born two hundred years and one day ago and this is the first classical music post on 6stars? for shame.

if scales make you see stars, please listen to this sublime piece that could last from now until the end of time, but instead stops at just under two minutes.

I Feel Love - Donna Summer (1977)

ooh... it's so good
it's so good
it's so good
it's so good
it's so good

ooh... i'm in love
i'm in love
i'm in love
i'm in love
i'm in love

i feel loooo
ooooooooo
ooooooooo
ooooooove

i feel loooo
ooooooooo
ooooooooo
ooooooove



listen.

We Tigers - Animal Collective (2004)

my favorite song off of Sung Tongs and one of the most memorable Animal Collective songs ever!

prepare to dance!
prepare to jump!
prepare to scream!
prepare to sing!

prepare to dance!

listen.

We Share Our Mother's Health - The Knife (2006)

please excuse the awful resolution of this awesome album art.

stereo makes anything possible!

have you ever felt like a song sucked you in? not grabbed your attention, but actually grabbed you and threw you into its purply blue world?

this is pop music, i feel it in my bones, it feels electric, but this is pop music. the vocals don't begin until the song is already a fourth over, but no matter.

it's this enchantress. wizard? daemon. amoeba. its voice, chameleon, morphs and blends from highs to lows, chickenscratch frequencies unleashed.

duets. we've heard robot duets before. robot trios. robot quartets. robot symphony!

am i supposed to dance? am i supposed to think? am i supposed to listen?
do i dance? do i think? do i listen?

fuzzy me lean spleen a bottle of air and a wisp just like that.

listen.

Alive 2007 - Daft Punk (2007)

i can honestly say that i love Homework, Discovery, Alive 1997, Human After All, and Alive 2007 equally (yes, expect at least five more posts in the coming eternity). so when Daft Punk releases an album that seamlessly, expertly, brilliantly, sublimely, mixes everything they've ever touched into a 1.3 hour epic medley of a concert, i find myself tempted to claim that it represents the epitome of the artist's music.

but it doesn't. it lacks one key feature of Daft Punk music: mind-numbing repetition.

where everything from "Around the World" to "One More Time" to "Human After All" recycles the same four bar argument for their entire existence, Alive 2007 evolves, morphs, trips, skips, falls, flies, destabilizes, stabilizes, hovers, sinks, and rises. and in under a minute? this is not normal Daft Punk.

on more than one occasion, i've played this album for friends who previously had no interest in Daft Punk... but they found something here.

i'm starting to think that to appreciate Daft Punk studio albums, you have to have a particular kind of insanity. you either have to a) love dancing, or b) love being, though the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. you either get up and just move, because that's all that four-on-the-floor is commanding you to do, or you stare off into space and let the waves of existence wash over you in a stormy confusion of awe. the repetition lends itself to this experience. why do Christians repeat the Hail Mary?

but for the non-believers, Daft Punk have created something new altogether, something still danceable and full of life: Alive 2007. Bangalter and that other French dude deconstruct, reconstruct, sack and pillage their old pieces to create a masterful compilation of their own forays into house, techno, acid, funk, disco, and synth pop, jumping from 1997 to 2001 to 2005 to 1997 to 2005 to 2001 to 1997 like it's nothing at all. this is not just an epic artist retrospective, but a world-class dance party, the best there ever was, the only kind there has ever been, the party that is life.

the encore isn't even fair. besides mixing the title track of Human After All with "Together," our beloved robot djs decide it timely to combine "One More Time" with "Music Sounds Better With You," probably the two greatest dance songs from the 90s and two of the greatest dance songs of all time. i don't understand how the law of physics allow them to coexist in one space of time without our legs stretching into dancing black holes that worm their way across the universe.

Wikipedia fun time!

audio:

The Alive 2007 set used Ableton Live software on "custom made super-computers" for the show. Daft Punk accessed the hardware remotely with Behringer BCR2000 MIDI controllers and JazzMutant Lemur touchscreen pads within the central pyramid. Minimoog Voyager RME units were also implemented for the live performances. The four Voyager units and two Behringer mixers allowed Daft Punk to "mix, shuffle, trigger loops, filter, distort samples, EQ in and out, transpose or destroy and deconstruct synth lines."

video:

The visuals of the 2006 and Alive 2007 tour were set up by XL Video. The company provided eight-core Mac Pro units running Catalyst v4 and Final Cut Pro. Daft Punk approached the company with their visual concept for the shows. "They came to us with a pretty fixed idea of what they wanted," said head of XL Video, Richard Burford. "They wanted to mix live video with effects. Using the eight-core Mac Pros, we were able to take in eight digital sources and treat them as video streams. Then they could use Catalyst to coordinate the video with lighting effects and add their own effects in on the fly. The final digital video streams ran to LED screens."

wow. i always find technical stuff enjoyable to read, even if i don't understand half of it.

I DIDN'T EVEN MENTION THE VISUALS!



ok it's not going to matter to listeners of the album alone, unless you're a lucky bastard and attended one of the shows and have all the spinning flashes and pyramidal shine ingrained in your neural passageways, but the visuals from this tour we're otherworldly. check it out sometime.

i really can't believe this is my first Daft Punk post.

download. purchase.

The Message - Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five (1982)

the person that first played this track for me introduced it by saying something along the lines of "hey guys, hip hop and rap isn't all about 40s and blunts."

now, i'm not one to talk down 40s and blunts, but let me just say that the era of rapping solely about 40s and blunts wouldn't even come until the early 90s, a decade after Grandmaster Flash got his message out.



while most rap tracks rarely exceed 5min in length (notably, 2Pac's "California Love" goes for 6.5 min), "The Message" hits seven minutes and twelve seconds, an epic for the genre.

but the length is necessary.

the beat is so tight that everyone wants to rap over it: Ice Cube, Puff Daddy...
the lyrics are so fucking brutal that everyone wants to repeat them: Andre Nickatina, Snoop Dogg, Immortal Technique...

and the message?

the message is the Message: it's about how fucked up life is in the ghetto, it's about frustration, and you feel it:

don't
push
me
cause
i'm
close
to
the
edge

i'm
try
ing
not
to
lose
my
head

it's like a jungle sometimes. it makes me wonder how i keep from going under.

such a fucking badass.