Sonic Youth

A scarecrow with a burning Halloween pumpkin in place of its head, set against a purple urban sunset that foreshadows the imminent fall of darkness and the rise of a malevolent moon: "Bad Moon Rising". More than just an image, the cover photo credited to James Welling is a stars-and-stripes curse. The American dream skewered like a voodoo doll. "I wanted to use the pumpkin as a metaphor because I liked how it symbolized Americans' fears," Thurston Moore would later explain. The title was inspired by the song of the same name from Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Green River", his idols, musically so far removed from Sonic Youth yet so close to their same dark premonitions. Through that phrase borrowed from blues slang, back in 1969 John Fogerty and his bandmates had chilled the flower-power euphoria, warning of coming disasters ("I see bad times today") and pointing the finger at the contradictions of an America that had by then lost its innocence amid wars, violence and social unrest. More or less what the Doors had prophesied two years earlier on "Strange Days", and, in an even darker and more nihilistic way, what the Velvet Underground had done on their debut. But coming from those founding fathers of the quintessential patriotic genre, Americana, the idea sounded even more unsettling.

The terror of Helter Skelter in the age of Reagan

Under the sickly, yellowish light of that "Bad Moon Rising", the dissolution of the Age of Aquarius had played itself out, symbolically sealed by two bloody events of that year: the open-air nightmare of Altamont, where during a Rolling Stones concert a young Black man was stabbed to death by the "security" provided by the Hells Angels, and the massacres carried out by Charles Manson's cult in Los Angeles, including the infamous Cielo Drive killings, in which Sharon Tate, the wife of Roman Polanski, was murdered.

Fifteen years later, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon pick up right there, from that orgy of violence, drugs and madness carried out to the cry of "Helter Skelter" that buried the hippie utopia for good. Because to Sonic Youth, the "new morning for America" heralded by Ronald Reagan's election slogan sounds just as fake and illusory as the "peace & love" of the freak generation had been, destined to be swept away by the Nixonian realignment. Warmongering imperialism in Latin America (with interventions in El Salvador and Nicaragua), growing social inequality, the economic crisis and the spread of crack (a new heroin for the '80s) all appear to Moore and co. as new pieces in the mosaic of an America falling apart. Hurtling at breakneck speed toward the abyss of its own "Death Valley '69".

In Death Valley

To seal that descent into hell, a metaphor for a radical rejection of the Republican daydream nation of the '80s, Moore enlists the very woman who had written that No in capital letters at the head of an entire movement: No wave. Yet his meeting with Lydia Lunch happens entirely by chance, on a bus. The singer-guitarist still had that raw, diabolical riff in his head, one someone in the band had strummed out during rehearsals. He asks the Queen of Siam to help him write lyrics for it and sing it together with him. They call the result "Death Valley '69", in tribute to the phrase used by Ed Sanders in his essay on the Manson case ("The Family").

That text is nothing more than the manipulated transcription of phrases spoken by Susan Atkins, the "Sexy Sadie" of the Manson Family who took part in the Cielo Drive slaughter ("I didn't wanna/ But she started to holler/ So I had to hit it/ Hit it/ Hit it/ Hit it"). And through her slurred ravings, mouth caked with sand ("I got sand in my mouth"), it's almost as if we're witnessing that horrific road trip, from the mud of the shacks at Barker Ranch down through canyons and forests, all the way to the luxury of the Beverly Hills villas.

But even more than the lyrics, what turns these five minutes of rock'n'roll delirium into "one of the fifty most evil songs ever" (according to Kerrang! magazine) is the musical construction: an amphetamine-fuelled clash between the guitars, with that mesmerizing riff that sounds like the roar of a Steppenwolf motorcycle, an incessant bass, and then that obsessive crescendo exploding into the two singers' frenzied, delirious spoken-word delivery, in a boiling magma of overtones, up to the orgasmic scream of a thoroughly depraved Lunch. A brilliant, murderous symphony that Mat Snow of NME would call "a Whole Lotta Love for the einsturzende pogo generation," referring to the German noise-makers Einsturzende Neubauten.

Already released as a demo and on an EP, and in this second version placed at the close of "Bad Moon Rising," "Death Valley '69" represents its definitive climax, but also the only self-contained track, set apart from the rest of the tracklist like a bonus single sealing the project. In that dark Valley, the menacing face of smiling American culture takes shape, one the Sonic Youth identify in Manson's demonic sneer. "In many ways, America is founded on death," Kim Gordon would explain. "California is supposed to be the last frontier, paradise, so it's highly symbolic that the Manson affair unfolded there."

"Death Valley '69" would be the track that pushed the album beyond the narrow confines of the New York noise-rock circuit, helped along by a successful video clip - a sort of splatter B-movie directed by Judith Barry and Richard Kern - featuring a stunning Lung Leg (the actress later pictured on the cover of "Evol") and the members of Sonic Youth smeared in blood, for a gruesome remake of the Manson cult's killings on August 8th and 9th, 1969.

The concept - Madness and death in a lost America

Fresh off two extreme, violent records (the LP debut "Confusion Is Sex" and the EP "Kill Yr Idols"), Sonic Youth still hadn't managed to break through, not even with the more forward-thinking critics, including the authoritative Robert Christgau. So, taking a cue from the line "I don't know why you wanna impress Christgau," Moore had the bright idea of turning the song "Kill Yr Idols" into "I Killed Christgau With My Big Fuckin' Dick" (!). The one who had believed in them, however, was Gerald Cosloy, boss of the small label Homestead, who signed them in the US. On the other side of the Atlantic, where they were paradoxically more popular, another admirer of theirs, Paul Smith, would found Blast First! (an offshoot of Mute) specifically for them, releasing "Bad Moon Rising" as its very first release.

Recorded at Before Christ Studios in Brooklyn for under seven thousand dollars, with Bob Bert on drums and technical support from Martin Bisi and John Erskine, the album is structured as a concept album on the themes of death and madness. A lysergic flow in which each of the two sides essentially forms a single track, with no break in continuity from one piece to the next.

Consistent with the concept, Sonic Youth had also killed off their own songs. At least according to Moore's own testimony: "It was getting too physical, there was a lot more violence, it seemed like there was only one way to experience the shows, so the music kept getting crazier and so did we, it was a real massacre," he revealed to Matter in 1984. Tired of renewing the hysteria of those bacchanals, the band shut themselves in the studio and changed everything, from the guitars to the tunings, down to the pickups: this way it would be impossible to reproduce the old songs, leaving room only for the new ones - less crudely hardcore, but more floating and balanced. The device of a single sonic flow also served to eliminate the "gaps" of live shows, caused by frequent tuning changes between songs and usually covered by pre-recorded sound collages.

To introduce this tableau of dystopian American nightmares, little more than a minute of trance-like arpeggios suffices ("Intro"), where the tension seems congealed, held back among those metallic strings that herald the first, furious noise-rock ceremony: "Brave Men Run (In My Family)" - inspired by a painting by Edward Ruscha - already shifts gears from the (post)punk shards of their early days, with its heavy, sumptuous stride, punctuated by an epic riff, beneath a dense hail of dissonance and clanging. Kim, Thurston's new bride, lands her first knockout blow against the American sunshine family: "Brave men run in my family/ Brave men run away from me," the hypocrisy of the good family man and the brave captain torn to shreds in a couple of verses. In its place, a black hole, "Society Is A Hole": this time it's Moore who grabs the mic, for a listless mantra, the perfect anthem to the anomie of the metropolis, which institutionalizes lying ("It makes me lie to my friends") and terrorizes people ("And everybody is scared"). And as that single frayed chord repeats endlessly, propped up by the drum hits, the mind runs to the Welcome To Fear City flyer circulated at the time by the Council for Public Safety, with its survival rules for New York's urban jungle, torn apart by guerrilla warfare and decay. "We are living in pieces/ I want to live in peace," a desperate Moore concludes, underlining an ideal, almost spiritual tension trying to make its way through the heart of darkness of the album.

Guitars in flames

But "Bad Moon Rising" is also, and above all, an album of guitars in flames, thrashing in agony between terrifying distortions and unheard-of alternate tunings. Fearless students of composer Glenn Branca, Moore and Ranaldo torture their six strings, striking them with objects and drumsticks, taking possession of every part (body, neck, electronics) and erecting walls padded with effects (droning, feedback), capable of generating that booming, lopsided but always unmistakable sound, backed by an exhausting drumming. A prime example is the tour de force of "I Love Her All The Time": over eight minutes of tectonic noise-rock, opening with a disorienting revisiting of the Stooges' "Not Right" and a sleepwalking serenade ("She comes into my mind/ Twisting through my nerves/ I don't understand/ A word she says/ She's on my side") before the deflagration that from the 3'30 mark onward twists everything into a maelstrom of dissonant guitars, scarred and scorched to the point of final implosion, with shreds of chords and Moore's lethargic chant - built on the iteration of a descending fourth interval - swallowed up by the mixer.

But behind the psychotic atmospheres lies the anxiety of escape, which finds in love its only possible refuge. Even in the form of the "ghost whore" celebrated in the hallucinated liturgy of "Ghost Bitch," where amid anguished sirens, metallic clangs and searing feedback, Kim Gordon raises a moved ode to the spirits of Native Americans and their progeny of lost souls ("Our founding fathers laid right down/ And Indian ghost from long ago/ They gave birth to my bastard kin/ America it is called"). America's original sin resurfacing, in a desperately poetic text, closed by a sudden flash of hope: "You're the first day of my life".

By now increasingly on a collision course with the tribalisms of industrial (the "einsturzende pogo" evoked by NME), the album heads into the home stretch with the abrasive diptych "I'm Insane"-"Justice Is Might"; the first assembles fragments of pulp tales ("a steaming swamp," "murdered angels," "inside my head my dog's a bear") in another morphine-soaked delirium from Moore, ever more the crooner-prophet of a new Blank generation; the second rises solemnly amid rumbling drums but soon wraps itself in a thick blanket of haze, with the mechanical screech of the guitars gradually dying out like the last gasp of a dying man.

Then, there will only be the precipice of Death Valley.

The musical legacy

Received with suspicion by critics of the time, who judged Sonics "pretentious" and "arty", and completely ignored by Rolling Stone, the album — like a new "Velvet Underground & Nico" — would end up marking a before and after in the grand saga of American alternative rock. A definitive derailment that would push its boundaries even further, deconstructing and manipulating the song format while never losing sight of pop canons and iconography. It's no coincidence that Kim Gordon and co. would become the indie stars par excellence, thanks also to the subsequent "Evol", "Sister" and above all "Daydream Nation". From Nirvana to Pavement, from Fugazi to Polvo, not to mention Swans, plenty of bands would come to thank this coven of blasphemous troublemakers and their profane dances around that burning scarecrow.

In 1995 "Bad Moon Rising" was reissued by Geffen with the bonus tracks "Satan Is Boring" and "Echo Canyon", along with both sides of the "Flower"/"Halloween" single. Always worthwhile additions, but not comparable to the power of the eight incandescent noise pieces that make this Sonic Youth monolith one of the undisputed cornerstones of noise-rock.

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05/07/2020