I have this memory of a lost night in the 1980s. For a moment I’m in the home of some kids I don’t know, kids old enough to have their own place. Don’t ask me where I was before or after, or who brought me there. I just know it was someplace like Allston, and the place was cold like maybe they didn’t pay their heating bill. Boston in the winter. These kids were really cool. One guy was named maybe Darryl and he was just so beautiful. He had this careless Mohawk, his hair was light brown, shaggy/curly, shaved down the sides, and it just tumbled into his face where his eyes were blue and his nose turned up cute like a rabbit. He wore a leather jacket with band insignia painted all over it. The girl that was there was really cool too, she wasn’t trying so hard like me and my friends were, with our carefully dyed hair and our intense makeup—one smudge, watch out. Goth is such drag. These kids were lazy punks. They didn’t have to try, ’cause they were it. I think they thought we were fussy, and young. We didn’t stay long. There wasn’t anything going on at their place. Just low light and no booze, a haze of cigarette smoke unmoving in the lamp beams. And Sonic Youth on the stereo.
They would like Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth wasn’t so much a band to pine after, they were like a philosophy. There was something advanced about them, the way these kids were advanced. It felt like it was too late for me to get into Sonic Youth. A weird attitude toward music, right? But shit was competitive. Me and my friends were always scrambling for an obscure, awesome band we could get into before anyone else, claim with psychotic enthusiasm, and have ultimate dibs on. I owned a few bands—Gene Loves Jezebel was one, but also Christian Death. My friends could like them, maybe even love them a little, but they were mine. My best friend Guen owned the Sisters of Mercy and their spin-off, the Mission UK. But who could own Sonic Youth? You’d have to be a scholar. They were deep like ancient Egypt or something. There was something spooky about them, dirge-y. Were they a cult? I learned about life from the music I listened to, I took lyrics really seriously. It seemed like I could learn a lot from Sonic Youth, but I honestly didn’t know if I was ready. I think on some level I knew that the bands I was obsessed with were just another kind of pop, even if I was getting my ass kicked in the street for being so into them.
I bought Sonic Youth’s Sister. Even the cover felt coded, a photographic rebus. The title and band’s name looked to be written in gold Sharpie. Oh, look: “Sonic-Youth,” it read. Is that how you wrote it? With a dash? This was crucial. I didn’t want to fuck up and write it wrong on my notebook or my Catholic school skirt because people would call you out for that and it was embarrassing. You had to play it off like who cares? but you did care, you cared deeply. Everyone did. Then, look on the other side, it says, “The Sonic Youth.” The Sonic Youth? Clearly this band didn’t give a fuck. They were all over the place, deliberately messy.
What could I learn from these pictures? A comet shooting through outer space. A woman sprawled on a wooden floor, short hair, tight little shirt, no underwear. No underwear? That’s intense. Something is written on her leg, what’s that on her ankle, a tattoo or, like, is she cuffed to the floor or something? Is this saying something about the subjugation of women? No—the girl doesn’t look upset. She’s a little sexy for sure but not as much as you’d think with no pants on. How about those cows on the other side, with the bangs that flopped onto their faces like cute Darryl’s Mohawk? A picture of a small town, long-ago Main Street, USA. Americana. Were they dissing suburbia? All I knew about suburbia was that punks liked to dis it. There’s a little baby naked on a lawn with his little baby-penis. Then the planet Saturn. A series of houses that all looked alike. And some crazy object, a black-and-white photo of it, like a drill maybe. It seemed atomic. Some gears at the bottom.
I put on the record and guess what? It’s the musical equivalent of the pictures on the cover. There’s something cosmic and spacey and lonely and lost. Simple, primal drums, and wailing, weirdo guitars. This was not pop. Or was it deconstructed pop, ripped apart. It was haunting, the way Kim Gordon murmured. She sounded like she knew everything—you could hear it in her voice. She knew everything but was too bored by it to tell you. You’d have to figure it out for yourself. Thurston Moore seemed to give up his secrets more readily. Something in his voice was earnest.
The little sheet that was slipped inside the cover was typewritten xeroxes of their lyrics, and this was before zines. On “Schizophrenia,” Thurston said, “I went away to see an old friend of mine / His sister came over she was out of her mind.” I liked how it was like a story. One of those weird nights when you wind up at someone’s house and some strange person is there being creepy or sad. Like when we wound up at the home of that guy who was supposed to be some big gay witch and he had an actual crystal ball that he twirled and then tossed at you saying, “Catch the light!” When I found out it was a quote from Labyrinth I couldn’t tell if that made it more or less embarrassing.
Whereas a lot of the goth music I listened to tried to conjure a melodic romantic fantasy, I felt like Sonic Youth was playing it like it really was. Their music sounded like life to me, which maybe scared me a little, or depressed me. I was looking to escape. But I was captivated. “Come on get in the car,” Kim insisted on “Pacific Coast Highway,” “I won’t hurt you.” Really? I wasn’t so sure. She sounded so tough and sinister. I respected her authority intuitively.
What about now? Well, Sister is only a million times better today. It’s so atonal and wild and sexy. I really think more than anything this is music to fuck to. And I had been a virgin! There are some things you can’t get until you’ve cast off your innocence. No wonder it tripped me out. “He’s got a fatal erection home in bed / … / He’s got a hard tit killer fuck in his past,” Thurston singsongs in “Tuff Gnarl.” Excuse me—“hard tit”? Blow my mind! I hadn’t known tits could be hard.
Oh my god—“Kotton Krown”! “Kotton Krown”! “Kotton Krown”! How could I have forgotten that this is the very very most beautiful song ever recorded, how it became my favorite song, how it satisfied all of my dreamy gothy uberromantic teenage needs. “Angels are dreaming of you / Angels are dreaming of you …” This is when you’re cuddling after crazy sex and you’re flying high on druggy dopamine in love. What did I know about such things? Someone should make a documentary about this song. Listening to it now I get a full-body memory of what it is like to long for something you have no words for. A craving for things you haven’t experienced, things you might not even know exist. “You’re gonna manifest the mystery,” they promise in tandem. I feel like someone just presented the inside of my brain with the biggest most luscious bouquet of otherworldly flowers. What a gift a song can be!
Being a virgin, sitting on my bedroom floor, listening to Sister, trying to decode it. I beheld the cover, its pictures. Each side contained a pitch-black square amid the images. I ran my fingers over it. It was raised, not flat like the others. I scraped it a little, and it began to loosen from the cardboard. NO WAY. The most mysterious band with the most mysterious sound had an actual mystery on their album cover! My heart raced, I felt like a girl in a book, like I’d found a secret drawer in the back of a desk, or a secret room that opened up from a bookcase. I tugged the blackness—a sticker—from the cover. There was a picture of Disney’s Magic Castle, the blue-and-white palace in the center of the theme park. Drawn over it were a series of Magic Marker circles, like radar being emitted from within, a secret broadcast.
Panting, I tore the sticker off the other side. A girl glared out from beneath. Young, maybe my age. She looked pissed. She wore overalls and stared straight into the camera. She was covered by a psychedelic wash of color, yellow and red blobs, like a strobe was passing over her, or she was trapped inside a lava lamp. I now know it to be Richard Avedon’s 1980 portrait of Sandra Bennett, I saw it in person at his retrospective at SFMOMA. Dick and Disney must have threatened the band with a lawsuit! I wasn’t savvy enough to pick up on the practical reasons for the stickers. I just thought it was another spooky gift from these witchy wizards. The only sad thing about my new copy of Sister is that those stickers are gone, and the black space is real, a void on the cover. I still sit fingering it anyway, waiting for a trap door to open—and it does. The record has come to an end in my apartment, but somewhere else in the building, someone is now playing Sonic Youth! Loud! Like I just was! Music is magic.
First published on xoJane in 2012.