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Finished it today. Been chipping away at it for months, sometimes reading it for prolonged periods, then setting it aside for weeks.
I thoroughly enjoyed it overall. I found it to plod a bit at the beginning, and race up to a hasty conclusion towards the end, but overall I thought it was excellent, peppered with interesting insights and anecdotes conveyed with literary wit.
I started listening to Sonic Youth in 1998. That period from A Thousand Leaves onwards holds a significant personal fascination for yours truly. Especially the mid 00s noise scene which I was indoctrinated into through bands which had an association with Thurston such as My Cat is an Alien, Mouthus, Wolf Eyes, Black Dice, Double Leopards, Magik Markers etc etc.
A handful of these bands garner a cursory namecheck in this book. That whole era really gets a kind of a paragraph. Thurston mentions bringing outsider bands on tour with them in 1994 at which point he names Sunburned, NNCK, Wolf Eyes, 16 Bitch Pile Up, and a few others. Only Sunburned and NNCK existed in the mid 90s to my knowledge, the rest only came into fruition late 90s/early 00s. Is this poetic license for sake of brevity, or has Thurston truly forgotten what was going on. Was that whole noise era actually him "slumming it" as he claimed not to be doing in an interview I remember from that time, was he actually just enjoying being the big fish in the noise swamp, resting on his laurels as the king of noise? Or was he strong armed into editing it all down into a paragraph or two by editors conscious of the fact that the average reader would rather more pages be devoted to touring with Mudhoney and Nirvana as opposed to the whole weirdo freak folk noise scene. At one point Thurston even says he was conscious during this period of the shadow that touring with Nirvana cast over this latter period, how it just wasn't as exciting.
In the afterword he thanks his editor and quotes the aforementioned as quipping "have you read Ulysses? You've written two Ulysses" which leads me to suspect there may exist a manuscript of Sonic Life which takes a deeper dive into the latter era of Sonic Youth as well as Thurston's solo improv career.
These are just my initial inebriated ramblings, composed at 3am. Hopefully I will be able to field some sober replies tomorrow and we can try and figure it out collectively. Keep on keep on keep on
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