Longevity presents a challenge to rock 'n' roll bands in
different ways: for some it's just not in the
game plan, though they might find it foisted upon them
anyhow; for others it's something they aspire to but
never reach; for others it means a retreat into the
familiar and, ultimately, a kind of creative stasis.
For Sonic Youth, musically speaking, it really doesn't
seem to matter a damn — they just keep on rolling,
with an unstoppable, off-kilter momentum. But in
critical terms, longevity has them nailed. In 1988
Daydream Nation received near-universal critical
praise, and has since come to be seen as their peak
achievement. Everything that has followed it has
therefore had to struggle to emerge from its
long shadows. To make matters worse, it
was also the band's last release before signing to
Geffen, a move still regarded as dubious by the more
fundamentalist adherents to the indie cause. The
reputation of Goo suffers then on two counts: one, that
it follows the band's widely perceived masterpiece,
and two, that it's representative of the band's
sell-out to mainstream, corporate values and
MTV-friendly guitar rock.
But listening to Goo 15 years on offers a wider
perspective, and despite the critical orthodoxy that's
been handed down, to my mind it's a great album,
equaling and sometimes surpassing what the band
achieved on Daydream Nation. Prior to Goo, Sonic
Youth's evolution had accelerated, from the EVOL album
onwards, moving away from avant-rock murkiness towards
a greater focus on songforms, however skewed, while
cementing the band's love-hate relationship with rock
in general and the lurid, trashier elements of
pop-culture in particular. Sister and Daydream Nation
both captured, respectively, the raw essence of the
band in transition and a more refined approach. Goo
takes things one step further, presenting Sonic
Youth's sound in unprecedented clarity and
simultaneously adopting a more flagrantly ironic
approach to their subject matter. It is perhaps this
quality that is most troubling about Goo, because any
discussion of rock 'n' roll as art inevitably takes a
high-handed serious viewpoint, and here are Sonic
Youth persistently poking fun at, and holes in, the
(counter)cultural fabric.
The highlights are vivid and come thick and fast: from
the scuzzy opening of "Dirty Boots" followed by the
ode to Karen Carpenter, "Tunic," it's clear that the
band means business, but purely on its terms. "Dirty
Boots" echoes "Teenage Riot" in its wry espousal of
classic outsider, teen-rock values, but with
languorous insouciance replaced by a more urgent sense
of pace and dynamism. "Tunic" is an exemplary piece of
multi-layered irony with a piercing, feminist
commentary at its heart, underpinned by a virulent
energy. "Kool Thing" originally drew criticism for its
perceived failure to make a cross-cultural statement
via Chuck D's guest spot, but guess again: it is a
statement, but it's directed exactly at that kind of
critical expectation: "Are you gonna liberate us girls
from male, white, corporate oppression?" is Kim
Gordon's rhetorical question, eliciting the pithy
reply from Chuck D, "Tell it like it is, yeah, word
up." It's a kind of drop-dead, exaggerated cartoon
cool which satirizes itself as much as anything else,
much like Raymond Pettibone's cover art. "Mote" is as
near as the band gets to conventional hard-rock
("Sugar Kane," off the next album, would nudge them
closer still), but eventually breaks up into noisy
dissonance; while "Cinderella's Big Score" and
"Titanium Expose" follow tight, irregular patterns of
streamlined energy, and pulverizing force — with Steve
Shelley cooking up a storm with the best drum sound
the band had enjoyed on record thus far.
This being a deluxe edition, the remastered Goo is
fleshed out with B sides, outtakes and 8-track demos,
expanding it into to a sprawling two-disc set. Some of
these extras are of real value: the vocal version of
"Lee #2" is almost wistful, far gentler than
anything on the main body of the album, and the band
addresses the comparisons to Television generated by
Daydream Nation in a typically perverse manner by
covering the Neon Boys' obscurity "That's All I Know
(Right Now)." The 8-track demo versions of the Goo
tracks on the second disc are a little more raw-sounding,
and less overtly dynamic than the finished versions,
but are generally pretty close to what eventually came
to be released. In this sense they're less of a window
into the band's working methodology and more of an
alternative version of the album proper (as on the
expanded edition of the Velvet Underground's Loaded).
The main benefit of this new version of Goo is in its
beefed-up sound and the possibility that it might
receive the sort of wider reappraisal it surely
deserves. In admirably unpredictable fashion, Sonic
Youth followed it with the logically rock-centric
Dirty, but then defied expectations again with the
low-key Experimental, Jet Set, Trash & No Star,
followed by a decade of diverse and powerful material.
They're still out there and they still matter.
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