Something 4 The Weekend # 146

Thurston Moore: Psychic Hearts: "Cindy (Rotten Tanx)" [mp3]

Our good friend, uncle Thurston, channels Bolan with a clear Lucite guitar that shoots sparks from the whammy bar and the nut...

Swaying confidently on red leather platforms and matching ascot while trying to find a rhyme for "monsters"...

Hotcha! Hank

Delayed Thurston Sideways Maneuver

"Bow down to the queen of noise."

So yeah, this is a video for "Ono Soul", a song off Thurston Moore's solo debut, Psychic Hearts, and it's a tight piece of lumpen cuz I [heart] Thurston, and Psychic Hearts is a damn solid album of SY Pop Lite stylings, and I also [heart] Yoko Ono quite alot. I love her so much, in fact, that I even wrote and recorded two different songs about her..."Onoboner" from approximately 1988, and "Usflux" in 2000. Some sunny day in 2012, I will write a third.

Beatle fans and critics in general who hate Yoko and think she ruined and broke up the Beatles aren't really true fans or good critics. Yoko Ono was the best thing that ever happened to John Lennon as an artist, and probably as a person, and in turn, a more interesting Lennon made for a more interesting Beatles...

We are all products of our influences - even the Beatles, who escaped their Skiffle roots through Bob Dylan and his weed, George Martin's studio prowess, Indian music and spirituality, Buck Owens, LSD, and Yoko Ono, just to name a few. The White Album is a monumental collage of all these influences and dozens more, and it is certainly their most interesting and musical recording, if not their defining one. Personally, I think Sgt. Peppers is a fine pop record, but it's probably only my fifth or sixth favorite Beatle record.

For her part, Yoko was doing her own thing, her own songs and recordings, which were/are just as diverse and interesting as The White Album, if not quite as appealing musically (depending on yr tastes)...Her singing in particular, can oftentimes be tough for Western minds to get with, as we don't tend to like and appreciate atonal music the way Eastern people do...Still, at other times, she sang straightforward ballads that tend to appeal to our Western sensibilities, and they're quite lovely...She worked with Ornette Coleman and John Cage, the guys from Can, and our man, Zappa, to name just a few...To dismiss Yoko Ono as a musical dilettante is definitely short-sighted, and the rest comes down to taste, I guess...

Dada...Fluxus...NYC No Wave...The ButterScotch Threshold...

Those are some of my tastes, and I [heart] Thurston and Yoko and the approximately infinite universe they reflect and inspire.

Hotcha! Hank

Something 4 The Weekend # 43

I've been in several bands over the years, most of them Punk, Metal, or some combination of the two, and all of 'em were loud. Still, I blame Sonic Youth for the slight ringing in my left ear and the migraines I get from time to time.

I don't know what year it was (late '80's/early '90's), and what album they were touring, but one of the six or seven times I've seen Sonic Youth over the years was in a small cafeteria at UW-Milwaukee. The ceiling was 15, maybe 20, feet high, and I was about ten feet from the stage, with a wall of PA speakers, stacked floor to ceiling, extending out into the crowd on both sides of the "pit". It was the single loudest, scuzziest, feedbackingest show I've ever witnessed, and revealed every last one of my Punk Metal bands to be nothing but soft and tender wannabes.

It can sometimes be easy to hear Sonic Youth as little more that a loud, scuzzy, feedback-laden noise band, and unfortunately, that short-sightedness makes one miss the most essential element of their music, and that is the supreme melodicism that lurks just under the surface of all that scuzziness and feedback. Not all the time, but alot of the time, Sonic Youth, to put it simply, write and play beautiful music.

Thurston Moore: Trees Outside The Academy: "The Shape Is In A Trance"

Thurston Moore recently released his second solo album, and what's coolest about this recording, I believe, is that in it's gentler, softer sounds, once can still hear the essence of Sonic Youth, but stripped of the scuzz and feedback, one is able to fully hear and appreciate the beauty that has been the true heart of Thurston's band from the start, or at least since their Bad Moon Rising album.

Hotcha! Hank