Happy 30th Anniversary to Sonic Youth’s eighth studio album Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, originally released May 10, 1994.
Lori Barbero, Mark Arm, and Lee Ranaldo are chatting outside a tour bus on a crowded festival field when suddenly Arm presses a finger to his nostril and blows a snot rocket into the grass, barely missing Barbero’s shoe. “Oh thank you,” she says sarcastically and then, without missing a beat, giggles and looks into the camera. “Hey, what’s green and flies over Germany?” The two guys look at her inquisitively. “Snotzis!”
It’s a relatively tame scene amid the rock-n-roll mayhem captured in 1991: The Year Punk Broke, Sonic Youth’s documentary of their two-week European tour in the summer of ’91. With an entourage of Babes In Toyland, Mudhoney, Ramones, Dinosaur Jr. and—most notably—Nirvana, Sonic Youth were playing to massive festival crowds in support of Goo (1990), their major label debut.
In between scenes that poke fun at Madonna’s Truth or Dare in a meta “Look! We’re making a documentary!” sort of way, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore fleshes out the film’s thesis. “’91 is the year that punk finally breaks through to the mass consciousness of global society,” he opines like a professor over breakfast one morning. “Modern punk as featured in Elle magazine.”
In another scene outside a nightclub in Germany, he chats up a group of older teens. “I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture by mass marketing and commercial paranoia behavior control,” he says. “And the first step is to destroy the record companies, do you agree?” The teens giggle nervously.
I, too, was a teenager living in Germany in 1991, though I was an American living on an American army base. That year, there was an excitement in the air—the Cold War had just ended and there was a spirit of lighthearted rebellion and boundless possibility. I was 14 years old—still a little too young for music festivals—but it’s quite possible that I flipped through the Stars & Stripes one morning and noticed a photo of a still relatively unknown Kurt Cobain at the Rhein Rock Fest in Köln. There would have been little way of knowing that Nevermind (1991) would come out the following month and rock the Western world, defining my adolescence—and my entire generation—over the next few years. All joking and professor-like irony aside, 1991 was indeed the year punk broke through to mass consciousness.
For that reason, the early ’90s would end up being a whirlwind for both Nirvana and Sonic Youth. The latter would eventually use their 1994 art-core album Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star to comment on this wild ride at a time when they wanted nothing more than to hop off. But first, they’d release two sleekly produced albums and embark on a few high-profile tours, playing to ever-growing crowds, to arrive at that point.
But back to 1991, the year punk broke. Though Moore had talked a good game about smashing the corporate-rock cabal, the truth was that Nirvana had recently signed to major label Geffen after Moore and his wife/bandmate Kim Gordon had encouraged them to do so. Since forming in early ’80s New York, Sonic Youth had never fit in with the dying punk scene, or the emerging No-Wave scene, or with any of the popular radio fare. They’d fashioned their own unique brand of melodious noise-rock through alternate tunings and a creative sculpting of distortion. In their own quest to find a home for their music, Sonic Youth had suffered a string of indie-label letdowns, and so by the time they themselves had signed to Geffen’s DGC imprint, it was mostly with relief.
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So when it came time to record Goo in 1990, the band put a lot of sweat and diligence into their major-label debut in hopes of making DGC happy—and maybe even producing a radio-friendly single. “It was arduous,” Gordon said of the recording process. Still, the album managed to reach a wider audience, while maintaining its credibility with Sonic Youth’s loyal base.
For their national Goo tour, where they played larger venues than they ever had before, they brought along Nirvana, whom they’d admired since the previous year when they’d first heard Bleach (1989). In fact, while shooting the video for “Dirty Boots,” Moore had even worn a Nirvana T-shirt to the set. “No one had ever heard of Nirvana,” remembered director Tamra Davis. “We all said, ‘What’s that shirt?’”
Not long before this joint tour, Nirvana had recorded rough demos of the songs that would end up on Nevermind and gave copies of the tape to Sonic Youth. Though Nirvana was at that point still on Sub Pop, they were growing frustrated with the indie label. With Sonic Youth’s urging, Nirvana would end up not only signing to DGC but also with Gold Mountain Management, who Sonic Youth also employed.
But meanwhile, as Nirvana were gearing up to sign contracts, Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing” from Goo reached a respectable No. 7 on the Modern Rock chart. The corresponding video even made it into rotation on MTV’s Buzz Bin. But it never became the smash hit the label had hoped for. “‘Kool Thing’ was commercial for them, but it really wasn’t a commercial song,” said a Geffen creative director. However, another opportunity for exposure soon arrived in early 1991 when Neil Young asked Sonic Youth to open for him and Crazy Horse on their Smell the Horse tour. That, too, would end up being a disappointment when Sonic Youth discovered that Young’s fans just didn’t know what to make of their artful-yet-gnarly noise.
But then not long after the Neil Young tour came the tour documented in 1991: The Year Punk Broke. It began in August in Ireland and snaked through Germany and England before ending in Holland. It was a fun jaunt full of friends and hijinks, and a breath of fresh air after the stinker that was Smell The Horse. What’s more, the European crowds loved Sonic Youth and their caravan. Coming off that high, that fall Sonic Youth sent demos for their next album to Butch Vig, who had recently finished production on Nirvana’s Nevermind.
In January ’92, not long after Sonic Youth’s recording sessions with Vig had begun, Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous (1991) out of the #1 slot on the Billboard chart. At every major label, Nirvana’s explosive success would spark a feeding frenzy, with every A&R guy searching for “the next Nirvana” and anything that could be remotely deemed “alternative.” At DGC, hope began to arise that maybe Butch Vig could facilitate a similar coup for Sonic Youth. Everyone at DGC got a promotion on the heels of Nevermind’s seismic success, and no one had forgotten how pivotal Sonic Youth had been in Nirvana’s signing. So part of the band’s reward was a large recording budget and plenty of promotional add-ons for the album that would be called Dirty (1992).
On Dirty, Vig found innovative ways of working with Sonic Youth’s alternate tunings, and he got each member to use strobe tuners so as to be even more precise than usual. He also made them do multiple takes of the songs, which they didn’t love doing. “We were usually impatient with that stuff, but at that moment in time we were willing to give Butch free rein,” remembers Lee Ranaldo. Vig applied some other tricks, like feeding Kim Gordon’s voice through a harmonizer to render it more radio-friendly. He also added in some pre-recorded drum sounds, which drummer Steve Shelley wasn’t all that happy about in hindsight. Overall, though, Sonic Youth trusted Vig, and the Dirty sessions were fun and relaxed.
Dirty wound up being a record of relatively conventional song structures polished even glossier in production. With Nirvana’s recent breakthrough, it really seemed like a mainstream audience might finally be receptive to Sonic Youth’s own punk-influenced sound. For the Dirty tour, Sonic Youth would end up playing even larger venues than on the Goo tour. And the crowds complied, with new fans showing up in each city and an influx of celebrity admirers like Oliver Stone, Gene Simmons, and Keanu Reeves turning up backstage.
Some of these new fans were in no doubt owing to Kurt Cobain’s penchant for wearing Sonic Youth T-shirts and namedropping the band in interviews. Therefore, with characteristic irony, the band highlighted their grunge adjacency in their video for “Sugar Kane,” starring teenage ‘It Girl’ Chloë Sevigny modeling “grunge” fashion in Marc Jacobs’ showroom, after the designer had notoriously ripped off the look and fastened it with a hefty haute-couture price tag.
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Still, despite all of Sonic Youth’s efforts, Dirty was tinged with disappointment for the Geffen execs. It didn’t yield any radio anthems, and MTV had been aloof. What’s more, the grunge crowd simply didn’t catch on, failing to see the similarities between their idols and their idols’ idols. For their part, Sonic Youth saw themselves as a bit too old and eccentric to resonate with the emerging Alternative Nation of the MTV demographic.
Which is how 1994’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star ended up being Sonic Youth’s “fuck it” record. As in fuck it, they were doing things on their terms. The band had indeed been happy with their Dirty sessions, and so they hired Vig again to work on this latest album. But this time, when Vig got the demos, the material was starkly different. The songs, which Gordon would call “art core,” were concise, punky spurts. The band had also told Vig that, unlike what they had done on Dirty, they didn’t want to do multiple takes and would be opting for a rough and spontaneous approach.
“At the time, we were responding more to the sort of music we liked that was more experimental and internalized,” Moore explains. “It was underground in reaction to the mainstream co-opting of the punk-rock world and Nirvana, which became this big thing.” In other words, rather than celebrating punk having broken through to the mainstream, Sonic Youth were reeling it back in.
As Billboard would point out, Experimental Jet Set harkened back to Sonic Youth’s indie-label days, and particularly their time on punk label SST Records. “That’s what we decided to go for on this record, to write songs and record them very simply and basically—the way that good old rock ‘n’ roll was recorded before people had astronomical budgets and [could use] every trick in the book to make the drums sound larger than God,” Ranaldo asserted.
Though Experimental Jet Set would be a reproach to the studio gloss Vig had applied to appease Geffen, Vig was fine with the pivot and even took a pay cut to work on the album. He kept overdubs to a minimum, and moved on to another song if a track wasn’t nailed in a couple takes. “Good enough!” became the mantra.
The album’s name reflected each band member’s alter ego—Ranaldo (experimental), Gordon (jet set), Moore (trash) and Shelley (no star). But it was also inspired by the time Moore and Gordon witnessed Yoshimi P-We, of Japanese band The Boredoms, refuse to give an autograph by telling fans, “No—no star!” So, the title was more than fitting for a band who were actively shunning fame.
Then, a month before Experimental Jet Set came out, Gordon received a phone call that Kurt Cobain had shot himself in his Seattle home. His death was upsetting, but she wasn’t completely surprised. “There was a big divide between what he thought he wanted and what he could deal with,” she said, referring to his fraught fame.
“Onstage, he was fearless as well as something even scarier,” she reflected in her memoir Girl In A Band. “There’s a point where fearlessness twists into self-annihilation, and he was too familiar with that space. Most people who saw Nirvana live had never before witnessed that degree of self-harm in someone, as he hurled himself into the drum set as if in some privately negotiated death dance.”
By 1994, I was 17 years old and still hadn’t seen Nirvana. But they were touring through Germany again and my brother and I had bought tickets to their concert in Böblingen that March. We were beyond excited. Unfortunately, Kurt came down with laryngitis and our show got cancelled, though it was rescheduled for May. A few weeks later, we read the horrible news of his suicide. Even then, his death felt like the end of something bigger—the end of an era, and the end of that feeling of rebellious possibility that had charged the air a mere three years earlier.
Experimental Jet Set opens with the sparse, acoustic “Winner’s Blues,” sung by Moore with hang-dog melancholy. It offers up a critique of fame, and the sad concession that life rarely turns out the way you expect—“It's all the rage, it's every day / And it's out / And it's not what you thought it was about.”
The clanking, ambiguous “Bull in the Heather” offers dreadful suspense offset by Gordon’s seductive, whispery vocals—Bettin’ on the buuuullll in the heather. The video would feature Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, one of Cobain’s dear friends from his pre-fame Olympia days. As Gordon explained to New York magazine, the song was about “using passiveness as a form of rebellion—like, ‘I’m not going to participate in your male-dominated culture, so I’m just going to be passive.’”
Noise-glam “Starfield Road” offers an irreverent take on stardom, with Moore singing nonsensically but hilariously, “Ah, your butt cheeks can’t stay / As I spleen my name in flame.” Next up, the sludgy “Skink” is Gordon at her breathless best singing about wallowing in a muck —Down to the bottom and, oh, what a bottom it is.
“Screaming Skull” pays tribute to the band’s former label SST by documenting a trip to its “superstore” on the Sunset Strip. The song captures the ’90s’ ‘alternative feeding frenzy’ by naming bands, through a fuzzy amplifier haze, whose records were there—Hüsker Dü, Superchunk, the Lemonheads. “Let’s go there, Sister’s there,” Moore sings, namedropping an old Sonic Youth album. However, despite the SST nostalgia, Experimental wasn’t covering old ground: “I don’t see the record as being that similar to Sister, but they’re both more private records,” Gordon told the Chicago Tribune.
There’s a scene in 1991: The Year Punk Broke where Sonic Youth are surrounded by journalists and Moore suddenly interrupts the frenzy by declaring, “The biggest star in the room is Courtney Love.” The camera pans to Love and she positively beams. Therefore, it’s not all that surprising that the song “Self-Obsessed and Sexxee,” is rumored to be about Cobain’s widow. Moore, however, insists that it’s about an anonymous Riot Grrrl.
The banshee scream and bluesy dirge of “Bone” takes its cues from Bastard Out of Carolina, a book Gordon was reading at the time. Meanwhile, “Androgynous Mind” takes a stand against gay bashing. “Quest for the Cup” was inspired by the Drew Barrymore Guess ads of 1993—“I don't look like an angel / I GUESS I'll put some jeans on / Make my lips look redder,” while the frenetic “Waist” references Gordon’s own newly minted fashion line X-Girl.
“Doctor’s Orders” offers up lo-fi, sexy swagger courtesy of Gordon’s drawl, while “Tokyo Eye” is a sublimely weird stutter-and-clang punctuated by Moore’s slightly creepy whisper. “In The Mind Of The Bourgeois Reader” starts out with a raucous whistle and never lets up in its bougie pursuit of knowledge. The record ends with “Sweet Shine,” sunshine-y, charmingly off-key, and sadly celebratory—Wooo, I’m comin’ home, mama, to Swall Drive (a reference to a plot of land Gordon’s family owned in Los Angeles).
Experimental Jet Set would be the first album Sonic Youth didn’t tour behind. Gordon had just given birth to her and Moore’s daughter, Coco, and it was a happy time during what was also an incredibly sad time. Still, the band’s laissez-faire attitude towards the album didn’t stop journalists from asking whether this might be the one to finally make them go big. “What if, by some fluke, Experimental Jet Set goes platinum?” asked New York magazine. “It’ll just be another day,” answered Steve Shelley pragmatically. “And there’ll be another day after it that we don’t have a platinum record.”
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