Sonic Youth has been a part of my life for over thirty years, after I bought Dirty when it first came out because I read a review in Spin or Rolling Stone. I have spent my entire life looking for new bands, and while Nirvana was starting to blow up, I wanted to be adjacent to this change in music culture, focus on bands that inspired Nirvana and/or were contemporaries. Sonic Youth was the best band for me, and Dirty is the album that changed everything. 

It is no surprise that I was excited about Thurston Moore’s new memoir, Sonic Life. We get the story that he wants to tell in the way that he wants to tell it. The main focus of the book is the early days of him discovering the New York music scene, falling in love with bands and songs (“I Wanna Be Your Dog” being the best song ever written), and experimenting until he finds his musical voice and vision. In the five hundred pages, Sonic Youth is not even a blip until about a quarter of the way through, and the 90s are not mentioned until close to the 75% mark. The focus on the earlier albums, the touring and the reception, seem to be more important to Thurston’s story because these are the albums where he learned about himself and the band. This is when the music is more a labor of love than anything. 

He talks freely about the music, the bands, and the musicians that he loves, but he is very reluctant to talk about himself. Toward the end he glosses over the fact that he has poor memory when it comes to Sonic Youth lyrics, that he has had the words posted behind the monitors or amps. He also talks about the last decade of Sonic Youth in the last twenty pages, and the disintegration of his band due to him and Kim getting a divorce in the last ten. I know that this is Thurston’s story, and he tells it the way that he wants, but there is very little time spent on anything other than the music that he creates and the people that has met and learned from. This skirting of the personal makes Sonic Life feel a little shallow for a memoir and more of a history of Thurston Moore, as if many of the stories that he tells could be stories that we could learn if we researched hard enough. There could be a second part, a sequel that focuses on the second half of Sonic Youth, but I also know we probably will never get it. 

What we do get is a greater understanding of the music scene that nurtured Sonic Youth. Those early albums, from Sonic Youth to Daydream Nation are informed by Avant Garde art and noise rock. Moore mentions hundreds of bands that are worth checking out, and the whole idea of Sonic Life is that Sonic Youth and Thurston Moore is as influenced by as many bands as they have influenced. This is  not Thurston Moore’s book about Thurston Moore as much as Thurston Moore’s book about Sonic Youth. There is a definite distinction, and those who are looking for a tell-all book about Moore’s personal life are going to be sorely disappointed. Instead we are given a testament of his recollections of being in the most influential noise rock band of all time. 

I received this as an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

An utterly fantastic and fascinating read about one of the most influential experimental guitarists in America. I love all of the details that Thurston Moore shared about living in pre-gentrified New York City and all of its interesting and non-mainstream artists. This biography is highly recommended and should prove inspiring to all music lovers and connoisseurs of fine art.

The comparison of Sonic Life to Patti Smith's if-not-critically-acclaimed-then-certainly-TikTok-beloved Just Kids is accurate. Like Just Kids, this is a decently well-written, quickly paced memoir by a notoriously cool person, with a lot of name-dropping. A lot a lot of name-dropping. And, like Just Kids, your tolerance for this name-dropping will heavily depend on how interested you personally are in the people being name-dropped by Moore. Given some of my recent reads (The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker, Punk Rock is Cool for the End of the World, Up is Up But So Is Down, my slow chipping away at Our Band Could Be Your Life, to drop some names of my own), it's apparent that I, personally, really enjoy the alt lit and art and music scene going on in New York and LA during the years this memoir covers, so I was fairly delighted by the mention of David Wojnarowicz, Cookie Mueller, Jim Carroll, Television, Michael Gira, Pavement, the fact that Thurston Moore had tickets to see Joy Division for the American tour that never was, etc. I thought the brief Madonna cameos were interesting- I was sort of aware that she had come out of the Downtown scene or was adjacent to that scene- she dated Jean-Michel Basquiat and Michael Gira, after all, and I think at one point collabed with 3 Teens Kill 4 (David Wojnarowicz's former band), but it's still hard for me to reconcile the orginal pop princess with that. Also, I went to the same university Moore's father taught at and he attended briefly, and I currently work in New Haven so it was fun to actually recognize most of the sites he talks about in the early parts of the book.

There are flaws, of course. It gets a bit heavy into the music production aspect, which I wouldn't typically be opposed to, but Moore doesn't make it entertaining the way, say, Peter Hook describes the same process in his own memoirs. And Nirvana takes up a big, big part of this book in a way that interested me at first, but then sort of lost me. Look, I like Nirvana, I think everyone with ears does. And Kurt Cobain is an interesting, tragic figure in his own right. But I'm not a Nirvana superfan and, quite honestly, most grunge outside of Nirvana and some of Hole's discography (I said what I said) does absolutely nothing for me. As far as 90s music goes, I'm more interested in lo-fi and indie like Pavement and GBV so I wished he got more into his involvement with those bands.

It'd be interesting to see what legs this memoir ends up having. I'd recommend it to any fans of Just Kids, but at the same time, Thurston Moore is a bit more of an admittedly obscure figure than Patti Smith, and the bands and names he drops, with some exceptions (the whole bits on grunge, Madonna, Lou Reed, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joy Division) are more obscure. He also doesn't do much explanation as to who any of these people are, meaning that at times the memoir comes across a bit... I don't know how to word this correctly. Sort of like a test to see how much you know based on whether you nod and give an approving "hmm" at the sight of someone's name and then get entry into a cool person club because of it. Like with Mike Kelley- if you didn't know who Mike Kelley is prior to reading this, the most you're going to get is "he was an artist", which, okay, yes he was but he was little more interesting than just that. Cindy Sherman gets the same treatment during her brief mention- she isn't even identified as a photographer, just an artist. It's been a hot minute (years, in fact) since I've read Just Kids, so perhaps Patti Smith did the same thing, but it feels a bit more egarious here because of, again, the relative obscurity of the people name-dropped. Then again, one could also argue that the Venn diagram of people who know who Bob Flanagan is and people who read Thurston Moore memoirs is a single circle, but again, Just Kids reached a larger audience than already established Patti Smith fans who probably had no idea who Jim Carroll or Robert Mapplethorpe were before reading her memoir, and they got through it okay. I don't know. I'm rambling.

Thanks to Netgalley and Doubleday for providing me with an arc!

Thurston Moore either has an encyclopedic memory and/or he kept copious notes throughout his Sonic Youth tenure. If you are looking for any kind of salacious type writing, you've come to the wrong place. This memoir is highly readable, my biggest gripe is the short shrift given to the nineties and beyond (really the group's most visible era). Also, the book ends in quite a jarring fashion. This all being said, a fascinating look behind the curtain. SY forever.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Doubleday Books for an advance copy of this new memoir by a musician, writer, DIY practitioner, soundscape designer, father, and a person who always kept his mind open to all the art that was around him, and there was a lot.

When I first starting working at my first record store I'd like to think I was chosen cause I knew a little bit about a lot of things. I think it was more my availability as my lack of a life made me easy to fill shifts for cooler people than I. My biggest problem was that a lot of music was happening, but I had no idea what it was, the skill to comprehend it, and frankly the idea that a lot of this supercool music was out of my league. Sonic Youth was one of those bands I thought I was way too cool for me. They were on labels that were cool, their covers were wild, the 45's and cassette singles, all had crazy titles. Even the music seemed above me. Working in the store opened my heart and my soul to music in lots of ways. But seeing Thurston Moore, a founder of the band, at Tuxedo Junction in Danbury, Connecticut, doing a benefit show opened my mind. There was 14 people maybe, and it was a sound collage of something, and I was in awe. Finding out he grew up three towns over from me, also set me back. How???? How could someone grow up in Connecticut and be so cool. Sonic Life: A Memoir has shown me how, and more importantly why. This memoir is a deep look into the influences, thoughts, highs and lows and most of all music of this influential music maker, and hopefully writer of more books.

Thurston Moore was born in Florida but grew up in Bethel, Connecticut, a small town that has a lot of windy roads, but not much else, and as with most small towns in Connecticut nothing for kids to do. Moore became interested in music early teaching himself on his brother's guitar how to play, and traveling with his best friend to New Haven for records. Moore's taste ran the gamut of early rock, Joni Mitchell, but it was Patti Smith and the rise of punk that really got him going. Moore's father passed early, leaving a hole that nothing seemed to fill, until he began traveling to see shows in New York in his father's old car, daring blackouts, and a city that was falling apart to see shows that now are spoken in legend. Soon he was living in the city, joining a band, and having adventures only a New Yorker at the end of the 70's would have, but meeting and hanging out a vast array of people, all who would influence Moore's musician some ways. One band ended, but another band begins, named Sonic Youth, and soon life would change for Moore.

A fascinating look at a time and place that could only happy once. The mix of grime, crime, a city on the edge, anger, and art all coming together to make magic. Moore met, them, knew them, saw them, judged them, and had enough left for cigarettes and coffee. Moore is very good at showing both the era, the art, the scene, and what life in a small town was like. His comments about driving on one lane roads in Connecticut still hold true, the closeness of New York is still a draw. The scene, the streets all come alive. Moore goes into detail about a lot of people with stories featuring Patti Smith, Henry Rollins, Kurt Cobain, even David Bowie and Madonna. The book is heavily about the past, the last twenty years can be covered in about the last 15% of the book. However fans always like the classics, the new stuff they live without, so I understand that. One of the best memoirs I have read in a long time.

Incredibly detailed, and not just about Moore's band, but about the people, the sights, and sounds. The book really gives a you are there feeling. Recommended not only for fans, but for music readers and cultural historians for Moore's look at the music scene. A great book for people to find under the tree, though I wouldn't want to wait.

A front-row seat to an incredible era of music and culture in New York City, rewritten by one of its prominent figures. A little like Patti Smith's Just Kids, in that it romanticizes the era and scenes in an honest way (one can tell he really is that awed by the music and artists, and not playing it up for the reader), and a little like Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band, in that reveals a complex human behind the effortlessly cool rock star in Sonic Youth.

Sonic Life was an excellent music autobiography. I loved reading about Sonic Youth and the band's commitment to making it. This was a story of dedication and struggle. The band lived out of their van, touring the country. I love the passion for making music and not compromising who you are.