Avant-conservatism
Not to keep dragging this out, but k-punk hit back at Simon Reynolds and ZST with one last blast of ire against Sonic Youth. Some vicious barbs in here:
“Contra what Seb in Zone’s comments suggests (“I’m … glad to see someone cook up a convincing explanation of K-Punk’s oddly intense enmity towards SY”), it’s not my hostility towards SY that requires explanation - it’s SY’s hegemonic support that needs to be accounted for. But I think that this characterisation of my response tells its own story. If a group were genuinely challenging and experimental, “oddly intense emnity” would surely be expected from some quarters. But the point is that no-one, even their own supporters, really expects SY to provoke any sort of strong affect at all, just elicit a bland admiration. They’re on our side, they’re good sorts. And the fact is, it is indeed difficult to summon up any affect for them. […]This renormalisation of boredom, this re-establishment of consensus around ‘accepted standards’, is precisely what is so pernicious about Sonic Youth now. They represent the embourgeoisiement of the rock avant-garde, its disconnection from overreaching, intemperance, intolerance and antagonism.”
‘“Sonic Youth are banished from ‘mainstream’ taste forever,” Zone argues. “Kim Gordon in growl mode, the abstract-expressionist noise breaks, performance artists Bob Flanagan and Sherry Rose wiping their arses with stuffed toys on Dirty’s artwork.” But Zone’s inverted commas around ‘mainstream’ are entirely necessary - for the idea there is a mainstream which repudiates Sonic Youth is the fundamental (rockist) fantasy which feeds their allure.”
‘Most of the time when I’ve sold records, I’ve ended up regretting it at some later time, but I can honestly say that I’ve never once missed the SY LPs. That’s because, to quote Ray again, “There was never a moment when they were ‘good’: their ‘noisy’ period was never anything but feeble rocked-up no-wave pastiche: Daydream Nation is the most grotesquely overrated work in living memory.”’
“Sonic Youth are ‘art’ in all the worst senses (they possess a certain insitutional prestige, a certain standing and position, a certain set of meta-rationales for what they do); but they are not art in the sense that there is a compelling reason for them to exist - there is no more at stake here than just another cool leisure product with all the right credentials.”
BUUURRRRRNNN!
