On their first LP Confusion Is Sex, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo established their reputation—noise-obsessed, acerbic, in thrall to subversion and half in love with nihilism. So it came as a surprise that they followed it up with a pitch-black, punishing take on Americana titled after, of all things, a Creedence Clearwater Revival song. Its timing was ripe, arriving amidst the culture wars of the Reagan era: Gordon and Moore cast a shadowy portrait slicked in sweat and blood, not unlike the nightmarish caricatures of American institutions you often saw on the cover art for hardcore bands.
But the band’s fury ran deeper than that. As Gordon recalls in her recent memoir Girl in a Band: "I ... preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture"—more specifically, "the westward pull, the American romance with death," as well as the collision of this all-American death-drive with the hopeful ecstasies of the hippie generation. Where Time Life Books was busy commemorating and canonizing Woodstock, Gordon and Moore raised up the leering specter of Charles Manson, highlighting the thin lines separating free love from violent sexual anarchy, and how such spaces are often exploited to attain power.
Bad Moon Rising is obsessed with sex and power, specifically with how one informs the other. It is the band’s most explicitly sexual album, and among its darkest. "I Love Her All the Time", "I’m Insane", and "Halloween" (a bonus track that’s since become standard on all CD versions of the album) develop female subjects as supplicants to male authority figures, ceding their bodies (and therefore, their identities) to them as if there’s no other choice. "She’s on my side," Moore coolly says of his strung-out paramour on "I Love Her All the Time", repeating the song’s title with the unsavory enthusiasm of a cult leader who’s finally cracked the code. On "Halloween", Gordon struggles to identify just what it is that makes her succumb to a man’s wiles, finally theorizing "it’s the devil in me": the female sex drive, corrupted.
Bad Moon Rising is not so much a collection of songs as it is an extended, unending uproar, seamless in sound and theme. This is partially due to the band’s recording strategy, which translated the ebb-and-flow of their live show at the time into a singular composition. At this point in their career, Sonic Youth didn’t have guitar techs to assist during shows, and long stretches of feedback between songs allowed them time to tune. On the album, this approach lends itself well to a constantly shifting tableau of American nightmares, beginning with the primordial fury of "Brave Men Run (In My Family)" and barreling towards its final destination: Manson’s Death Valley and the terror of Helter Skelter.
In Bad Moon Rising’s world, the country’s loss of innocence—and its sexual corruption—began with an assault, chronicled in the terrifying "Ghost Bitch". Moore sounds possessed on the following, mournful track, "I’m Insane", a sinister piece assembled entirely of fragments from pulp novels like "a steaming swamp," "murdered angels," and the head-scratching "inside my head my dog’s a bear." It’s less a song and more the no wave aural equivalent of refrigerator magnet poetry, but it functions remarkably well within the album’s overarching narrative.
But what happens when women reclaim their bodies and fight back? Years before riot grrrl, "Flower" (a bonus track released after Bad Moon Rising alongside "Halloween" on 12” and added to the album in subsequent reissues) encapsulated the sex-positive sentiments, as well as the noise, of the forthcoming movement. Gordon's chanted manifesto, delivered over a paranoid, unstable rumble, urges us to "support the power of women" by "us[ing] the power of man." The nature of this power, of course, is sex, but Gordon’s vision encompasses more than the act itself; her culminating directive of "Use the word/ FUCK!" commands a recognition of women as carnal, sexual beings. "The word is love," she adds, completing a circular logic proof of sorts: Power is sex, but sex is love; love is universal, so universal recognition of sex has the ability to empower all. Granted, "Flower" might scan as slightly hippie-dippy next to Kathleen Hanna’s acerbic prose, but its mangled punk instrumentation and feminist politics set a precedent.
Bad Moon Rising reaches both its climax and conclusion with the Manson-inspired madness of "Death Valley ’69", Moore’s infamous duet with Lydia Lunch, and the closest the album comes to producing a viable single. A tortured yell drags the record out of the doldrums of the preceding "Justice Is Might" and into a busted-up Chevy parked in Death Valley on some dead night, in the Summer of Love. Moore and Lunch don’t try to harmonize or sing on key, because their minds aren’t on the melody; they wail over and under one another like coyotes in heat. A single glance over the lyrics suggests another instance of male-on-female violence ("She started to holler/ I didn't wanna/ But she started to holler/ So I had to hit it"). And yet, the ecstasy with which Lunch vocalizes all but says "This is a game, I’m trying to get you, and I’m winning." The balance of power shifts once more as Lunch unleashes that orgasmic shriek at song's end: a brilliant imitation of the whimpering guitars, a final paean to chaos before the fade to black.
Despite its compelling aesthetic, Bad Moon Rising suffers from a few technical shortcomings which become more evident in this remastering, specifically Bob Bert’s tom-heavy approach to the drums. They play a critical role in conveying the primal energy coursing through "Brave Men Run (In My Family)" and "Society Is a Hole", but the atmospheric boost quickly wears thin: not just because he sounds like he’s drumming with crab mallets, but because he can’t be bothered to beef up his fills or do little more than the bare minimum. One can’t help but long for the frenzied kit work of Steve Shelley, the hardcore-schooled, improvisatory percussionist who succeeded Bert. Additionally, your mileage may vary where vocal melodies, particularly Moore’s, are concerned; his grating refrains on "Society Is a Hole" and "I Love Her All the Time" show he hadn’t yet developed the tightness and control he would exhibit later. That said, this dissonance is a defining aspect of early Sonic Youth albums, and some might find it refreshing compared to the straitlaced sound of, say, "Incinerate".
Since its release, Bad Moon Rising has left behind many legacies. Thanks to the mangled mass of the guitars, as well as the lack of anthemic verse-chorus-verses structure that dominated Daydream Nation and Goo, the LP is regarded by many as Sonic Youth's most "difficult" album. Fans of contemporary acts like Swans (who Sonic Youth toured with prior to the Bad Moon Rising sessions) might find in the record’s structure a source of catharsis and narrative strength. Those who became fans post Daydream Nation, meanwhile, will need to re-acclimate themselves to the pitch-black soundscapes. And while the task may seem imposing, it’s also immediate and engrossing; after being immersed in this album's world, it’s jarring to return to the real one—and perhaps, by extension, Sonic Youth’s subsequent catalog, which never quite revisited the sheer alienation of Bad Moon Rising.
