Sonic Youth were destroying music: In the no-budget 1989 film Weatherman ‘69, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore thumb through dollar-bin-grade vinyl records before ominously snapping them to bits. Like anything, the act was a symbol, irreverent, a simple fuck-you. In a way, it was noise: the sound of life and death at the same time, annihilating music and rendering it limitless.
This clip from Weatherman ‘69—shot and directed by the band’s SST Records comrade and eventual art world fixture Raymond Pettibon—remains a shining document of Sonic Youth’s anarchic era on that L.A. hardcore label. EVOL, the band’s sordid third LP, released in 1986, was their first of two pivotal albums for SST. Sonic Youth began to fuse with lawless West Coast punk: Minutemen and Black Flag versus sadistic cops and sun-bleached strip-mall banality. This ultimately showed how unmistakably East Village the Sonic Youth camp was. Sonic Youth was subterranean subway clangor; windowless bohemia; a fast-walking stomp on a sidewalk grate; the hallowed doors of Trash & Vaudeville; a secret. As if to assert their Downtown identity, the album opens with the somnambulant churn of “Tom Violence,” a song inspired by Television’s Tom Verlaine, which narrates a classic renegade pose. In her liner notes to the 1993 CD edition, transgressive zine writer Lisa Suckdog quoted Moore’s lyrics: “‘I left home for experience’—me, too!’”
By 1988’s Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth’s deep inquiry into pop and the avant-garde—into Madonna on the one hand and La Monte Young on the other—had cohered into a fundamental sound. Pettibon’s black-and-white cover illustration for 1990’s Goo became an eternal RayBanned shorthand for wry art-punk cool. But on EVOL, the pieces were still laid bare: bent glitter-pop here, macabre spoken-word there, gauzy instrumental noise, a persistent clatter, all with a reverby DIY iridescence that sounds buried in the ground. EVOL is “underground” as both form and aesthetic: deconstructed and raw, dim and boomy. Gordon once called the sound of Downtown “abandoned,” and that fits here, too. If Daydream Nation is Sonic Youth’s opus, EVOL was crucial research. There’s a directness that makes everything feel close. It is pure tension with little release. The entire record is a shadow.
EVOL was not just a skewering of rock’n’roll but also of America. A college syllabus could revolve around its vast allusions to Marilyn Monroe, Charles Manson, The Great Gatsby, and Alfred Hitchcock. EVOL might have a cheeky Richard Kern horror-film still on the cover, it might feel like the most dissonant passages of the Grateful Dead’s Dark Star held captive and tormented in a cavernous haunted house, but the album was beyond a “faux-goth” record, as Gordon once described it. EVOL is a graveyard for 1960s peace-and-love idealism. (The title is “love” backwards.) The destructive force of no wave and hardcore was cast as a new kind of sonic conceptual art.
The spooky EVOL title was inspired by the multimedia artist Tony Oursler, who in 1984 devised a black-comedy video piece, also called “EVOL,” offering a hallucinatory critique on the construct of love. Gordon wrote about Oursler—as well as Pettibon and the artist Mike Kelley—in a 1985 Artforum essay called “American Prayers.” Her article discussed the failures of Pop art (think of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans) and how these three men more successfully upended American iconography. The ideas in “American Prayers” echo through EVOL’s doomy screech. Sonic Youth weren’t protesting American conservatism like their hardcore contemporaries, but EVOL was an affront to the American myths that fostered it. The atonal sorcery of “Marilyn Moore” was inspired by Norman Mailer’s book about Marilyn Monroe, but instead of a shiny portrait, Moore sings of how she’s “full of disorders,” with a “hammer in hand and her head to the floor.” A great photograph of Sonic Youth from this era, by SST’s Naomi Peterson, captures their negative realism: The band looks depressed and disheveled in front of a Wonder Bread truck, Gordon with her back to the camera. Sonic Youth pushed Warhol into the red.
EVOL has a seductive, uncanny ease, which makes its violent undercurrents even more frightening. It was Sonic Youth’s first record to feature new drummer/hardcore kid Steve Shelley, previously of the Crucifucks, and their atmospheric songs could newly thunder and pop. EVOL has enthralling hooks—this was around the time Gordon recorded “Addicted to Love” in a karaoke booth for The Whitey Album—albeit skewed ones, pop songs trudging uphill, carrying the weight of their own dread. Sonic Youth’s tilted cover of Kim Fowley’s cheap “Bubblegum” has only grown seamier with time. With a twisted hop, “Star Power” was inspired by the unbelievable 1970s Star magazine, which was aimed at underage groupies: “She knows how to make love to me,” Gordon sings. The equally poppy “Green Light” borrows one of The Great Gatsby’s major recurring images, a symbol of the American Dream. Sonic Youth’s racket implicitly subverts that.
It’s sinister all over. Lee Renaldo’s densely-packed monologue “In the Kingdom #19”—the very number connoting a process, the Beat-inspired endless scroll—is a tale of “death on the highway” and “blood everywhere” and “smoke and flames, alright.” It’s eerie for how the agony of the careening car crash feels like an inevitability on U.S. highways of 1986 and today; eerier still because the Minutemen’s Mike Watt appears on the track, laughing and playing bass. It was Watt’s first recording following the death of his best friend, bandmate, and forever punk hero D. Boon, in a van crash, in 1985. The track’s samples of skronking traffic may evoke the Cagean idea that music is everywhere, or color its bop-prose swarm. Moore called it “a way of trying to be celebratory about the fact that you die” and told biographer David Browne it was inspired by Boon. Per Sonic Youth lore, Moore threw lit firecrackers into the booth while Ranaldo was recording it.
Neil Young said “Expressway to Yr. Skull” was the best guitar song ever written. When Sonic Youth opened for Young on tour, he liked to stretch under the stage while they jammed it. EVOL ends with the barrage of its epic seven-minute sprawl: If noise has ever sounded more arresting, this controlled chaos could erase your memory. “We’re gonna kill the California girls [...] We’re gonna find the meaning of feeling good,” Thurston sings laconically, like Brian Wilson on bad acid, mixing classic Fugs-like New York antagonism with the nihilism and hedonism of Los Angeles. Any question of whether EVOL belongs in the pantheon of New York rock is obliterated by that grenade of a lyric. It is EVOL’s neat concluding paragraph, and no less than when Moore makes an overt reference to critic Greil Marcus’ marvel of rock’n’roll history, Mystery Train, his groundbreaking 1975 book. “Mystery train/Three-way plane/Expressway to your skull,” Moore sings, before a burst of squalling cacophony gives way to ambient noise, minimalism, and space. Rock history is collapsing onto itself, derailing, but then so is American history, American culture.
Gordon wrote in her memoir that she wanted to feel music like a crashing wave—“deliverance, the loss of myself, the capacity to be inside that music”—and EVOL’s “Shadow of a Doubt” is the sound of it cresting. It’s the highlight of EVOL: One of Gordon’s most iconic vocal performances ever, capturing the inspired, physical reach of her spacious speak-sing. Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, the song is charged by all the anxiety, suspense, and noirish voyeurism his films represent. This fever dream of violence and lust is the tale of a woman in public: punk-feminist city music. It feels of a piece with EVOL’s surreal piano revery “Secret Girl”; Gordon has said she wrote its lyrics in light of how “threatening” it could be to portray yourself as a girl in rock. Both songs build tension and never resolve, never climax conventionally, never conform to a linear start-middle-end of pop hegemony, which feels so anti-rock, their own feminine kind of hardcore.
What is it that makes Kim Gordon “cool”? Her Black Flag earrings? Her flip-up shades? The fact that she made a song called “Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu”? Perhaps it is the process of becoming that exists in every note she pushes out, the sense that her stoic persona is an act of edging into the unknown, and then being vulnerable enough to let the unknown take over.
EVOL, after all, was also an evolution for Sonic Youth. SST originally pressed 5,000 copies; EVOL sold 40,000 in one year. Like most Sonic Youth albums, EVOL is packed with so many ideas, so much rigor and obsession, it is too absurd to begin to wonder what they would have done in our current era of endless information. But if EVOL is one of Sonic Youth’s more do-it-yourself records, that manifests as an inspired “do anything yourself,” as a 40-minute testament to the virtue of curiosity. For all the “NO” that Sonic Youth’s earliest iteration espoused, EVOL explodes possibility, offering “yes” after profound “yes.”
