last night we saw Dave Markey’s 1991: The Year Punk Broke which was 1 part awesome to 2 parts fhack. carrying the memory of nirvana and gritty ass sonic youth as alternative youth culture gods, it was pretty disappointing to witness them for what they really were; in sonic youth's case, art-brats that want to rebel against something that they already were, and in nirvana's case, rabbled adolescent falstaff's who inadvertently traded in their one-hitters for syringes.
well fame has never been synonymous with goodness, and arguably an inherent difficulty of "punk" is that once people want to pay to see you, you've already become the commodity you seek to degrade. what's important is that sonic youth and growling faced, awesome kim gordon produced guitar-noise onstage that nowadays people spend a lot of time trying to recreate on machines. and when kurt cobain wasn't trying to psychotically launch himself into drum kits, speakers, and fist-pumping, tangle-haired acolytes, he played beautiful, dirty, body-thrashing guitar. (unfortunately?) for nirvana, cobain's snarly, drugged howls were, unlike thurston moore's, melodic and impressive in a way that headbangers and mall rats could both agree. the most striking thing about this documentary is sonic youth's rebellion against "the media" and their sense of music vs. people trying to talk about music. in the battle between the cool kids and the music dorks, who is prevailing?
check out this interview with kim gordon from 1989 in which she rails against mtv's conservatism ... this was before you could watch kids dry humping in night vision on reruns of real world austin-cisco. then again, what's more conservative than dry humping.
