Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth

Warning: There’s little to no hotel trashing or groupie fondling in this straight-forward (and perhaps premature, as the band is still together) biography of America’s most influential post-punk guitar band. Goodbye is the polar opposite of a titillating rock & roll band-on-tour expose. Outside of smoking grass in the van on early outings, New York art insurgents Sonic Youth have had a remarkably clean career, unless you count the usual label woes and some passive-aggressive drummer and manager firing. Both are par for the course in the story of these underground guitar heroes’ journey to the semi-big-time—as Goodbye reveals, the quartet never seems to sell as many records as it deserves.

Browne, author of Dream Brother, the double bio on Jeff and Tim Buckley, uses no such father-son gimmick this time. He notices that while Sonic Youth made band-democracy, noise, Fender Jazzmasters and alternate tunings a part of the rock vocabulary in inverted songs, the group was also listening to the underground, even steering it. Much of Goodbye concerns Sonic Youth’s role as go-to curators of a varied “cool” aesthetic. Whether it be associations with photographer Richard Kern and composer Glenn Branca, championing Nirvana and DIY hardcore, working with skate-video director Spike Jonze or bassist Kim Gordon’s articles in Artforum—Sonic Youth is usually tuned in and turning us on.

But the band also made keystone rock records, and Browne does a fabulous job of detailing the setting, technical details and artistic temperament in the group’s creative process without hyperbole. The book can’t help but feel nostalgic for a cozy time before punk broke. But Sonic Youth, whether it meant to or not, brought the era that birthed it to an end.