Robert Lowell wrote that "Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them." And this used to go double for rock stars: Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Buddy Holly. Today, though, there's an awful lot of late vintage out there. "It's better to burn out than to fade away"—Neil Young, 63, still touring. "I was so much older then—I'm younger than that now"—Bob Dylan, 68, still touring. "We gotta get out while we're young…"—Bruce Springsteen, 59, still touring. There's scarcely the need to twit Pete Townshend, 64, yet again with his best-known line.
There's scarcely the need, either, to twit the group Sonic Youth with their name. My favourite band is now well over two decades old. Its married singers—Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore—have a teenage daughter. As I write they've just put out their 16th studio album, The Eternal. But who are Sonic Youth and why should we care? Well, they're a New York rock band. Yet they are more than this—and the fact that the question needs to be asked is a sign that they may still not be getting their due in the wider world.
There are four of them, plus—if you include their dizzying range of side-projects—a host of collaborators. But centrally, there are four of them. When their ninth album Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star came out, they joked that it was a description of the band: guitarist Lee Ranaldo is Experimental, glamorous bassist Kim Gordon is Jet Set, singer/guitarist Thurston Moore is Trash, and Steve Shelley is… well, a drummer.
And boy do they make a fantastic racket. The end of the average gig will see Thurston—6ft 6in in his stockinged feet, and at 50 years old still looking like a mop-haired teenager—sawing at the strings of his detuned guitar with a screwdriver or a drumstick. Lee will be waggling a guitar up against a speaker to produce an oscillating howl of feedback, and Kim will be stamping on the fretboard of her bass with her high-heeled shoes.
Sonic Youth taught me how to listen to feedback; how to enjoy clanks and bangs; how to be attuned to the texture of a rock song's sound rather than merely lulled by its rhythm. And for that, I commend them to you. But the other thing they do, which is very unusual in rock and therefore very interesting, is to be rigorously impersonal. Their lyrics are elliptical. The first-person voices of their songs are seldom consistent even within the songs themselves: you learn nothing about the band from their music. The emotions they express are, in a sense, musical emotions, inseparable from each song. TS Eliot would have approved.
They are also a cultural gateway of sorts. They've been closely involved with the art world—John Fahey and Gerhard Richter paintings show up on their album covers, offshoot projects have referenced Yoko Ono and the lead track on the new album salutes Yves Klein. They are interested in poetry and literature—Sister is a punk-psychedelic fantasia on Philip K Dick; Gregory Corso is the dedicatee of a song on The Eternal, as Allen Ginsberg was of a song on A Thousand Leaves. And they have also been pivotal influences and encouragers in the no-wave, punk and hardcore scenes. You might well never have heard of Nirvana had it not been for Sonic Youth—who introduced the band to a major record label, Geffen.
They have their knockers. They've been attacked as poseurs, sterile experimentalists, middle-class careerists and—in a recent Guardian blog post—"the whitest band in the world." But those are sneers, not criticism. The work speaks.
Ageing rock stars reach a crossroads. All long-serving artists are subject to hazards of style: mannerism, repetition, self-parody. Popular music is so intimately involved with fandom, though, that its hazards of style can turn into conscious career choices. Among the first generation of musicians to see this in action, many have followed the example of the Rolling Stones: now just the world's most expensive Stones tribute band. Dylan is a better example. Don't look back, he advises. Sonic Youth, taking that advice, have left their back pages where they belong.
