Sonic Youth - Bad Moon Rising

It was Leipzig in 2003/4. I was under the misguided assumption that I was in love with someone but that didn't turn out well and in the wreckage, this album truly was a saviour. In the sense that it kept me together as an 18 year old still reeling from the hurt and rejection from it all. Americans tend to glorify getting in a car and driving all the way until their petrol and money runs out - I had a more European experience. Yes the money ran out but mine was done with train journeys across Germany and The Netherlands. When the Intro and Brave Men Run In My Family comes on I could feel a connection to the lyrics, the sense of adventure I was having, the fact that I was on my own and fleeing my life in Dublin, Ireland like I'd always wanted to at that age and the foreboding sense that doom was around the corner. 

Society Is A Hole practically spoke to me in the chorus "Society is a hole it makes me lie to my friends," which had the added irony that I didn't really have many friends at all, if any. "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace" was the echo of a tumultuous mind. Sore and still reeling from the wreckage. When I came home, our convenience store was petrol bombed so you could walk up to it, before it was boarded up, and you could still smell the petrol/kerosene involved. This would be one of the songs I would have playing on my Discman on one of my endless walks around the block or the park to thrash out my sanity. The dream of living abroad quickly faded and the hatred of what was there was all around me.

I Love Her All The Time was for me the pinnacle of my self-delusion. That the person I was madly infatuated with (and sometimes still think of) was someone I was in deeply love with. The whole line "She comes into my mind, twisting through my nerves" just felt like the inalienable feeling that long after it felt like the game was up (and on reflection it was before it had even started), I couldn't break free from her. The more I struggled, the more I felt like it carved itself into me even more. "I can't understand a word she says/She's on my side/I love her all the time" practically spells out my delusion. She was German, and when she spoke German to her friends, I was practically clueless as to everything but yet I was convinced about it. As Ian Curtis once wrote "a blindness that touches perfection but hurts just like anything else."

While Ghost Bitch is more explicitly about the dawning of the birth of USA from witnessing a tribal native American dance for the first time as one of the outsiders who would go on to conquer the land, there were parts in the lyrics that echoed dreams I had that felt eerie to me at the time. You know, being young and stupid and full of illusions and delusions about everything that was going on. And being self-centred to top it all off.

I'm Insane has that trick of reeling off blurbs from cheap trashy novels, more than likely horror novels, but managing to sound cohesive at the heart of it all. Again back to the self centred me, the line "Inside my head, my dog's a bear/She was significant, I'm insane" neatly encapsulated my solipsistic world view at that point in time. Writing this, it really makes you understand why people say the folly of youth.

Justice Is Might is the one track I felt that didn't do anything. Between Thurston struggling to say a coherent sentence in the intro and the song itself not being really worth to me. I never skipped a song on this album but it's the one song I felt I was close to skipping on more than a few occasions.

This brings us to Death Valley 69 which with Lydia Lunch accompanying Thurston on vocals makes it such a harum scarum feel to it that if I was American and had an interest in cars, I could see myself wanting to go out with a bang Thelma & Louise style and drive off the Grand Canyon (Note to any teenagers reading this, don't listen to this old man, it really isn't worth it).

Since the CD had 4 extra songs, I'll try and briefly go through them. Flower showcases Kim's feminist politics becoming stronger and more overt than before. Certainly more overt than Ghost Bitch or Brave Men....Satan Is Boring I liked at the time because I was becoming bored of all these self-proclaimed Satan worshippers at the time. The whole thing was silly, the song itself is not the best but I liked for reasons outside of the song itself (yep, that kind of pretentious). I can't honestly remember much about Halloween and Echo Canyon's Superman sound effects ended the album so neatly.

One of the main things about this album that really impressed me is how smoothly it melded between songs. Even if they had Metal Machine Music playing or The Stooges, it didn't break the flow or the feel of the album. Everything just nestled into it's right place at the right rhythm and nothing could stop it. Only it could really. There's a line from Robert Christgau's review of this that calls the band "sociopathic," and there's me as a teenager thinking "that must be what I am." Sillyness I know, but however misguided my readings of the lyrics were, it was the right album for me at the right time along with a couple of others which will be mentioned in due time.