Sonic Youth: Super Sonic Sisterhood
Mark Sinker, New Musical Express, 20 June 1987
2005 note: Mostly what I read in this piece is what a fight it seemed to get anything said about "rock" in 1987, in the inky mainstream. A fight with the local zeitgeist, somewhat - but also a fight with myself. Far too many clumsy justifications: why I'm writing about them should have carried purely in the quality of the writing, not built on appeals to community significance. Plus this line seems just bonkers: "gives me such a burst of abstract energy that it spills over into random sex..." I know what I meant, kind of - that the um "aesthetic" charge of SY when they're on (nothing like as often as this piece implies, incidentally) was sometimes so strong that it was an actual sexual turn-on, and as a result so were they, and indeed anyone in on the event. Hence: random. But I was being pretty inexact: in my defence, my sexuality was a total mystery to me at this period.
Total word count of piece: 2596