corporate ghost [2004; music videos by sonic youth]

i've come home spent the past few nights.  perhaps it is the weather.  temperatures hovering in the triple digits.  perhaps it is my age.  i look in the mirror and am surprised to see a white-haired old man staring back  perhaps it is the doldrums of summer and long hours at the office.  whatever it is i watched this dvd couple nights ago and was -- ah, what is the word? -- ravished.

sonic youth is one of those bands that either changes your perspective or it doesn't.  i really got into sonic youth a little later in their discography.  i knew of them.  i heard them but when i bought at tower records the cassette of daydream nation in 1988 i was blown away.  i mean, who the fuck was this band that created such glorious noise and yet managed to create some mad hooks in their compositions?  song structure, guitar tunings, lyrics, and the very fact that the band members did not look like rock stars but very like art school students changed my perspective.

and so this dvd.  i bought it when tower records was selling its inventory as it closed down forever a few years ago.  i bought lee ranaldo's poetry collection road movies [soft skull press; 2004] during the same liquidation sale.  the title refers to the band's major label years.  their label was geffen.  perhaps it's just me but back in the 90s and early part of this century going corporate allowed for some adventure and risk by those who were willing to risk corporate alienation.  so these videos are directed by indie stalwarts like harmony korine, richard kern, todd haynes, spike jonze et al.  not that these videos are avant-garde or offensive in any way.  there is no nudity or squished bodies as the inclusion of underground filmmaker richard kern would suggest. 

but these videos are packed with energy and a kind of hipness that is available to all who care to embrace it.  the video for 'bull in the heather' [a near perfect song] features kathleen hanna from bikini kill.  you don't get much more indie than kathleen hanna.  '100%' features jason lee during is skateboarding days.  'dirty boots' is a damn fine survey of young love -- or lust, depending on your point of view -- and club going.

in other words the record label is corporate but the band and its videos are just cool.  sonic youth influenced me in another yet more nebulous manner.  one that i've alluded too in this note.  the band and its members have a kind of anti-cool.  they posses an ordinariness that is striking in our media age.  even in middle age the band members and the ban proper celebrate stability.  they remind me of the poet jose kozer when kozer says that he is a poet happy in marriage and who has had a shower in the morning.  risk in life and art does not mean one shirks his/her responsibilities and ordinariness.  sonic youth is a proof against the myth of the poete maudit.  sonic youth rocks the art of life simply and because.