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Rating: Hello everyone, I'm making my debut in a new sub-genre on DeBaser: after "minor" cinema and music, now also "minor" concerts, specifically the one by Sonic Youth that took place last Saturday in Bolzano/Bozen. Minor because, obviously, they happen a bit outside the mainstream, detached from organizations like those that oversee concerts in stadiums filled with people, or in Roman ruins transformed, for the occasion, into a place for hordes of adoring fans, often makeshift and attracted by sleepless or sleepless nights.
Let's begin with the recounting of the events, then.
Saturday, I leave home early and take a long drive of almost 400 km to reach my destination, with the obvious intermediate stop at the motorway service station for the Camogli sandwich and the obligatory Coca-Cola, along with a fleeting glance at the under-21 match with a truck driver. After other tourist stops, I arrive in Bolzano around 21:20: the concert is located not far from the Bolzano south exit, in an anonymous suburb, made up of car dealerships and industrial warehouses, but overall clean and geometric, as one expects from a German city that has ended up within the borders of the Belpaese, along with some of its inhabitants.
The place where the concert is held is fitting for the context and, altogether, for the musical recipe of the (ex) Sonic Youth: it's a sort of warehouse where shadows of industrial plants stand, reinforced concrete beams, the enormous doors once used for the access and exit that an old Albanian acquaintance called "camióni". A place where, once, perhaps the sound waves of an industrial reality roamed, and today, the assaults of a group that combines noise, research, and post-punk fervor.
The age of those present - not many, I expected more - strikes me quite a bit: the under-20s are very few, while the majority are over thirty or thereabouts, proof that this music, which I still insist on considering modern and avant-garde, is not so well-known to the new generations (I exclude that they lack money for a reduced-price ticket) and belongs, in its own way, to the past.
Almost as if everyone present arrives here - they, yes - twenty years late with the history of young music, and having left behind daily worries, having relit cigarettes with their suspicious acrid smell, they try to reclaim their lost age and an alternative to their having become ordinary, or less alternative than they believed. To my surprise, I find among them a very old flame of mine, who, at the time, didn't know the Sonics: and I wonder whose merit it is that she now embraces them, and where the dusty tapes I duplicated for her to wean her off the love for singer-songwriters have ended up.
While observing these things, a supporting trio opens the concert with strange sounds, mixing oriental flavors with sauerkraut and dilated atmospheres: those with me indeed observe that in different times and contexts we would have praised them and peddled their stuff as Art. Today, they bore us a bit, and, with relief, around 22:12, we see Sonic Youth take the stage.
The band is in great shape: Thurston Moore, with dyed hair, is the true frontman and the rock soul of the quartet (tonight a quintet because there's an incongruous second bassist!), the one who makes the group's distortions and sound flows accessible; his headbanging makes me smile, as if he were twenty or thirty years old, his hair waving, and the audience, aged with him, following him; Kim Gordon bears the signs of menopause with a bit of weight around the tummy - far from the days of Evol - and plays on childlike charm in a colorful baby doll: she's not nice, although some find her appealing - and she doesn't have great technique. She insists on her dances, occasionally, simulations of orgasms that were (or are? I hope working together hasn't dimmed the couple's ardor), while her not-excellent voice responds well live, giving expressiveness and pain to the music, which I have always appreciated about the Sonics. Steve Shelley, behind the drums, is a bit paunchy but good at playing the part of the drummer full of vigor and enthusiasm, while I fear for his heart. Lee Ranaldo is doing better: the salt-and-pepper hair suits him (he was never young, after all), he's friendly and smiles, tortures his guitar with sticks, sometimes fluid, sometimes percussive, making it scream in anguish, and giving that avant-garde touch of the Big Apple to the group's sound. It feels like being in the '80s now.
The setlist alternates pieces from the latest albums (beautiful Incinerate!) with super classics from times gone by, mainly from "Sister" and "Daydream Nation" (but to the great regret of the writer, no Teenage Riot). "Goo", "Experimental...", and "Dirty" were sacrificed (except for 100% as an encore). The craft is there, the passion too, the audience responds, although the concert ends after less than two hours, without major upheavals. However, what is missing is the novelty, the experiment, the unpublished, the shocking, the possible. They're Sonic, not too Youth.
On the way home, I stop for a night break at the service station, wondering if I did well to meet my "idols" in person: in the part where, seeing them mortal, I killed them, yes (but sex is not confusion). And while I think about the avant-garde that was, my eyes fall on the basket of Italian CDs. Perhaps better.
Youthsincerely Yours,
Il_Paolo
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