Customer Reviews

Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth

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This book of short stories inspired by legendary NYC noise rock band, Sonic Youth, is exactly what I expected....which is the unexpected. This band has an extreme distaste to conventional presentation in regard to their music, imagery, etc...Album titles include 'Washing Machine', 'Whores Moaning', 'Silver Sessions for Jonathan Knuth', and on and on. Like their music, they are a band that can be very hard to predict and this book presents itself in a very Sonic Youth-type fashion.

Sonic Youth (and this book) are not interested in making the listener/reader feel nice and cozy. They tend to focus on things like death, sex and odd pop culture references. They are also thought of by many as being the ultimate "cool" band and one thing, in my opinion, that has always been the reason for this is that they never act like they care about the attention they recieve. In a lot of ways this book reminds me of what a Sonic Youth album would be like in written form. As a fan of the hippest band on the planet I dug this book.

This was an interesting read, but it wasn't what I expected. As a longtime fan of Sonic Youth's music I was expecting more of a direct connection. Quite honestly, without the titles and book's cover I never would have made ANY connection to Sonic Youth and the stories within. I realize it is not a biography or non-fiction book on the band, and that is not what I expected either...but I thought the stories and characters would feel more in the vein of a Sonic Youth video somehow. It's not a bad short story compilation but definitely nothing stands out here to savor re: Sonic Youth.