As may you may have heard, Sonic Youth has decided to skip the traditional best-of route, instead getting famous friends like Mike D, Radiohead and Eddie Vedder to pick less familiar, more personal choices like “100%,” “Kool Thing,” and “Teen Age Riot.” Only six of the fifteen older titles selected have never received a video treatment, and one of those is “Expressway To Yr Skull.” This basically leaves “Stones,” “Tuff Gnarl,” “Rain On Tin,” “Tom Violence” and “The World Looks Red” as genuinely surprising tracks to find on a SY comp, so thank you Allison Anders, Dave Eggers, Flea, Gus Van Sant, and Chloe Sevigny. Hits Are For Squares? Wouldn’t a more accurate title have been Starpower? Let’s attempt to deduce the curators’ logic.
“Bull in the Heather” (Catherine Keener saw the video once)
“Sugar Kane” (Beck was soooo high when he saw them rock this at Lollapalooza)
“100%” (Video has skateboarding in it and Mike D was like, “yo!!!”)
“Kool Thing” (Radiohead really thinks they shattered boundaries when this got played on MTV)
“Disappearer” (Portia DeRossi thinks Lee Ranaldo kind of looks like her girlfriend)
“Superstar” (If you like this, Diablo Cody also thinks you should check out the Juno soundtrack)
“Stones” (Allison Anders thinks people should get over the old stuff and pay more attention to their new ideas)
“Tuff Gnarl” (Mike Watt covered this once–it’s the jam and Dave Eggers thinks “blah blah blah phbbbt”)
“Teenage Riot” (Eddie Vedder likes to imagine some day kids will stand up, revolt, and go see the Fastbacks)
“Shadow of a Doubt” (Michelle Williams thinks this song is creepy and sexy, like seeing your ex dressed up like the Joker)
“Rain on Tin” (This song is so cosmically magical to Flea, it reminds him of 9/11 and makes him take off his shirt and cry)
“Tom Violence” (When he closes his eyes, the track makes Gus Van Zant see a beautiful blond boy looking bored)
“Mary-Christ” (David Cross likes this song because it sounds like Alvin & The Chipmunks)
“World Looks Red” (One of Chloe Sevigny’s skeevy, demented director boyfriends used to play this every morning)
“Expressway to Yr Skull” (Flaming Lips are thinking about removing the distortion and making this sound like sloppy Styx)
“Slow Revolution” (a new Sonic Youth song about how they slowly transformed into the kind of band who would get famous pals to write kissy-faced intros to an ironically titled hits comp available only at coffee shops)
Sonic Youth Sets Track List For Starbucks Compilation [Billboard]
yawn.
the album cover i’ve been seeing online is particularly hideous. i love sy but don’t see the point in this compilation
no Incinerate? ; Sunday? My Friend Goo? Youth Against Fascism? …
As long as Scarlett Johansen has nothing to do with this, I will buy it.
As long as they’re including that many catchy jams, the exclusion of “Dirty Boots,” “The Diamond Sea” and “Little Trouble Girl” really makes no sense.
I can’t wait until this thing is in my local Starbucks. I’ll go in and tell the baristas (and everyone in the store) about how this band changed my life.
OK, I’m feeling a lot of love for Flea right now, “Rain On Tin” is probably my favorite SY song of the past 15 years.
“Eddie Vedder likes to imagine some day kids will stand up, revolt, and go see the Fastbacks”
don’t we all?
Radiohead really thinks they shattered boundaries when this got played on MTV
Pretty much my thought!
Oxford, 1990:
THOM: “It..it’s that guy. From that rap act.”
@Chris Molanphy: Adding the 19- or 25-minute versions of “Diamond Sea” would certainly have been cool. Maybe that was the Jeff Tweedy pick that we’ve been denied. (Wilco wuz robbed!)
Wow, this is SO necessary…
Ok, now that I’ve got my snarking out of the way, it’s nice to see some stuff off ‘EVOL’ and ‘Confusion Is Sex’ on here.