Spotted the clip below, this morning, and it struck me for two reasons. Firstly, it underscored the recent negation of the MTV News archives, which still completely confounds me. Secondly, it reminds me of a period of my life that now seems quite a long, goddamn time ago.
And while, yes, 32 years is indeed a long goddamn time, I can still pretty vividly remember this day. I believe I’ve spoken about it here before (I have), but I attended Sonic Youth’s July 4 performance, with Sun Ra opening, at the Central Park Summerstage in the balmy summer of 1992.
I would have been 25, at the time, and working as an editorial assistant at LIFE Magazine. I want to say I went with my friends Rob D. and Vicky S., and I remember being frankly confused by Sun Ra and, if I’m being honest, kinda bored by most of Sonic Youth’s set as, by this time, they were heading off in a direction that I didn’t find quite as compelling as their weirder, noisier material from just a couple of short years earlier. They played a bunch of stuff that would surface later that month on Dirty, which I wasn’t that into. But, they were still Sonic Youth, thus — still cool. When they launched into favorites like “Teen Age Riot,” “The Burning Spear” and “Expressway to Yr Skull,” I was well enthused, but disappointed that they didn’t bust out “Death Valley `69.”
I also remember milling around before hand in the park outside the Summerstage area, chatting briefly with R.E.M’s Pete Buck, who was just kinda hanging out, and getting in a strange argument with some dude about the politics of Laibach. He was adamant that they were nazis, while I was countering that their aesthetic was archly ironic … he walked away unconvinced.
In any case, in the eras since this clip was shot, Sonic Youth would release nine more studio albums before splitting up over the sad dissolution of the marriage of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. The rising wave of “Alternative Rock” — as a mainstream concern, at least — would shortly crest and summarily crash, paving the way for flatly indefensible garbage like Blink-182, Creed, Linkin Park and Avril Lavigne, not to mention the inevitable return of glossily slick teen pop ala Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and the like. Hip-Hop — then in the throes of what many largely consider its “golden era” — would continue to rise, mutate, and shortly completely overtake all things rock in terms of the music of popular youth culture. Sun Ra, meanwhile, would die less than a year after this show.
In the weeks that followed this afternoon, I embarked on a dubious office romance with a young lady from LIFE’s production department that — not unlike “Alternative Rock” — would crest and crash in remarkably short order, leaving me shaking my fist at the notion of a beneficent god for honestly far longer than I should’ve. I got laid off from LIFE in 1993, but got picked up by TIME and stayed there for 12 years before splitting for — wait for it — MTV News, who’d, in turn, lay me off two summers after that. I’d then kill time at MSN for two years before joining the website of the TODAY Show (what was I thinking?) for about four and half years before unceremoniously getting the keys to the street, again, and floundering for several months before landing the job I have now, where I’ve been for eight years and a little bit.
Oh, I also got married in 2001 and had two kids.
But back in July of 1992, none of that had happened yet….
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