June 1999, New York City, and the guy serving me in a supermarket points to my Confusion is Sex t-shirt and says something I can't immediately decipher from his Korean-American accent. After one or two repeats, it turns out to be, "I've got that album." Oh, I didn't know it was an album; I thought it was just a t-shirt design. Now that might seem ridiculously uninformed for someone who calls/called himself a Sonic Youth fan, but I only picked up the SY story with Sister and then worked backwards through E.V.O.L. and Bad Moon Rising, their second studio album. I found those albums by flicking through racks in shops, not by searching for Sonic Youth discography online. Because there wasn't one. And neither was there a copy of Confusion is Sex in the racks. It was reissued in 1995, by which time I'd stopped looking so closely, but I happened upon a copy in Fopp just a couple of months after that NYC conversation.
Speaking of Caroline, as I was yesterday, it was almost exactly a decade before that NYC encounter that I wore the t-shirt round to her house, just at that point when we were trying to decide whether we were made for each other or not. Or more specifically, whether we were going to go upstairs. "I'm confused," she said. Now I don't wish to brag, or make it sound easy, because things got complicated very quickly after that, but at that moment I just pointed at the legend on my shirt, and up we went.
Flash forward, now, to 2007 and — you realise now how my wardrobe is equal parts thrift and care — I got the t-shirt out once more for one of the Daydream Nation revisited gigs. It was from the merch stall on the original Daydream Nation tour that I originally bought the t-shirt. Twice in 2007 I was stopped by people asking to photograph my 18-year-old shirt. They were young people, obviously. If I'd had anything else to wear, I'd have given it to them.
Sonic Youth were still young people when they recorded Confusion is Sex. Strange to think of this coming out at the same time as The Cocteaus' Head Over Heels and the first Smiths singles. Via Wikipedia, I found this facilitation of critical understanding, including Greil Marcus' Artforum piece outlining how the album communicates a "burden of negation". As often with Marcus, it's partly enlightening and partly bewildering. I can't hear what he hears in I Wanna Be Your Dog and Shaking Hell. How must it feel as a young rock band to have someone of Marcus's standing writing about your early work in Artforum? It may have been exactly what they had in mind: you know how it is with downtown New York "underground". Besides, Kim Gordon wasn't that young at 30, and, Wikipedia says, wrote for Artforum herself around the same time. Yet even Marcus felt that Side 2 of Confusion didn't match the breakthrough of Side 1 — how must he feel now, after 27 years and 15 more albums of broadly similar material?
My favourite track is Lee is Free, the closer of the original album (before Kill Yr. Idols was appended to the reissue). Recorded on two tape recorders by Lee Ranaldo solo at home, it sounds like the bells of a ceremony in a buddhist temple.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
Brilliant t shirt story!
Posted by: Brian | 26 July 2010 at 07:16 PM