Thurston Moore has been the leader of Sonic Youth since 1981, a long run for a rock 'n' roll band that never sold more than a few hundred thousand copies of any one album. By today's standards 100,000 sales would be formidable -- but in a career whose span overlapped with Michael Jackson and Nirvana selling mega-millions, those numbers are a mere pittance. Yet somehow Sonic Youth has retained its credibility and continued to record its trademark punk-jam-band sound without ever having a hit single. Moore and his wife and bandmate, Kim Gordon, along with Lee Ranaldo, have made up the core of the band from the beginning, walking the path between punk and avant-garde, as chronicled with great detail in the recent book Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth (Da Capo) by David Browne.
Over the years, Sonic Youth has assumed iconic status, with Moore and Gordon becoming role models for a music business where brand values count more than hit records. Moore's encyclopedic knowledge of underground culture, from zines to mix tapes to death metal and beyond, along with Gordon's love of fashion and art, have put them at the center of the alt-indie universe, where they have been cited for their early support of Nirvana, Beck and Sofia Coppola, among many others. As cultural entrepreneurs and collaborators with multidisciplinary artists, their work has been gathered for a monumental exhibit in Sweden this summer demonstrating the breadth of their influence. Now living in Northampton, Massachusetts, Gordon and Moore still make time to nourish their downtown roots with frequent visits to their SoHo loft, which is near a cafe that in a former incarnation was a copy shop where Moore worked years ago. He now gets his coffee there, and so, caffeine in hand, new album The Eternal, we sat for the Guru interview.
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