Moments In Love: Sonic Youth's Blues

By Howard Cressi-Stallworth

Under the hood, Sonic Youth were a band of contradictions and surprises.  They were rarely reflective or emotional; odd for a band filled with 2nd wave Baby Boomers.  They were displaced, disaffected punks from the era when doing so meant you were considered a burned-out bummer.  Their codification as Gen X’s chaperones is earned due to their idle arty indifference towards anything, which is why the song being written about make this all the more interesting.  Released on May 10th 1994, Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star presented Sonic Youth firmly in that baby boom middle age they had spent so long running away from.  

“Winner’s Blues” is quite the about face when considering Sonic Youth’s catalogue of elongated guitar rock experimentalism. A group known for strong opening  tracks on their albums was inviting hundreds of thousands of kids to listen in on a song with more melancholy and confused reflection than anything they had done before.   It’s worth mentioning at this point that this slapdash item of a recording is my favorite Sonic Youth song.  

Invoking the inside of a room on a weekend evening, “Winner’s Blues” perfectly encapsulates a feeling beyond melancholy: an emptiness in what they had found after success.  It is Sonic Youth’s most emotional and potent recording.  A band infamous for its lack of sentimental music recorded something that would sit alongside their younger peers, such as Sebadoh or Guided By Voices.  They got to experience the feeling of finding out what success was truly like.  Whether you’re the smartest guy in the room or the most naive of actors, the message of “Winner’s Blues” is that exact prize of success they had found.  

“In right away, go out not today

Move back along wait a long, long time

Nothing running free, gotta time it all”

At the risk of falling over the same Gen X retrospective thesis, it seems to be the one song about their peers—a total reflection.  Sonic Youth were put upon narrators of their own world, whether they were snide, sarcastic, or honest about it.  “Winner’s Blues” is a disjointed, yet poignant perch of a song placed bare at the front of an album that was coming off of their largest commercial  successes.  While the rest of the album would feature more of the same arty experimentation and noisy riff rock they were known for, the lead off track was a detour into what might’ve been.  

The track is only Thurston’s hushed, compromised vocals and guitar. The now commonplace strange guitar tuning is heightened with just the use of an acoustic guitar and it’s open strings.  Thurston does his best ability to follow the guitar, bringing to mind the tradition of singing with the riff à la Black Sabbath with Ozzy.  The end of the song, completely absent of vocals, showcases Thurston’s best guitar playing of the era.  Sublime melodies and passages flow from each beat and string, ringing out for the right amount of time, foreshadowing the acoustic work he would do justice with on his solo work, such as the underappreciated Demolished Thoughts.  

Even newbies Eric’s Trip were crafting entire albums out of this very feeling, that potent early 20s snuggle love on hushed instruments that Carrisa’s Wierd and Death Cab would mint entire careers off of starts with the young Gen X’ers realizing that even the hardest of art bands could have emotional chewy centers.  Evan Dando leans in the corner smirking saying “I did this first.”

If one was to wonder what might have been had Sonic Youth made an entire album like this, it’s not as hard to imagine with their peers , as they were creating entire careers out of it.  A similar opening track was delivered by peer Liz Phair.  Her song, “Chopsticks” from the lovely Whip-Smart, feels like viewing a couple in their furnished attic bed watching television in the early 90s through the keyhole while the song plays in your head.  While Liz knew exactly what she was doing with that track, with “Winner’s Blues” it felt like an accident.

It’s truly quite a compliment to rank this piece out of their catalogue in 1994 as Thurston’s best guitar playing and writing, considering the work they had done up to that point includes some truly excellent guitar pieces like “Teen Age Riot” and “Schizophrenia”.  “Winner’s Blues” is a minor musical opus.  It reflects something that had been building within the home recording world for years,and showed the suburban teens that they too could have a career recording like this.  Most of that young audience's songs felt like this too, one to two riff lo-fi songs with a stream of consciousness lyrics.  

“And it's out

And it's not what you thought it was about

But a life, that you know

Will keep you bound in

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose”

Virtually everyone I knew or had known who recorded acoustic songs wrote pieces just like this.  The first two lines are totally written off the dome and almost clumsy, but they just happen to work so well; I know tons of tossed off demos and pieces that are just like it.  Never was an audience more in tune with how their favorite band wrote a song—how exciting is that?  It works wonderfully in Sonic Youth’s favor, just a testament to how lucky they were as a group.  Maybe they were echoing Stephen Malkmus who seemingly wrote all his songs like this, and would even deliver a similar song on their album Wowee Zowee next year with the track “We Dance.”  While less  lo-fi and more oblique, it was a glance into a specific part of their world like “Winner’s Blues” was.

Why would a group as multifaceted as Sonic Youth deliver such a message only to never  return to it’s feeling?  They were into their peers, Sebadoh and Guided by Voices; maybe  they were spurned onto this sound spontaneously and put it on the album.  Maybe they knew if they did it too much they’d be seen as trend hopping and not following their own path.  Whatever the case may be they captured something integral, a shard in the mirror to see into their own reality.Even the highest of poses brings  muscle pain and the need for  relief.

“Burn out your eyes, burn out surprise

Look out today you know it's not the same

It's all the rage, it's every day”

Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star was their final album as a large seller and cultural flashpoint in the age of alternative rock and the slacker.  Once their appearance on the indie-fied Lollapalooza 95 met with the release of  Washing Machine they were firmly elder statesmen, something they had more or less been since Goo.  They watched as slacker and alt rock movements were fading, and they no longer had to speak for anything.  Maybe they were relieved.  Sonic Youth were always in the unfortunate position to critique and discuss what went on within their circles due to their reputation  and success.  Musically, they were always willing to narrate the underbelly of american sociologies, and as minute celebrities they did so through various forms of media.  “Winner’s Blues” was a candlelight vigil for what was to come—they had seen it coming for years, they just decided to give it the best funeral it deserved.

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose”