It’s a muddy track only a few bands have managed to negotiate, but Sonic Youth figured out how to grow up and stay hardcore. From artfuck noise concept to tangerine flaked players’ players, over the last 20 years they’ve learned to cultivate the noise into something dark and mercurial and beautiful.

Backstage at Witnness, I’m watching the ease with which the foursome plus honorary member Jim O’ Rourke carry themselves amidst this year’s models. This is a playing band, but also a functioning family. Mind you, Thurston Moore still looks like a lanky teenaged refugee from some fuzzbox garage combo, and Kim Gordon remains a striking presence with icy blue eyes and the occasional smile that leads you to suspect her cool front may be half shyness.

And like the new song says, radical adults lick godhead style – minutes after we’d been discussing Neil Young and Charles Manson, Kim and Thurston’s daughter Coco wandered into our interview and curled up on her mother’s lap, unphased by her surroundings. Lynn Chaney and Tipper Gore take note: not all nuclear American families fit your bill.

This is why the conversation begins not with an index of Sonic Youth’s arcane and unorthodox system of guitar tunings, or dissertations on the relationship between Ornette Coleman and California hardcore, but the reasons behind the pair’s relocation from New York to Northampton, Western Massachusetts a few years ago when they decided to start a family.

“We were actually looking for a larger space in New York City,” says Thurston, “we didn’t really consider leaving, but there were some things that made sense to us. We could have a much, much larger place outside of the city for less money.”

“Also there’s this whole nanny culture in New York raising kids,” Kim adds. “ It’s kind of depressing when you go to the park with your kid and you’d rather have the babysitter take her because there’s a bunch of nannies sitting around, it’s kind of weird.”

So the pair fought shy of the kind of social climate where, as Kim puts it, parents are “enrolling their kids in music classes before they can even sit up”, and lit out for a progressive college town with a healthy arts scene and neighbours like J. Mascis just down the road in Amherst.

“We knew that community anyway,” Thurston points out. “We’d friends up there, it was an academic community, a women’s community, a lot of things going for it.”

Kim: “It wasn’t just like moving to the suburbs.”

So, as ever, the Youth find themselves at an angle, cranky adults in a music business infested with young conservatives whose idea of radical is how many wedgie shots you can cram into a pop promo without getting pushed past MTV’s watershed.

“I guess the way the media presents youth culture is that it’s conservative,” Thurston considers. “Beach blanket party people, everything’s under control, let ’em have their Walt Disney idols like Britney Spears, the MTV Pepsi generation. I was amused to think that when youth culture did become a radical culture in the media in the ’60s, it was so hardcore that there was this divided line: adult culture is square and youth culture is radical. And it’s really gone full circle now. The radicals in arts are people like Neil Young and Yoko Ono and Patti Smith, these are people in their 50s, and I just find that really interesting in the face of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and N Sync.”

Kim: “It’s all about sex, what’s considered radical is how sexy can you be, rather than creative expression or challenging the status quo with alternative aesthetics.”

Maybe it’s a style thing too. Post Madchester and hip hop, ghetto chic equates with buying off the rack at Chairman Mao Sports, resulting in the old tribal factions – crusties, mods, Teds, greasers, whatever – declining in the face of homogenous sartorial communism. Like Nic Cohn never said, today there are no gentlemen, exquisites or eccentrics – only Adidas clones. Hence the death of dandyism and the invent-yourself aesthetics proposed by the Milan modernists, the middle-class Jewish London mods, the Parisian Situationists, the art-school punks and Berlin-inspired Blitz kids.

“It was weird driving into this festival today,” Thurston says, “it’s like 90% of the people I saw, I felt like I was going to a football game because of the fashion and the hairstyles. They had short hair and football outfits on, drinking beers. You look at festival footage from the late ’60s and they had absolutely nothing to do with any kind of organised events such as sports, (it was) totally its own identity.

“The identity now is so dictated by consumerism. I’m a little blindsided by it, it’s like, why isn’t there an up-in-arms revolution going on (saying), ‘We won’t buy into this’? But I hate to be judgmental about it; it’s anyone’s decision to make. Everybody knows that there is a really radical youth culture that exists and there is an underground, but the information isn’t really out there”

So, post No Logo, you gotta think twice about the shirt on your back. If there is a revolution in the heads’ heads, it will not be televised by mainstream media in the corporate pocket. However, Sonic Youth always provided instruction of how to forge marriages of convenience with The Man, sticking to Geffen like tics on a hippo. This is the band who made it okay in Kurt Cobain’s head for Nirvana to sign to a multinational. Simultaneously, they’ve maintained links with several generations of radicals, from No Wave and straight edge back to the Beats, contributing to Burroughs’ Dead City Radio and dedicating ‘Hits Of Sunshine’ to Allen Ginsberg.

With respect to the latter pair, how does Kim reconcile her personal politics with the inherent misogyny of the Beats?

“Well, that’s my problem with it, but not all of it,” she says. “I mean Allen Ginsberg was a very sweet man, I met him. Kerouac certainly became the image that male rock stars should act like, an arrested adolescent, which is kind of fascinating. There’s a real distortion in the media, a lot of romanticising of Kerouac in particular. Unfortunately there isn’t any female equivalent. Maybe there is now, but in terms of a female figure that offered that ideal of freedom, like, ‘I’m not gonna get married’, I don’t think there was one until Patti Smith. Her importance is that she exemplified the sort of zest that these men characterised, and that’s why she’s a female icon. Even though her influences were all male and she related to men, she took that energy and that action.”

Let me state the obvious: Sonic Youth are an American band. Over 16 albums the quartet have built a body of work that reflects and refracts all the heavenly/hellish realities and mythologies of that continent, a matrix of sound that sucks in John Cage, Jackson Pollock, John Coltrane, Karen Carpenter, Charles Manson, Neil Young, The Beats, The Riot Grrls, Madonna, Nirvana, Hole and Harry Crews.

From Daydream Nation to NYC Ghosts & Flowers to the latest Murray Street, the band’s music has fed off the psycho-geographical power points of the modern urban sprawl, but there’s also something ancient and elemental in their sound. It’s there in the cover of Bad Moon Rising, a primordial spirit that originates not from Manhattan loft studios but Georgia O’ Keeffe’s desert flowers and Burroughs’ lines from Naked Lunch: “America is not a young land; it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”

The band addressed that evil in ‘Death Valley ’69’, a high water mark in hardcore’s fascination with Charles Manson as a symbol of transgression, of brutality and violence as a toxic antidote to the shiny surfaces and phoney nostalgia of Reagan’s America. Their noise evoked the aftermath of acid overload rather than the colours; less trippy pantheism than paranoiac-schizophrenia (which Kim Gordon’s older brother suffered from in his early 20s) and urban jitters.

The Manson-as-hippy-nightmare iconigraphy was also appropriated by Lydia Lunch, Black Flag and artist Raymond Pettibon. Indeed, the SST label at one point considered releasing an album of Manson’s jail recordings, and Henry Rollins had a brief correspondence with him.

Thurston: “I think Rollins’s correspondence was its own thing and was really nothing to do with what we were up to, which had much more literary aspects to it. It was never meant to be any kind of endorsement. A direct connection to Manson was something we had no interest in. Living in New York we were meeting up with people like Lydia Lunch who were expressing this very sort of nefarious imagery in a way, going back and re-evaluating Manson’s iconic images. And Raymond Pettibon this classic caricature of the Manson hippy with the peace sign, and underneath it said, ‘Watch His Other Hand!’

“The Manson thing was so intense in America in ’69/’70 that when he was put away, all of a sudden The Carpenters was in and it was like, ‘The ’60s is dead, let’s get rid of it’. It wasn’t something that the social culture ever dealt with, it wasn’t until the ’80s that people of our generation started looking at it and going, ‘What was that?’ and getting into the literature of Ed Sanders and reading Bugliosi’s book (Helter Skelter) and just sort of wondering about it. It was a very important part of American history that people had put underneath the carpet. A lot of it maybe had to do with Reaganism, which was all about trying to re-present this innocence of the past, the ’50s, before things got screwed up, it was all about revisionism.”

One of the more remarkable aspects of Manson was that his sociopathic tendencies might’ve been the result of thwarted artistic ambition. The guy wanted to be a rock star. Neil Young even recommended him to Warner Brothers.

“I mean it’s kind of interesting how a sociopath can work its way into celebrity,” Kim points out, “and if you get far enough then you can survive and flourish and people will celebrate you.”
Thurston: “Did you read that Neil Young book? (Shakey by Jimmy McDonough – PM.) Neil talks about Manson in there, and it was really funny ’cos he was close to Dennis (Wilson, Beach Boys), and they said the weirdest thing was this guy came in with all these girls and they wouldn’t even look at Dennis and Neil.’”

Cut to another American nightmare. Last August Sonic Youth convened for the recording of the Murray Street album with Jim O’ Rourke in their New York studio. Following the events of September 11 the area was cordoned off, effectively impounding their instruments and master tapes. After the dust cleared the band went back to work, but the physical and spiritual landscape had of course been irrevocably altered.

“It was weird,” remembers Kim, “after it happened, I got into Northampton from New York and I was driving in the car and there was some Neil Young song about the ’60s riots, ‘Ohio’, and already there was this strange feeling like you had to be so patriotic, you couldn’t say anything to criticise Bush at that time. It really made me understand the song and what it meant to demonstrate against the Vietnam War, that it was looked upon as un-American and betraying your country.”

The band has been down this route with Neil before. When the other Bush administration was oiling up the machinery for the Gulf War in 1991, Sonic Youth were out with Neil Young and Crazy Horse on the Ragged Glory tour. There was a similar air of jeopardy around at the time – Young overhauled his set to include tunes like ‘Powderfinger’ and a feedback saturated ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, while every night a roadie tied a yellow ribbon to the mike stand.

Thurston: “I think the yellow ribbon sort of designated support for the defence, but was also sentimental to the point of, ‘We support you going and defending our country but we want you to come back. But Neil’s so complex that it’s a little hard for us . . .”

He doesn’t have to finish the sentence. Here’s a man who could claim to support Reagan’s administration (much to the disquiet of his wife), play Farm Aid and write ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’ all in the same five year span.

“He had some reactionary hippy fans,” Kim indicates. “Straight fans also who read ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’ as a very patriotic American song in the same way they did Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born In The USA’, and you forget that hippies can be reactionary assholes, as we found out.”

Was it a war every night when they went out on that tour?

“Our thing was we decided to kinda take the piss in a way,” says Thurston, “we came out and played a tape of ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath really loud, much to the confusion of the audience. For them to hear Black Sabbath, which was this whole other world away from Neil Young, this working class British heavy metal band from the early ’70s singing a song like ‘War Pigs’, to me it was like, ‘This is as valid a comment as anything Neil can make’. We offered that, and then we’d play our songs and didn’t really make any other commentary besides that. But what happened last year, there’s no correlative feelings I don’t think between that and touring with Neil Young.”

Certainly, 9/11 left the majority of musicians feeling bewildered and helpless, as if they were hit by kryptonite.

“Freaked out,” says Thurston. “I think the more celebrated you were, the more your celebrity just became nil at that time. Ninety per cent of being a celebrity is kind of this amorphous weird existence, and all of a sudden that became so devalued in the face what had happened, you could really feel that, it was really sad, like, ‘Who are we and what can we do?’.”

“It was funny actually,” adds Kim, “Sofia Coppola showed us this little home movie video she made at the Mercer Hotel of all these models and fashion people during Fashion Week and they’re all hanging out at the hotel going, ‘What do we do?’, talking about how they were stranded. A couple of ’em were like, ‘I’m really gonna look like an ass!’.”

Read our recent interview with Kim Gordon, in which she discusses her debut solo album, No Home Record, here.