The Legacy of Sonic Youth

Breaking down the barriers like Sonic Youth,” sang Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow on 1991’s “Gimme Indie Rock.” “They got what they wanted / Maybe I can get what I want too.” Barlow’s song, a fan’s-eye view of the indie rock scene of the time, is laced with slacker irony, but thirty years later, his lines about Sonic Youth still ring true. As Sonic Life, the acutely self-conscious, if frustratingly un-introspective, new memoir by the band’s singer-guitarist, Thurston Moore, makes clear, Sonic Youth almost always did get what it wanted. The band went from being a pillar of the early-’80s downtown Manhattan underground to signing with a major label and then back to making avant-garde records for small audiences without missing a beat, and in the process came to embody for many musicians and music fans an aspirational ideal of creative freedom—and, by extension, freedom in general.