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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

C4 Sonic Youth

uncle retrospective

22:20 / 05.12.01

So I saw it and -

Riz is going to be pissed off. If you thought the Pixies had loosers on their show, Ride? Placebo?

It was only worth the time for Kurt Cobain's impression of Kevin Cosner. "I thought you were, neat".

Cool.
Crap show.

23:50 / 05.12.01

I hadn’t realised that it was possible to make a documentary where your audience would end up knowing less about the subject at the end than at the beginning.

In fact I think that I have just become bored of Sonic Youth.

(feels head)

Yep, couldn’t care less.

Shit.

10:12 / 06.12.01

i missed it (ok, i couldn't stay up that late too watch it because i'm a wuss). did they show any good live footage or was it the thurston knocking nails into a piano style 'art' stuff?
hey, that kurt quote is from the sonic youth film 'the year that punk broke' isn't it? i love that film. my ex bf stole it from me. i miss it. i miss kim and kurt dancing on the train tracks.

[ 06-12-2001: Message edited by: suds ]

[ 06-12-2001: Message edited by: suds ]

14:38 / 06.12.01

Yep, that documentary sucked.

25 MINUTES?!?!?!?

The fucking Smashing Pumpkins get an Hour and Sonic Youth get 25 MINUTES??? WHAT IS UP WITH THE WORLD!

And to add insult to injury, they followed it with a 90 minute performance by the most BORING man ever to pick up a musical instrument (so boring in fact I can't even remember the fat loser's name).

And of that precious 25 minutes, why were we subjected to about 3 minutes of members of Ride gurning, Brian Molko making some moronic analogy about volcanoes and ABSOLUTELY NO footage or music from before 1990?

Grrr...

There were one or two good bits though:

The footage of SY meeting Kurt - I've got to get that '1991' movie..

The clip from the video to 'Drunken Butterfly', with the song being performed by puppets - that was great.

Brief interviews with some people from some reasonably good bands for once - or Snowpony and Simian at least..

But otherwise it was totally unenlightening.

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

16:41 / 06.12.01

I kind of liked some of it, mainly because I'd never seen anything about Sonic Youth before.

But I mean, they had live footage and they barely showed any - and I'm thinking whhhhyyyyyy?! The fooolllllsssssssssss!

There is so much potential for a programme about Sonic Youth, what with all the shit they've done/do. The journal-y bits were good too.

That bloke from Placebo should be hit with a stick for such a poor analogy. I thought there was going to be a point in the end, but he kept jabbering on about swimming around in igneoous rock and magma and that was it.

What a farking tit.

But someone please tell me, what is this film? What's in it? Where can I get it? etc

09:27 / 07.12.01

Jonny, the video is: 1991: The Year Punk Rock Broke and its pretty damn good.

On and off-stage footage of Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., Babes In Toyland and The Ramones during Sonic Youth's 1991 European tour. Tracklist includes: 'Brother James', 'Schizophrenia', 'Teenage Riot', 'Dirty Boots', 'I Love Her All The Time', 'Mote' and 'Kool Thing' plus numbers from supporting artists. If you like any of the bands above then you should get the video, available on order through Amazon

Me, I’ve just spent the last 2 hours listening to Evol and Sister in an attempt to remind myself why I liked the band in the first place and what I would like to know is:
Who is licensing this style-less, uninformative docu-cack to Channel 4?

Tantalising glimpses of live and video footage with scant regard for chronology or context, and the indie Nora Batty comparing bands to igneous rock just isn’t good enough.

Either give us the whole deal (at least 1 hour, no fuck-wit guests), or a ½ hour live show. Or just play the fucking tourfilm! I want to be informed, entertained and thrilled by these pioneers dammit, not bored and nauseated by mawkish and self-regarding metaphors courtesy of Brian “Magma” Molko.

Jesus

Next week on Pioneers: The One Minute My Bloody Valentine
Molko spends 60 seconds thinking up words to describe MBV’s “pioneering” sound (loud, swirly, a whirlpool, a swirl, a whirl, a pool, a vortex, spinny, cool, occluded, foggy, misty, cloudy, sleepy, dopey, bashful, sneezy ………… )

Wept.

[ 07-12-2001: Message edited by: RedRunningLord ]

09:27 / 07.12.01

The annoying thing is that, as a documentary, the Smashing Pumpkins one from two weeks ago was really good - it had very few fuckwit celebrities, actual proper lengthy interviews with the band and far more live/video/studio footage than I've ever wanted to see..

..the programme making standard seems to decrease as the musical quality increases..

I wonder who's on next week?

12:14 / 07.12.01

that film, the year that punk broke, makes me wish, wish, wish that i wasn't 11 in 1991. a lot. and it makes me want to be in a band, too. and that can't be a bad thing.

Pin

14:11 / 08.12.01

I was 7, and I only got into music at all in about 1995. Think of the stuff I missed out on! Go on! Think of it! Dares ya!

There, wasn't that fun?!

21:11 / 09.12.01

quote: The annoying thing is that, as a documentary, the Smashing Pumpkins one from two weeks ago was really good - it had very few fuckwit celebrities, actual proper lengthy interviews with the band and far more live/video/studio footage than I've ever wanted to see..

Riz, was the Smashing Pumpkins show actually part of the Pioneers series?

Because as much as I love Gish and Siamese Dream, I really can’t understand how a petri-dish experiment in crossing grunge-lite with The Frampton Strain - before introducing a latent Depeche Mode virus - can be considered particularly pioneering.

Wait a minute, that does makes them sound rather interesting, in a nightime telly deathrockscientition kinda way. Hmmm………

Nurse, this patient is haemorrhaging! Bring me the disembodied head of James Iha, I have a lengthy and heavily reverbed guitar coda to extract. . . . .