Just Being Totally Perfect: Sonic Nurse Turns 20

Looking back on a high watermark in the Sonic Youth catalog

June 8, 2024June 8, 2024 Dan Weiss 1 Comment 2004, 20th Anniversary, Goo, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Mariah Carey, Murray Street, Rather Ripped, Sonic Nurse, Sonic Youth, Steve Shelley, Thurston Moore

Sonic Nurse album art (Image: Geffen Records)

“Your pattern recognition is kind of slow,” Kim Gordon taunts at the outset of Sonic Youth’s 13th studio album, and she might as well be jibing at me.

Her legendary alt-noise outfit of exactly three decades isn’t the kind of band that immediately announced themselves as my favorite. It was a realization after years of sinking in how often I still listened to every single one of their albums since Steve Shelley became their permanent skinsman. Sonic Nurse probably comes closest to explaining why they became my comfort food ideal in a rock band, but I’ve also got a few theories for that.

One, 2004 was my first year away from home in college, a prime time for musically formative life-changing. I’d been in love with Sonic Youth for years, first when the dynamic contrast between the sweet (soothing Lee and Thurston explorations) and sour (viciously abrasive Kim ones) of A Thousand Leaves got my attention when my friend Tracy lent me the CD in 7th grade and even more immediately when I snatched Daydream Nation from a used bin for $3 (“Trilogy” was scratched and skipped near the end), along with Experimental Jet Set and Dirty quickly after. But I was in love with a lot of music, I mean, I was a teenager. I went to Ozzfest and bought turntablism compilations, too. Staying power is a mysterious code to crack. (A Thousand Leaves, definitely not the best place to start, is now my favorite album of all-time by anybody.)

So two was another great leap forward: Seeing them onstage. I actually did previously catch SY opening for Pearl Jam in 2000 with my dad, but even this rabid NYC Ghosts & Flowers stan knows that an amphitheater support slot touring their most divisive, Beat poet-influenced album, was hardly an auspicious way for a teenager to meet the live experience of this band. I consider it a win that I didn’t hate their set. (Not sure if my dad felt the same.) Since I had a more solidified love of Sonic Youth by 2002’s Murray Street and its gauzier follow-up, I caught them headlining the Trocadero in Philly for Sonic Nurse (setlist.fm says it was the Electric Factory but there was no way, it was either the Troc or the TLA, setlist otherwise matches up with my memory) and it was incredible, possibly the best time I’d end up seeing them, except for maybe the 2008 Battery Park concert with the reunited Feelies opening (which would be immortalized as a live album, albeit one omitting the “Drunk Butterfly” where Kim stopped playing, kissed Thurston, and opined ‘I forgot the words’).

Sonic Youth Sonic Nurse, Geffen Records 2004

The set was simple and effective: most of Sonic Nurse, including a beautiful, opening number “I Love You Golden Blue” unhurriedly feeling its way into the show itself, and key career highs sprinkled in between: “Eric’s Trip,” “Teen Age Riot,” “100%.” They encored with a lovely “Rain on Tin” and an elegiac “Shadow of a Doubt.” I’ll never get the imagine of ultra-lanky Thurston climbing the venue’s speakers and thrashing out at his instrument out of my mind. Because Sonic Nurse was possibly their softest, cleanest album, it’s notable how well that material translated to the live setting, but also how memorable it was anyway. If it’s a transcendent album, as I believe of nearly all SY records, I admit it’s a transcendently routine one.

Nurse starts loose and jammy with excursions like “Dripping Dream” and “Stones” (“The dead are alright with me,” sings Thurston, or does he mean the Dead?), but less so than the stretchier parts of Murray Street. The single “Unmade Bed” and “I Love You Golden Blue,” the other advance track, were definitely their softest, a friendly contrast between Steve’s atypical use of toms in the former and a typically tone-deaf Kim crooning a ballad in the latter. The idea of Geffen cajoling them into attempting a more major-label digestible version of a hushed meditation like Leaves’ “Hits of Sunshine” is patently ludicrous, but that’s sort of the feel. Even with its ginormous epics, “Karen Revisited” and “Sympathy for the Strawberry,” Murray Street felt like a streamlined version of an assured sound, and I would say that continued with overwhelming success throughout the final three albums SY would ever make. The hooks increasingly poked out of the friendly morass in the second half: Lee’s “they were rising up out of a paper cup,” the sliding-up-the-neck lead guitar that suddenly squirts out of the Krautrock in personal fave “New Hampshire” like toothpaste.

Sonic Nurse’s most memorable tune isn’t delicate at all, though, in fact, it’s a bit insensitive. I’ll call it by its real title: “Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream,” which did end up in a more major-label digestible state upon release. Unlike their winking embrace of Madonna and their downright touching requiem for Karen Carpenter (not to mention their classic Carpenters cover), Kim’s Mariah takedown was almost a made-to-order diss track for the elitist wolves in their audience. Under a 2024 lens, it looks worse for a white feminist to spend five minutes of ad hominems on a biracial, bipolar (“you say you need privacy / Broken glass everywhere”) victim of her exec ex’s controlling abuse even if the subject in question is a multiplatinum diva. (Especially one whose own alt-rock album was unfairly blocked from release.)

But the song is so fun and ridiculous, I somewhat doubt Carey, who can afford better mental healthcare than Kim Gordon or you and I, would bristle if she even knew it existed (actually, she might). I love when Kim mentions Eminem and then quasi-raps “Did he bake you and then forsake you / Is innocence gonna still overtake you.” Maybe Mariah would even have a laugh herself at “you’re just being totally perfect” or “maybe you need an emo boy” or “it’s time to take a bubble bath.” It killed live. Black pop music has the last laugh anyway as Kim embraces Playboi Carti castoffs by ex-Lizzo collaborators on her enduring (and noisy) 2024 LP The Collective at least partly to retain her cool aura. And do we really want her to ever change?

Because SY’s sweeping discography has made up more than 20 years of my comfort listening, I had to zero in on this particular hour to describe the flavor profile. In the car, there were louder parts than I remembered, particularly the feedback tantrum that finishes off “Dripping Dream” and the squelching wah-wah solos that take over “New Hampshire.” So maybe it’s just another Sonic Youth album, though the trilogy from Murray Street through 2006’s even more subdued and hookier. Rather Ripped is the most melodic they ever became, with Nurse smack in the middle. When Kim strains to croon “I can’t read your mind” on “Golden Blue,” it goes against all telepathy and nature this quartet’s synergy had developed by 2004 in their own mysterious, alternate-tuned language. So it’s maybe a Thurston phrase I misheard as “Heaven’s junk” and couldn’t find again that sums up Sonic Nurse. Or Lee’s inevitably catchy “Paper Cut Exit”: “I don’t mind if you sing a different song / Just as long as you sing, sing along.”

Whatever it may be, this album remains one of the great high watermarks in a career filled with them.