Word: sonics
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...Mach3 will arrive in stores in July, priced at $6.29 to $6.79 for four cartridges, or 35% more than Gillette's Sensor Excel. It will be promoted by a $300 million marketing budget that will include an ad involving a jet producing three sonic booms before morphing into a razor wielded by a guy who looks as if he grows as much facial hair as Matt Damon...
Listening to a new Sonic Youth CD is like taking a holiday. Not an easy vacation like, say, skiing in Vail, but more like an adventure tour, the musical equivalent of climbing a particularly high peak without bottled oxygen. Traditional rock can be a sad grind--for example, on Eric Clapton's wan new CD, Pilgrim, one of the few listenable songs, Sick and Tired, turns out to have disturbing lyrics about threatening to blow out a woman's brains...
...rock shocks like that--when pop music parts, Red Sea-like, to reveal all the misogyny and ugliness beneath--that gave rise to progressive/alternative rock in the early '80s. And one of the champions of the form over the past 17 years has been the New York City band Sonic Youth. "We got past the hardest part together," says band member Thurston Moore, 39, "which was getting through our 20s and 30s together." Sonic Youth doesn't embrace the swagger and sexual bravado of mainstream rock. The band's lyrics are often deliberately remote, seeking to capture, through abstract imagery...
Today the genre that Sonic Youth helped create--alternative rock--is slipping creatively. "The industry only turned to alternative rock because they thought they'd find another half-dozen Nirvanas," says Ranaldo. "When they didn't, they dropped it like a cold fish and left a lot of bands--" Moore finishes his thought: "--flopping on the shore...
...Sonic Youth has never tried to be an arena-filling band. By quietly and resolutely continuing to make its own fiercely avant-garde, unabashedly personal music, it has created a space for itself. While many careerist bands lie gasping for air, Sonic Youth swims on, looking for deeper, uncharted waters...