StarPolish Interview with Sonic Youth - Page 11

SHELLEY: There are no expectations sales-wise, it's just sort of whatever happens and we never think about that when we're getting together. Murray Street, we didn't conceptualize it before it happened, it's just the way it came together. About the other stuff, we just sort of embrace the taping and file sharing and we hope that if someone hears something [they like], they'll be excited enough to go look for the record.

RANALDO: The whole thing about being more song oriented, I mean, our pendulum swings back and forth from more soundscapey, noisy stuff to more actual songs. We kind of hear that every five to 10 years, you know? We heard it when we made Goo and we heard it when we made Sisters. It's kind of like one of those things that is always droning away in the background. And the same goes for record sales. We've heard [for a lot of] records since 1989 that "This one's going to do really well," or "This one's going to be really big." So we just put them out there and see what happens. All that stuff is unpredictable. It depends what's going on in the market and underground, you know?

STARPOLISH: Well, one of the things that I think is interesting, particularly for a band that has been around for a while and that continually experiments with music, is that there's always the possibility of alienating a part of your fans who liked what you did during a certain period. I'm just wondering if that happens at all .

RANALDO: I don't think that's true. In fact, I think it sort of happens in a kind of the reverse — it's easy to alienate the fans that have kind of come recently and sort of dip in and check it out, and then move on to something else. I think especially for a band like us, our hardcore fans are really interested in the different directions that we go, and the same goes for us; if we like an artist, even if they go through a period that has you scratching your heads and wondering, "What the fuck are they doing?" — like with Neil Young or someone like that when he goes off on these crazy tangents — you still like something about who they are and what they're enough doing that you keep coming back to see where they're going. Hopefully they come around and do stuff you really love again, as [Young] has for sure. So I think that because we've been around for so long, there have been fans that have been with us for a really long period of time, and in general they look for us to do different things and sort of challenge their expectations of who we are and what we are. In 1999, I think it was, we did that Goodbye Twentieth Century record where we played all this modernist music. And you know, it's something I think our fans always thought we had in us, but maybe before we did it, it was kind of one of those unspoken things. But for us it was just opening up that we could do other things like film soundtracks, etc. I think the people who are interested in what we do are kind of interested in all of that — at least it seems to be the case. If you read our net chat board, we all do a lot of weird solo stuff, from freaky improve to singer/songwriter stuff or whatever. And the fans seem to be into embracing quite a lot of that stuff as part of that thing that is Sonic Youth.

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