StarPolish Interview with Sonic Youth - Page 2

The Current Climate

STARPOLISH: I think a good place to start, since you guys have been around for a while, is to discuss the environment into which you're releasing the new album, compared to even a decade ago. It seems like there's been a sea change in terms of how the industry operates. Although it sometimes seems that Sonic Youth is able to operate totally independent of the industry itself, you're still musicians who are earning a living from music, so you're in the business to some degree. Could you talk about how you approach releasing a new album now compared to 10 years ago?

SHELLEY: Well, you know to some degree being an artist of the scale we are, we operate fairly similarly to the way we did 10 years ago. I mean, obviously the whole environment has changed now with the Internet and downloading and all this stuff; record sales in general are not what they were 10 years ago. When a hot album came out 10 years ago, your record company would expect it would go through the roof. I suppose today they imagine a certain portion of their sales is getting siphoned off. Whether that's true or not seems to be a subject of much debate these days. But we're pretty much a self-sufficient band, so we kind of operate in the same way we did 10 years ago: we make the music, we put it out there, and the record sales, they sort of fluctuate, but they have a certain amount of consistency with our fan base, in terms of how many people buy our records and things like that. So I guess to some degree I think we're slightly exempt from the vagaries of the marketplace just because we do have this long tradition of who we are and this tide of fans to support us.

STARPOLISH: I think that sometimes it's surprising to people that you're on a major label .

SHELLEY: (Laughing) It's surprising to us!

STARPOLISH: When you left to sign with Geffen initially back in the 80s, a lot of people just didn't understand that move at all. Is that something that you can talk about? I know there were some issues involved with SST, royalties and things like that .

SHELLEY: The deal with Enigma at that time was a one-off I think, so it wasn't like we left them; we just sort of didn't do another record with them. We started going around and meeting all the labels — it's what you do when you're going to sign — and they take you out to dinner, and we initially flew out to California because we had some pretty close ties with some people at A&M, and we really thought we were going to sign with A&M. But it while we were out there, this guy from Geffen really wants us to come by. And we really liked Geffen a lot, and at the time it was the last independent major label. It was still owned by David Geffen and you could actually go into his office and talk to the owner, where the buck stopped. That was pretty interesting and they didn't have a whole lot of artists back then, which was really interesting to us as well, so we felt like it was a good home.

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