StarPolish Interview with Sonic Youth - Page 6

SHELLEY: I think we've always felt we could do more with the Internet. I mean we've got a pretty intense website, but there are certainly tons more things we could do with that. We have a lot of free mp3's on our site and videos and things like that, but there are definitely artists who've embraced it and are leading the way into that next chapter and what's going to happen to music and the Internet. It's all pretty interesting, but I don't know — in some ways it's strange to say, but we're a pretty traditional band. I mean, we're pretty physical about playing guitars and drums and we carry this junk with us and play these shows and it's a really big part of what we do. So I'm not sure what will happen next between the Internet and us, but I know all of us feel, in different ways, that there's more.

STARPOLISH: Has the experience that some artists have like Prince or George Michael, who've had public conflicts with their labels and then decided to try to do it on their own and not really been particularly successful, become cautionary tales in any way?

SHELLEY: Well, those are such strange stories to me because those are people who, business-wise, live in a totally different world then we do. They're people who get advances for millions of dollars and who are still not happy with what's happening after the advance. So our story is pretty far away from that, and we live much more modestly as musicians; we relate more to blues or jazz musicians than to George Michael and Prince, who by the way I love and we were actually talking about him yesterday.

STARPOLISH: Have you heard the new album?

SHELLEY: Yeah, it's great. He's going to do really well this year, getting inducted into the Hall of Fame. It's awesome that he's back. But it's sort of weird for me that he probably made a lot of money from Warner Brothers, but at a certain point he was so unhappy with the deal that he would write the word "slave" on his cheek. And I think that he signed the contract (laughing). You know, he agreed to get into the situation just like George Michael did, and they knew that these people who don't care anything about your music have all this power over you. So it's sort of like they chose their path and they're dealing with it. When we were talking about a major label, Lee was saying that Geffen seemed to want to give us control. They didn't give us all the money; they gave us all the control. I don't have a lot of sympathy for those stories, and they don't seem really related to what I do. That's like a different world, the George Michaels and the Princes of the world. But I hope that they do what they want and they make good records and they have fun. I don't know if that answered the question...

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