Books – Maria Teresa Soldani

Author: Maria Teresa Soldani
Title: Made in USA. Sonic Youth's work between indie and pop, video and cinema
Publisher: Mimesis Editions
Pages: 152
Price: 16.00 euros

Let's imagine going back to 1991 for half an hour, turning on the TV and fishing for Mike Bongiorno while, more enthusiastic than a child who has just entered a five-a-side football pitch, he announces live the world premiere of Michael Jackson's new video, to be precise “Black Or White” directed by John Landis. Well, even just this strange anecdote would be enough to grasp the specific weight of the video clip in an immaculate era like the early 90s, as a prestige not yet hostage to social media, selfies, photos, videos, in short, we understand each other. In that crucial era for the music industry, Sonic Youth obviously behaved like loose cannons, or if you prefer like incurable mavericks, displaying a series of videos that are difficult to frame in a single scope, both for the blissfully crazy, therefore unpredictable style, and both for the even crazier desire not to disappoint even in this nascent aspect “the cultural and artistic context of the 80s and 90s in the United States”, which incidentally is also the title of first chapter of “Made in USA. The work of Sonic Youth. Between indie and pop, video and cinema”, the new book by Maria Teresa Soldani, published by Mimesis Edizioni.

Research fellow at the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna and professor of “Methodology of visual culture, multimedia languages, theory and method of mass media”, Maria Teresa has also been a valuable and attentive editor of OndaRock for years. In this new publication of hers, Soldani is a threat as never before, because she lights the fateful lantern on the role of Sonic Youth in the audiovisual field, or rather: she quantifies the evocative power of their image in the aesthetics of a country that was preparing, in the years immediately following the collapse of the Wall, to practically control half the world, with all the annexes and connected even in the so-called alternative circles. It is a study, with its thematic in-depth analysis, which on paper is anything but easy to use, given the extravagant quantity of videos linked to the New York noise-rock band.
However, to delve carefully into the Sonic Youth network, Maria Teresa separates out reiterations to passionately craft an assimilable, possibly streamlined narrative, net of necessity, without ever affecting the time line, especially because the group did not, after all, have great receptions from part of the US general media, and it therefore becomes very useful to draw a coherent overall picture in terms of timing to properly analyze the evolution in the field. One of the many objectives achieved by “Made in USA”, not surprisingly, is precisely that of enunciating the caliber of Sonic Youth's videos in that supersonic process of media expansion that involved the macrocosm of the art-rock/grunge/underground/punk scene /and so on and so forth American. Not to mention the band's unprecedented contribution to the careers of directors still unknown at that time such as, one name above all, Spike Jonze.

There are three macro-sections, carefully divided into small chapters that explain in detail the aforementioned artistic context and the “body”, the latter in turn analyzed both for its role at the center of video-media conventions and for the “ruin” effect staged in independent cinema. Apparently “complex” topics, for an approach which, however concise and fluid, cannot fail to take into account its intrinsically academic nature. Yet, Soldani manages to slip gracefully out of the classroom to define both Sonic Youth's music, also through the words of the well-known Californian writer and music critic Greil Marcus (“a scary Big Bang”), and “the collective cultural subconscious ” authentically linked to the imagery conveyed by the four musicians in front of the cameras, often also turning their gaze to the centrality of the audiovisual apparatuses involved or, to name one, to the art of cut-ups which acted, in fact, as the axis of rotation for the entire sonic camera.

But let's get to the heart of the matter. And let's examine one of the many video clips placed under the magnifying glass, such as that of “Death Valley '69”, in which a frame from the film “Submit To Me” by Richard Kern with Lung Leg appears. The effect is alienating, between racing, thriller escapes in crime scenes and scenarios Lynchiansclouds, unspecified cataclysms, punk guerrillas and cascading guitars. Then there is the more “emblazoned” video of “Teen Age Riot”, which the author explains as “hybridized with the diary formula rather than with the non-fiction one”, shortly afterwards also exploiting the words of the time released by Lee Ranaldo to clarify the concept upstream, which involved, among many things, the reuse of footage that had never been used. And again the equally powerful images of Tamara Davis for “Kool Thing”, interconnected in a witty way to the eccentricity of New York fashion of the very early 90s.

We were talking, therefore, about light and the underground. Well, Maria Teresa Soldani guides the reader to discover the visual mine of the noise-rock band par excellence, where filth is lifeblood for the eyes and tightrope walking is culture of the soul. We thus focus on the superimposed planes and the simulated reality of a debutant Jonze or Kevin Smith which anticipate the saturation and nuanced polychromy of Nick Egan, who directed the video clips of memorable songs from the sonic sample such as “Youth Against The Fascism” and “Sugar Kane”, with the first “shot in an abandoned site in Los Angeles” to refer to the “concept of propaganda in the history of the twentieth century through the visual technique of collage, characteristic of the historical avant-garde and taken up by the punk subculture”, according to what Maria Teresa writes. And we fly high down the lanes of memory when the “teen drama” of “Kids” reappears, written for the occasion by a young Korine and directed by Larry Clark.
These are the last fireworks before the attempted “mainstream” marriage in vogue towards the end of the century, which however inexorably ended up clashing with the in opposition physiological nature of the group led by Moore, who however still managed the miracle of framing (and clearing the still skeptical critical undergrowth) the depressive imagery agitated at the time by Nirvana and almost the entire Seattle scene.

There is also no lack of fundamental subtleties to link to the audiovisual aesthetics depicted in the video clips or through third-party references. Like the scene in Richard Linklater's “subUrbia”, in which two Jeff/Sooze lovers “let themselves go to the liberation of their bodies” after listening to “Candle”. The same goes for the quotations, dutiful but not obvious, of cult films such as “Generation of Sonic Youth's aesthetics, conceptual work and collaborative processes.” It is the best gloss for mapping the parallel universes of the “sonic” imagination. A set of worlds that Maria Teresa Soldani embraces in the pages of a book that will animate the hearts (and eyes) of fans (and not only) of the most inspired and milestone noise-rock group ever.