Sonic Youth have inevitably attracted a whole bunch of middlebrow theorists, namedroppers and would-be fellow travellers that have failed – or haven’t really been interested enough – to follow the various subcultural threads that the arc of their career has worked to tie together. Who are all of these people who go to sellout Sonic Youth shows and yet never pick up a record on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label or even know any Sonic Youth albums pre-Daydream Nation?

For most contributors to The Empty Page, Sonic Youth may as well be They Might Be Giants. They openly profess ignorance of their music, boast that they’re the weirdest thing in their collection, reveal how they “didn’t get Sonic Youth” or make confessions like: “I actually don’t know that much about Sonic Youth. I love them in theory of course, who doesn’t?” (Scott Mebus). And there’s the rub. Across middlebrow USA they have become shorthand for college lifestyles, vacuous notions of cool, right-on politics, the weakest post-Beat drivel. So we get typical student short stories inspired, basically, by Sonic Youth titles, lamenting the gap between rich and poor, whimsical coming of age garbage and cliched riffing on their “Neil Young influence thrash and trash guitar” (uh?). It’s a mystery why anyone was asked, why anyone would care and why this book even exists. Perhaps i was expecting it to throw some light on these writers affinity to the band and how Sonic Yoith has nfluenced them. Sadly, this a definite miss. ( )