[The Soup Nazi]

I think a bit of context is necessary here. At the turn of the decade and the early '90s the band had embraced the vibe of Mudhoney and Nirvana and filtered it through its own glorious idiosincrasy, which of course produced Dirty, but the so-called "new mainstream" unwittingly unleashed by Nevermind's success was, what, at best 5% interesting and 95% execrable and excretable. Sonic Youth reacted to this cesspool's expansion by aiming for a kind of against the grain "art rock":

When I see MTV and its Stone Temple Pilots mania, I wanna say, "Fuck rock & roll. Rock & roll is dead! Art rules!" —Thurston to Rolling Stone, 1994

So, crunchy fuzzy straightforward stuff, out. Beginning the album with an all-acoustic song (!), in. Memorable conventional hooks, out — for the most part. Fractured non-verse-chorus-verse structures, in — for the most part. And, if I'm not mistaken, a policy of "first take best take" was adopted for at least a portion of the recordings. Does it ALL succeed? No, but this is what I'm getting at: Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star is the ultimate transitional Sonic Youth album, the critical first step (followed by less tentative, but in my opinion not fully realized either, moves with Washing Machine and the SYR EPs) in order to eventually reach superlative quality status again with A Thousand Leaves and the LPs from the Jim O'Rourke years, before taking another couple of brilliant (but not as dramatic) detours with Rather Ripped and The Eternal. All in all, a most certainly rewarding journey to follow, and despite a few subpar songs here and there, a journey from which I wouldn't remove a single release.