Sonic Youth
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
There was no official radio sponsorship of the event, but Q101 was on the scene with a remote broadcast, cheerleading the ideals of Lollapalooza and alternative rock. The station’s presence was somewhat ironic, though, since it never plays two of the concert’s mainstage acts–Cypress Hill and the Jesus Lizard–and gives only limited play to other participants like Sonic Youth, Beck, Pavement, and Sinead O’Connor (who subsequently left the tour). Only Hole receives the station’s full endorsement. Those who suggest that acts like Sonic Youth, Pavement, and Beck don’t warrant regular airplay because they’ve long passed their creative peak should be forced to explain why disposable pap like Bush, Filter, Live, and Alanis Morissette are today’s Q101 staples.
With more of an emphasis on form than substance, today’s “alternative rock” is a blanket genre. In the 70s everyone tried to sound like Van Halen, in the 80s it was U2, and now it’s Nirvana. In most cases, the influences were and continue to be cosmetic.
The dramatic highlight of the set was the lengthy closer, a new tune called “Diamond Sea.” The song opened with a thick weave of melodic wah-wah guitar lines, and Moore’s singing introduced the quartet’s most hooky tune yet. Following a pair of verses, bassist Kim Gordon and drummer Steve Shelley locked into a trance-out rhythmic pattern over which Moore and Ranaldo unleashed a mesmerizing wash of undulating sounds. Demonstrating the potential beauty of noise, their guitars chimed, rang, and screamed, crawling slowly from a glimmering whisper to a raging crush of feedback that organically ebbed back into the tune’s initial melody. “Washing Machine,” a new, even more oblique tune sung by Gordon, offered a similar range of extremes.
