Jordan Stern

Just finished Sonic Life. It is hard to create this review without bias, as Thurston Moore was my main music hero growing up (in the early 1990s), the epitome of cool, the gold standard of iconoclastic creativity. I have been awaiting this book for a long time, especially since Kim Gordon released her memoir “Girl in a Band” about a dozen years ago. In many ways, this book is stronger as a historical document of how the NYC punk scene transformed into post-punk and no-wave from the late 70s into the early 80s, than it is as a traditional memoir. A few raw moments hit me hard, as the turmoil Thurston felt after losing his father resonated with my own experiences. However, I would have enjoyed more self-reflective/cathartic moments, as opposed to as much history. In fact, I think the ideal thing would have been to parse the initial thousands of pages of prose written by Thurston into two books: one a memoir, and one musicological in nature. But now that I think about this, maybe that is impossible. The thing I got from reading this book is that music is most of what is contained in Thurston’s being (again, I find this personally relatable.) The experiences Thurston bad being on the fledgling NYC scene are so much at the core of who he is (or seems to be) that the two cannot be easily disentangled. He only writes a few pages about his split from Kim Gordon, but I kind of understand why. The media already trampled their privacy in the early 2010s on this matter, and Thurston already answered a lot of media criticism back then, so why rehash it now, especially if there isn’t anything new to say? I personally would have enjoyed even in depth more accounts of studio creation, especially Thurston’s solo records and collaborations (such as the awesome Dim Stars record). I can also see why the publisher would want to keep it under 500 pages. At the end of the book, I feel like I understand certain parts of Thurston (the musical omnivore, the record collector, the innovator, the mentor, the perennial punk rocker) better, while deeper aspects of the soul remain hidden, which at the end of the day I think is a fair deal.