Sonic Youth's 'The Sprawl'

November 21, 2023

Note: this was originally a discord message.

The Spawl and Books and Lyrics (incohrenert)

First IMPRESSION

Kim Gordon’s vocals slap? yeah ok but. i’d lean more towards: the track highlights her andro vocals’ quirks (totally not because i was baited in the first two seconds)*
I thought it would end around 4:30, boy

• however my attention span isn’t long enough to fully concentrate on the guitar which left me with no choice but to leave it alone and let it
  • thsi is a great idea and tbh you should never try to odissect things like this unless you are snom

LYRICS

The Chorus is just store more and more more repeated like five times and this is fucking sick

..tagline for a series of television ads for New York City department store Bloomingdale’s all through the 1980s.
This line talks directly to people who are influenced by media to keep on engaging in consumerism.
— Genius

ok now consider the ‘consumerism is killing us’ interview from kim some years back and the logical conclusion is this song is about consumerism bad but to me this doesn’t make sense because: (because im cooking bullshit)

1. genius is full of fucking morons
2. when you read verses 1 and (to a much smaller extent) 2: they clash!! we do not like conflicts!! How do we make sense of this??

LYRICS (i repeat this heading for dramatic effect with no other purpsoe) \\ 1

verse 1: "[google it you fuck]"
apparently kim gordon borrows from books a lot and this verse an extreme (ly good) example of that because it’s literally straight from one. Why does this matter? (it doesn’t)

• it’s about some reporter who went to nicaragua to report (this isn’t important)
• but sike she’s actually a hoe (whore (hoe)) because of unfortunate circumstances (we’ll come back to this)

TITLe \\ 2

The Sprawl -> i tihnk it’s fair to assume this refers to the northeast megapolis considering the NY and the below:

Kim claims to have gotten the title off of a William Gibson novel entitled Mona Lisa Overdrive

this is apparently a part of a trilogy called the sprawl trilogy (primary source so you better trust this is real)

idk anymore \\ 3

if you are suicidal enough to read the autobiography** which i didn’t because i literally do not care, this mf just gives it to us when she mentions Fiskadoro as an inspo for the song.

In chapter 27 of her memoir, Gordon wrote that she had read one of Denis Johnson’s books titled Fiskadoro, a book that she described as “a haze-filled dream world of a novel about the survivors of nuclear fallout attempting to rebuild their lives and society.”

source: this rando

• uhhhh it’s set 60 years after the fallout but it’s still a post apo book i think

anyway the important part is this:

In my head, Fiskadoro mingled with old 1960s movie themes of young women growing up in small towns, wanting to leave their hometowns behind and be somewhere, anywhere, and someone, anyone, else. Maybe they’d glimpsed a highway billboard that advertised clothes, a car, a golden future, a possibility. Maybe, thanks to the machine of consumerism, they felt they were missing out on something they hadn’t even known existed.

it all comes together

it comes close to together only if you snort cocaine before you start reading this

<—cocaine break—>
this is where i cook fr fr

.3. you canNOT tell me ‘that big sign down the road’ (verse 2) isn’t evolved from this idea of a ‘highway billboard’
.2. Kim also wrote parts of the lyrics based on an interview with a sex worker from ny’s lower east side, which happens to be part of The Sprawl
..1. This also aligns perfectly with, and explains verse 1’s ‘are you for sale?’. Also do you remember the plot in The Stars at Noon? Furthermore it even checks out with ‘young women’ in 3.

• this is a triple whammy that i’m most satisfied about and prompted me to write this whole thing

what the FUCK are you saying

I think the dissonance between the verse and chorus that i mentioned earlier can be explained with an alternative interpretation that may not be obvious from the song alone but is definitely hinted at in girl in a band.
A young girl in poverty (google shotgun house) dreamt of experiencing the wider world, but is living disoriented and unstimulated while selling herself. (The story goes from verse 2 to 1)
While all of this was happening, she was surrounded by consumerism from start till end, be it from her days as a girl, (big machines, big signs) or as a failed adult (are you for sale?, i’ve gone native)
Chasing what consumerism has always pointed to has failed her, since there is no such thing (chorus; how it loops)

Feet mmm i love feet

* i’m writing the billboard part and while reading girl in a band i noticed there’re these two whole paragraphs about androgyny so like damn i hit the nail on the head with this one unlike everything below i should have stopped typing after first impressions

** the litterbox link expires in 12 hours so libgen it yourself if you ever come back to this hallucinatoric mess of a words

In hindsight i should have linked books 1 2 3 to verse 1, title, and verse 2 by naming the headings as so for clarity but fuck it we ball