Slacking in the USSR: The Sonic Youth’s strangest gig
Music historians typify the 1980s by the shining glittery surf of new wave, where synths and chart pop reigned supreme and everything seemed right with the world. But everyone forgets that there were still much darker, edgier, and more political forces at play, with Sonic Youth leading the full force of that alternative battalion.
Of course, songs are a double-edged sword within this—the ultimate capsule of escapism, but also a reckoning towards the state of the world when one needs to hear it most. Thurston Moore and Co lived by that mantra in their careers and musical tenure as a band. But even by their standards, playing a show in the Soviet Union was really pushing that notion to its limit.
The year was 1989, and the band were on the cusp of stratospheric fame when they ventured over to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It was obviously a risky move for all the social and political reasons that we are well familiar with now. Even still, the hostile reception that they received took Moore by surprise.
He recalled in a 2020 interview, “That will always stay with me because it was at a time when very few Western musicians had gone there. Nobody had ever heard of us, let alone heard us. We would play in front of audiences that were basically Russian families who were coming out for a night’s entertainment. We were really out of our element.”
It hardly sounds like the ideal environment to put on a show, as Moore went on to explain, “People just watched us in curiosity and wonder. There was hardly any response. It was pretty crazy. It was just confusion by these Russian families sitting there.” Although it was the furthest possible cry from a musical hotspot, the striking culture of the country still left its imprint on Moore in an indelible way, more than he could ever have comprehended at the time.
“It’s a memory I’ll never forget—not just the gigs, but just the entire experience of being in the Soviet Union as this kind of sort of poor art-rock band”.
Thurston Moore
The society represented a whole different world to the vibrant inner city surge of New York, which, on balance, felt like the cultural hub of society to Moore when he reflected on the state of Russia. However, seeing that first-hand was still vital to his perception of the world at large, as he said: “It was really an experience and education, seeing these real failed aspects of what should have been progressive socialism, but wasn’t progressive. We actually went down and played in Georgia, which was a little hipper. There were actual punk rockers.”
In the end, as much as Western music may be a highly contentious issue in the Russian sphere, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there’s no telling the experiences that it granted bands like Sonic Youth in shaping their future musical psyches and leading them in the alternative music cause. The gig itself may have been humbling, but the memory of performing in the USSR was one they’d never forget.
