What did Sonic Youth play at their final show?
As Sonic Youth trotted out on stage for their appearance at the SWU Festival in Brazil, almost nobody knew that it would be the band’s final concert. However, the one person who was sure that it would be the end was bassist Kim Gordon, who had started the band with her then-partner Thurston Moore a full three decades prior. In 2011, Gordon and Moore officially announced their separation, leading many to believe that the band would break up right then and there. But they didn’t: there were still some shows left for Sonic Youth to play.
If the band could gather themselves and get back out on stage while Gordon and Moore were figuring out their personal situation, there was no reason to believe that Sonic Youth would need to break up. They had become one of the most legendary and durable bands in the history of alternative rock, pioneers with a full legacy and a history of reinventing themselves multiple times over. The idea that Sonic Youth could just drop everything was unfathomable for most of their history. But 2011 was the breaking point.
The entirety of their final tour dates were excruciating for Gordon, who found herself inadvertently ostracised among the band and crew members who had so lovingly embraced her throughout her time in Sonic Youth. As she explained in her memoir Girl in a Band, the final show at the SWU Festival was an especially gruelling experience.
“I could barely hold it together during the first song, ‘Brave Men Run’. At one point, my voice fell like it was scraping against its own bottom, and then the bottom fell out,” Gordon wrote. “Tonight Thurston and I didn’t look at each other once, and when the song was done, I turned my shoulders to the audience so no one in the audience could see my face.”
The performance kicked off with ‘Brave Men Run (In My Family)’, swiftly followed by ‘Death Valley ’69’, two tracks from the group’s 1985 LP Bad Moon Rising. Even though it wasn’t explicitly meant to be a farewell show, Sonic Youth did pull from their large catalogue for the concert, giving a loose summary of their 30-year career together.
‘Sacred Trickster’ and ‘Calming the Snake’, the next two songs in the set, were both pulled from the band’s final studio album, 2009’s The Eternal. Lee Ranaldo then reached back to ‘Mote’ from 1990’s Goo before Sonic Youth dropped into ‘Cross The Breeze’ from their iconic 1988 album Daydream Nation. The loud volumes and chromatic tones were somehow both cathartic and depressing for Gordon.
“Extreme noise and dissonance can be an incredibly cleansing thing. Usually, when we play live, I worry whether or not my amplifier is too loud or distracting, or if the other members of the band are in a bad mood for some reason,” Gordon added. “But that week, I couldn’t have cared less how loud I was or whether I accidentally upstaged Thurston. I did what I wanted, and it was freeing and painful.”
‘Schizophrenia’ from 1987’s Sister came next, followed by ‘Drunken Butterfly’ from 1992’s Dirty. 1994’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star got its representation through ‘Starfield Road’, while the stand-alone 1985 single ‘Flower’ was placed as the penultimate song of the main set. A final pull from Dirty, ‘Sugar Kane’ closed out the main set before the band returned to play their Daydream Nation classic ‘Teen Age Riot’. It would be the final song Sonic Youth performed together.
The entire set is available on YouTube, but Gordon says that she’s not interested in revisiting it. “Someone told me the entire Sao Paulo concert is online, but I’ve never seen it, and I don’t want to,” she said. “Throughout that last show, I remember wondering what the audience was picking up on or thinking about this raw, weird pornography of strain and distance. What they saw and what I saw were probably two different things.”
Check out the final Sonic Youth concert below.
Sonic Youth setlist – November 14th, 2011 at the SWU Festival, Paulínia, Brazil
- ‘Brave Men Run (In My Family)’
- ‘Death Valley ’69’
- ‘Sacred Trickster’
- ‘Calming the Snake’
- ‘Mote’
- ‘Cross The Breeze’
- ‘Schizophrenia’
- ‘Drunken Butterfly’
- ‘Starfield Road’
- ‘Flower’
- ‘Sugar Kane’
Encore
- ‘Teen Age Riot’
