Having really missed out on them at the time, I’ve posted a number of Sonic Youth tracks on this blog over the years. I’ve now reached a point where I can say with some degree of certainty that my preference is more towards those tracks where Kim Gordon is losing her shit with someone, only to break off from her fury to lapse into some kind of incantory trance, before snapping out of it and ending on a final, unarguable note of vituperation. She had done it to such memorable effect on the joyride from Hell that was Pacific Coast Highway, 5 years before recording The Destroyed Room, a Youth Against Fascism b-side, in which she repeated the magic.
In most of my listens to The Destroyed Room, I found myself thinking that it was an excellent evocation of the pain and desperation felt by those trying to get through to a loved one suffering from mental health problems. From her early exhortations about the subject’s inability to communicate: You’re not telling what you feel/ You just say you can’t deal/ You’re just lying in an orange peel/ You’re just saying it ain’t real, Kim sounds worn out, frustrated and at the end of her patience and empathy. The situation has clearly been going on a while given that the subject’s own family members have also started to crack up in the face of the subject’s problems. Your mom told you/ And I’ll tell you/ You better straighten up/ You’re such a messy son. Perhaps the frustration comes because he won’t get help? Certainly the music reflects a sense of both angry impatience and lurching moods. This is crystallised when Kim goes into her incantation of teenage memories and simpler pleasures/times backed by the band moving the track into Cop Shoot Cop style-spookiness. Are they brother and sister or school sweethearts heading towards crisis point?
Being that this is a Sonic Youth track, it is somewhat inevitable that the opening line of the incantation, You’re hot, is followed by a response which emphasises that she isn’t talking about his looks. You’re baked suggests an overheated mind and psyche. Once the list of items both musical and edible is rattled off like a witch over a cauldron, Kim is back on the attack again and in an astonishing upping of the ante, she begins make it all about her, If you make me cry/ I’ll poke your eye!/ I’ll tear you limb from limb...If what you say is true/ Then I say we’re through. It’s a shocking turnaround and yet seemingly so typical of Sonic Youth. You’re in pain? Well fuck you, mine’s worse because you’re causing it.
And then the theories get blown out of the water by the story that the track was actually inspired by the shockingly, untidy state of J Masics’s bedroom, I wonder how Kim ever saw that? It does at least explain the references to orange peel, which could be drug related or could just be because Masics is a messy bastard. The title comes from a photo by Jeff Wall and they used both the photo and the title for a compilation album of b-sides and rarities released in 2006. Curiously, The Destroyed Room didn’t feature on that album and neither did an acoustic version of Purr, which the band recorded for Mark Goodier’s Evening Session. Peel played it in this programme and it was in my initial list of choices but Thurston Moore’s upbeat sunshine love song didn’t hold me as spellbound as his wife’s fire and brimstone takedown of male slovenliness. If she’d ever seen my mate, Teudor’s bedroom during 1994/95, she’d have probably shot him.
Video courtesy of Sonic Youth
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
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