The Comedy of Errors: Sonic Youth - 100% (12 June 1992)

Buy this on Discogs

In prepping this post about 100%, the lead single on Sonic Youth’s Dirty LP, I was surprised and chastened to learn a little bit more about why Henry Rollins hates everything.  On December 19 1991, Rollins and his housemate, Joe Cole were held up outside their house in Venice Beach by armed muggers.  They only had 50 dollars between them, so Rollins was ordered into the house at gunpoint to get more money.  He managed to escape through a backdoor and raise the alarm, but Cole was not so lucky and a mugging escalated to a murder.  The perpetrators have never been caught.  Rollins had to contend not just with grief at the murder of his best friend, but also the trauma of briefly being suspected of the crime himself.
Sonic Youth dedicated two songs on Dirty to Joe Cole.  JC is the private grieving song with Kim Gordon chocking out an incantation that’s factual, unsentimental, brutally cognisant of life’s fragility and transience, but just about holding itself in from screaming about how unfair the tragedy is.  The music reflects this though with guitars wailing like the sound of walls being beaten by fists and tears burning out of eyes that are melting with the torrent of emotion from those left behind.  It’s the grieving process that those who stood at the back of the crematorium and offered their genuine sympathies at the funeral but had moved on to other things by the next day, don’t see and would run a mile from in terrified helplessness if they ever witnessed it.  According to The John Peel wiki, Peel played JC on a few occasions over the summer of 1992. Alas, I was not acting in anything over that summer so I haven’t heard those shows and won’t be blogging about them, but I wouldn’t have been up to the challenge of JC, I don’t think. It goes to necessary, real places in typical Sonic Youth fashion, but I end up one of those who runs away from the raw pain on display there.  Instead, I would be clinging to the other tune dedicated to Cole’s memory, 100%, which in Thurston Moore’s hands comes across as both the sermon at the funeral and the communal hymn sung to remember their fallen friend.

It does Moore a dis-service though to think that although 100% may be a more palatable expression of grief and remembrance, it’s by no means soft in terms of its feelings.  In the background, Lee Ranaldo’s guitar sounds like a dozen churning stomachs, sick with grief and sticking a handkerchief in the mouth to try and stop the dam of grief from bursting over in public the way that JC shows that it will in private.  Lyrically, the track balances tributes to Cole (“I can never forget you/The way you rock the girls/They rule the world and love you/A blast in the underworld”) with direct questions about forgiveness (“Can you forgive the boy/Who shot you in the head?/Or should you get a gun
and/Go and get revenge?)  This last week in the UK has seen notions of forgiveness and not meeting violence with more hate given a considerable amount of analysis.  But as far as Sonic Youth are concerned, in so far as the murder of Joe Cole went, they lean more towards a Henry Rollinsesque worldview (“I’ve been around the world a million times/and all you men are slime/A gun to my head/Goodbye, I am dead/Westwood rockers, it’s time for crime”).

Incitement to violence couched in a tribute to a murdered friend but presented in thunderously catchy style means that 100% stands as one of the more genuinely edgy UK Top 30 hit singles of the 1990s.

Video courtesy of Sonic Youth.
All lyrics are copyright to their authors.