Sonic Life

Thurston Moore traces his path from a boy first captivated by rock and roll in the early 1960s to a young man drawn to the defiant punk and no wave scenes of 1970s New York, where he eventually set off to join a band in 1978. In 1981 he helped found Sonic Youth with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo, and over nearly three decades the group recorded and toured without pause, constantly pushing into new territory.

Along the way the story brings in a wide circle of musicians whose paths crossed with Sonic Youth's, among them the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Patti Smith, Television, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Nirvana, Hole, the Beastie Boys and Neil Young, as well as visual artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Gerhard Richter. The book argues that Moore and Sonic Youth reshaped the sound of modern alternative rock and widened what a generation of artists believed was possible within the form.