Rough Trade Books of the Year 2023 (UK)

Rank: #1 (See full list here).

https://www.youtube.com/embed/l7xA6sJondc?

A study of a life lived in an environment of wild music and endless wonder, Sonic Life is the long-awaited memoir of iconic American musician and Sonic Youthfrontman, Thurston Moore. A music-obsessed retrospective, beginning with his childhood epiphany of rock ’n’ roll in the early 1960s into an infatuation with the subversive world of 1970s punk and no wave blasting forth from New York City – where he eventually runs off to join a band in 1978. By 1981 Moore would form the legendary and notorious experimental rock group Sonic Youth, who proceeded to record and tour relentlessly for almost 30 years, always progressing, always exploring.

Along the way we meet a constellation of artists and musicians who colluded and collided with Sonic Youth including Velvet Underground, Stooges, Patti Smith, Television, Sex Pistols, Clash, Nirvana, Hole, Beastie Boys, Neil Young and a cavalcade of other musical visionaries, as well as figures from the art world – Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Gerhard Richter.

Simply put, Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth changed the sound of modern alternative rock music and opened the minds of a generation of artists to new possibilities within the form. This is essential reading.