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Kill your idols is a potent phrase.  It is also extremely reasonable and important spiritual and artistic (though not literal) advice. In the 1980s, ’90s, and beyond, in its’ truncated “Kill Yr Idols” form, it also became a powerful pop meme, to be seen on lunchboxes, t-shirts, bathroom walls, record sleeves, and as many etceteras as there as ets in the cet.   I don’t recall “Kill Yr Idols” being a commonly repeated phrase, until it appeared as the title of a Sonic Youth song in 1983.

That Sonic Youth song was about me.

So I take a little credit for the expansion of this meme, a story I shall share imminently.

But first, some words from The Diamond Sutra, in which the Buddha offers advice about the perfection of emptiness to his elder student, Subhuti:

“Subhuti, that mind is everywhere equally. Because it is neither high nor low, it is called the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind. The fruit of the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind is realized through the practice of all wholesome actions in the spirit of nonself, non-person, non-living being, and non-life span. Subhuti, what are called wholesome actions are in fact not wholesome actions. That is why they are called wholesome actions…”

Which is another way of saying Kill Yr Idols.  Because, to paraphrase another line from the Diamond Sutra, 1) the Beatles are, 2) the Beatles are not all that and a bag of chips, and therefore 3) the Beatles are.  But anyway:

In 1982, I was living in a peculiar studio duplex on Thompson Street with my great friend, Kevin Hogan.  Kevin was (and is) a beautiful actor.  He is suitable for all parts calling for a middle-aged man of almost feline handsomeness. I was also writing, avidly and aggressively, about avid and aggressive rock music for a number of national and international music publications.  I had been doing that since I was 16 (in 1982 I was 20).

Robert Christgau, mentor of the author, nemesis of Thurston Moore

One of the publications I wrote for was the Village Voice.  Robert Christgau, who ran the pop/rock section of the paper, was not only a legendary music journalist but also a brilliant, astute, and patient editor who took great time to mentor me. Then, as now, I have nothing but really positive things to say about Christgau.

Simultaneously, I was forming a close relationship with Thurston Moore. I had taken a fierce and early interest in Thurston’s then-new band, Sonic Youth; I thought their feral, foaming, spiky, joyous, raucous, abrupt, grinning, slashing performances, usually in front of a dozen or so people in cellars in the far East Village, were amongst the most visceral and honest manifestation of pure rock’n’roll I had ever seen. I wrote about them every chance I got. Thurston and I were also playing together in (one of the many incarnations of) Even Worse, Jack Rabid’s quasi-legendary and/or pseudo-legendary New York punk rock band. My time in Even Worse (I was in the band from June ’82 to January ’84, Thurston for about ten months or so beginning in June ’82) is an entirely separate yarn, and although it is a wonderful and tragic-comic tale, it would only serve to unnecessarily complicate the story I am trying to tell here, so let’s pretend I never even mentioned it, okay?

I will, however, add that I was hanging out with Thurston a lot: going to shows with him, occasionally hiring him to transcribe interview tapes for me, and visiting him at Rockefeller Center, where he was selling Dove Bars off of a cart.

Anyway, Thurston had some kind of issue with Christgau; to be frank, I don’t quite recall where or how this began, but it led to Thurston being quite agitated that I had a good relationship with Christgau (not that we discussed this a lot; however, I do recall long conversations about a band Thurston and I wanted to start that was to be called Glue, dedicated solely to playing the riff to SSD’s “Glue” over and over for forty minutes).

(This is “Glue” by SS Decontrol; pretty great riff, huh?)

In mid-1983, Sonic Youth recorded and released a song called “Kill Yr Idols,” first issued as a 12-inch single, not too long after their (honestly) incendiary and essential album, Confusion Is Sex.  The first thing I noticed about “Kill Yr Idols” was that it had something you could call a concrete riff; in fact, the riff was such a sharp, chopped, and slashing object that it immediately announced that Sonic Youth’s future was going to be something distinct from its’ past.  The beautiful, hoarse, woozy bursts of bristles and wonks that filled Confusion, sounding like a sharp-nailed ferret attacking a box of Brillo steel wool pads, contained virtually nothing to prepare us for the almost AC/DC-ish old-school riff that inaugurated “Kill Yr Idols.”

The second thing I noticed – in fact, I think it had to be pointed out to me, because I was so swept away by the magnificently rockist riff that had announced the song and the “new” Sonic Youth – was the opening lyric:

I don’t know why
You wanna impress Christgau
Ahhhh Let that shit die
And find out the new goal

And that was unmistakably about me.  And I am goddamn proud of that.

Regardless of Thurston’s somewhat purposeless attack on one of the most supportive, literate, and intelligently provocative music journalists I’ve ever met, 30-plus years later, Kill Yr Idols remains exquisitely sharp advice.  By lovingly investigating the fact that not one of our favorite artists’ achieves perfection, by demolishing the myth of infallibility (even amongst our most sacred cows), we can truly appreciate the native and acquired genius of these artists; for instance, the Beatles are an amalgamation of imperfections, rendered with invention and sweat; no person seeking perfection would have the courage to create something as startling as The White Album, or London Calling, or White Light White Heat, or Pet Sounds, or Pink Flag, or Soused.  These works are all acts of extreme courage, which is to say each of these masterpieces, full of distortion and majesty, are about human and artistic flaws, rendered with energy, passion, and creativity; in fact, the very definition of creativity is seeking perfection by taking imperfect roads.  When you believe in the god-like infallibility of the artists you love, you virtually demand that they deny the human qualities and the potential for exploration (brilliance is often the result of error) that leads to groundbreaking events and “genius.”

Kill Yr Idols.  Or at the very least, recognize that not only is no one infallible, everything in life is suffused with impermanence; and impermanence not only makes all life possible (imagine a river that does not run, a blade of grass that does not grow, a sun that neither rises nor sets), impermanence, which is to say the quality of variation of influence and skill and the willingness to err, makes all great art possible.

“Then the World-Honored One spoke this verse:
Someone who looks for me in form
or seeks me in sound
is on a mistaken path
and cannot see the Tathagata.”

What a beautiful way to end a legendary lifespan.

These days, fewer and fewer bands – and virtually no legacy acts – are willing to say “This is where the story ends.”   Even fewer can end their lifespan with a ringing valediction and validation, something that simultaneously underlines an act’s most distinct gifts yet adds something of true and lasting value to the catalog. 

(I mean, did anyone even care that something calling itself The Who released a new song eight weeks ago?  Did Binky even care?!?)

The Endless River, the fifteenth and final studio album from Pink Floyd, is a classic Pink Floyd album – especially if your idea of Pink Floyd is David Gilmour’s Benadryl slides and cough-syrup glides, and the empty-museum instrumental explorations of Umma Gumma and Meddle – while adding something new and even challenging to the catalog.  The album also asks the question:  what if Floyd had gone straight from 1972 to 2014, quickly stopping in 1976 to pick up some of the hash-lump musical memes that made the post-Syd Floyd so, well, luscious?

The Endless River exists, quite positively, on a number of different levels:  it is, without a doubt, a beautiful monument to Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright, who died 6 years ago; most of the tracks on The Endless River are based around sketches and performances Wright recorded in the early/mid 1990s, around the time of the sessions for The Division Bell.  It is also an affirmation that the best-remembered Floyd – which is to say the shifting, sighing, sliding, soaring, shimmering, spacious sound of Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here — belonged to Gilmour and Wright, who effortlessly evoke that sound here.  Next, the new Floyd album firmly asserts that the wholly progressive and adamantly non-commercial head-band that Floyd became after Syd left but before the mega-sales of Dark Side — that is, the group that produced deeply personal and artful soundtracks for both the neurotic and peaceful mind — was still very much alive a generation later, and could be summoned at will.  Finally but perhaps most significantly, it is a graceful, elegiac monument to Pink Floyd, space rockers, head-rockers, and masters of plaintive and compelling shifting-sands-under-a-pale-moon rock.

With only one song featuring a complete and traditional vocal (that’s the track immediately above, and you’ll see/hear it’s very goddamn good), The Endless River is loaded with canyon-deep/borealis-high instrumentals, flowing seamlessly and gorgeously in and out of each other.  Vibrating and sighing, trembling and lifting, the album occasionally slips into great pronouncements of almost Elgar-like melodicism and adamant late-night FM rhythms; but it mostly lives in the land of slow-shifting sands of mood, tone, and texture.  The Endless River is almost certainly the most FIRM and avid statement from the post-Waters Floyd that Gilmour/Wright/Mason had a RIGHT to have a Floyd without Waters.  This album is beautifully, adamantly, and firmly Pink Floyd.

Gilmour, Mason, and Wright (with help from producers Phil Manzanera and Youth) do this by sitting themselves firmly in the headspace Floyd created in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If you love the Floyd that made Meddle – an album that sounds brilliant shuffled with this one – Umma Gumma, and Atom Heart Mother, you will probably dig this very much.   It’s the same band, clearly.  If you can imagine that band – the Floyd that existed, say, between ’69’s Umma Gumma and ‘72’s Obscured By Clouds – re-emerging forty years later and applying some of wind-swept sonics and gentle slides from Floyd’s later, more commercial work, The Endless River would be the result.

The very best thing Pink Floyd have had to offer in the 45 years since Syd left was the idea of texture. The elegiac, sighing, spacious, looping, and continuous landscape of The Endless River, full of nods to earth and science and even pop, is Pink Floyd, far more than the bitter, snapping polemics of Roger Waters was ever Pink Floyd.

(May I also add that when I used the word “polemics” in the last paragraph, it was just a Hail Mary?  I mean, it looked and sounded and felt like it would be the right word to use there, but to be frank, I wasn’t entirely on solid ground in terms of the definition.  But then I looked it up, and BOOM goes the dynamite! Jon Matlack strikes out the side!  It was the perfect word. )

Roger Waters. The word “polemics” is to him what peanut butter is to chocolate.

1970’s left-hander Jon Matlack. For some reason, he has worked his way into a column about Pink Floyd. The World of Words is a vibrant and surprising land.

The Endless River is a lovely, strong album, distinctive but as wonderfully familiar as a favorite old over-sized sweater found in the back of a drawer.

It reminds us that once upon a time, headphones were worn, and as the early evening of a late fall afternoon wrapped around our suburban bedrooms, we retreated into a land of rich strange highways; and a lifetime later, Pink Floyd are still reminding us that they were, are, and always will be the Kings of that road.