I’M NOT AFRAID TO SAY I’M SCARED!
In 1981, out from clumps of decomposing post-war dream-matter shot the then 23-year-old Thurston Moore’s shaky and desperate admission; the inceptive utterance of New York’s Sonic Youth on The Burning Spear. One feels that their fear was necessarily intransitive. A contextual monster could be dilute and ubiquitous; the election of Ronald Reagan and the subsequent acceleration of neoliberal responsibilisation, a global recession and stubborn unemployment, unending foreign intervention since 1945. A personal monster could be unknowable. But rather than too overwhelming to designate, perhaps an object of fear is extraneous to the context and structure of the admission itself. The assertion that Sonic Youth are, indeed, not afraid to tell you how they feel, leaves us with scant evidence of actual, present, fear. All we learn is that they are not scared to talk—shout—about it, on a public stage, if necessary. And perhaps if taken as both an unprovoked response to the anaesthetising pop-sugar of 1970s mainstream music and an announcement of take-off and travel speed into a future slowly becoming bereft of progressive concepts of sociality, it leaves us with enough to grasp part of the energy of the band in its infancy and the sentiment of the American underground in the early 80s.
If there were an object of fear, it could be the new impositions of the machine. Moore’s adolescent howl fights for surface over a clanging, whirring, juddering locomotive whose propulsion has gone unassisted for the first two minutes of the song. The venomous gurgle of a ferro-snake (power drill through a wah pedal) screams to life just before Moore’s vocals, with its own seizures inconsiderate of timing, gnawing through the rest of the track like an unmanned plasma cutter through sheet metal. The buzzsaw of modern war tech ‘efficiency’? The conspicuous vocalisations of early computers? (1981 later saw IBM rolling out the very first PC). The battlefield of The Burning Spear is treacherous, rusted, acrid. The existential reality is anarchic, crime-ridden, desperate, and most importantly, LOUD. This two-minute manifesto could more than convey the social energies of a band who shied away from being overtly political for most of their career. The inner tributaries of Sonic Youth feed a poorly-dammed universe of corrosive defiance-sludge.
Twenty-seven years later, Matty Healy of The 1975 made his own admission of fear at the beginning of the song, I Like America & America Likes Me: ‘I’m scared of dying.’ The fundamental fear is not screamed but whimpered in the gooey falsetto that defined the male pop voice of the early 21st century. The entrance of our new machine is this time dozy and cosy; a flurry of blinks and a squeaky yawn, again, just before the vocals enter. But this time it comes with all the uncanny terror that only hypermodern AI can summon. The entire introductory passage of the song is a garden of toothless soldiers slowly shuddering to life sprout by sprout.