I wish RC would design, or engineer – however pop is made – a soda that is a commentary on Coke's world business practices. The taste would allow the drinker to see crate after crate of Diet Coke sitting off a sandy, sun-yellowed tarmac, waiting for deployment in Iraq. As in the world of soda, the feuding houses of music at times do result in the occasional death. The same is thankfully not so with off-rock bulwarks Sonic Youth, who've tried to pick more than their share of fights on the playground of pop. Or, more fairly, they've attempted through various songs and projects to understand and critique the temporal myriad pop iconoclasts. So rather than fight, they point and jeer. The latest is a fascination that both Kim Gordon and Erase Errata shared, while touring together in 2002, on the calculated collapse of Mariah Carey. So fascinated were the two groups that they decided to put out a split seven-inch on the subject of this captivation. Over the many chords and cymbal crashes, Gordon's voice retells of Carey's woes in the past several years: public breakdowns, box office poison and label trouble, all through Gordon's sneering, patronizing vocals. Just like when Sonic Youth recorded an album dedicated to Madonna, Gordon's concern with these women is not what they do in the pop world, rather it is how they are perceived by the listening community, namely, impressionable female consumer youth. Her point made, she even steps back from the jabs to give Carey some advice, performer to performer, and it could be for all of us tired from television scandal: Take a bubble bath, date an emo boy, wear underwear. Sonic Youth, the mothering cola.
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