The Break-Up

When you take a minute to think of all the things you take for granted every day, you might find it takes more than a single minute to consider all of them. At night, nobody wonders as they're falling asleep whether or not the road they take to work will continue to exist in the morning. Or if the Starbucks that provides them their coffee will still exist. Or whether or not their parents will stop loving each other. Or whether or not the sun will burn out. These things are just assumed to continue existing. Sure as the sun, as sung by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, with utmost certainty.

You might be certain that the members of your favorite bands are best friends, having impossibly productive and stable relationships, stronger than your own parents because they're bonded by their art. One of those bands might be the most influential rock bands of the last thirty years. Two members of that band, who've been married for 27 years, could be considered the King and Queen of alternative music.

In October, Spin reported that Kim Gordon & Thurston Moore announced the break-up of their marriage since 1984. After learning this a week ago I have been emotionally stewing about the potential demise of one my favorite bands that is still performing (one band on a very short list).

My own parents were married a year earlier, though they divorced in 1995, when I was nine years old. When I discovered Sonic Youth as a teenager it was very easy, having around only one parent who was very left-brained, to consider Kim & Thurston artistic parental figures who took up the same space in my subconscious that my real parents did.

My real parents taught me everything they could about life. "Listening to music that isn't cool is stupid," my father would say to me. "Stop listening to your father," my mother would say to me. But when I was in my car or in my room, Sonic Youth taught me everything they could about art. And noise. Lot's of fuckin' noise.

They taught me things my parents never could. They taught me that you didn't have to tune your guitar the same way everyone else did. They taught me that the best art I create will always come from the subconscious, everything floating around in my mind that I don't yet know or understand. They taught me to create my own meaning.

Sometimes they illuminated the things my real parents couldn't properly communicate. Listening to songs like I Love Her All The Time, Tom Violence, Death To Our Friends, Dirty Boots and Rain King helped me to understand that some things are better understood when you're older.