MOORE FUN IN THE NEW WORLD
Thurston and his kool things.
"I’m not much for nostalgia, but at the same time, I find so much pleasure from work, from the past. You know, I loved digging through ’60s and ’70s iconography of rock ’n’ roll and literature and poetry and whatever. I mean, that always keeps me really sort of jazzed.”
It can’t be denied that Thurston Moore—the 66-year-old guitarist whose former band Sonic Youth brought “noise rock” as close to the mainstream as anything with “noise” in the pitch was ever going to get and eventually became something akin to a Grateful Dead for people who hate jam bands—really likes his stuff. An ardent lifelong collector of literature and vinyl (“I certainly never understood or related to anybody my age spending whatever money they got on anything except books and records. Right? Like, why would you spend money on a bag of pot when you can buy Exile on Main Street?”), he talks a good enough game about his stuff (describing his stuff with words like “vibratory” and comparing the rifling through the Poetry Project’s archival material to mudlarking 1,000-year-old artifacts from the shores of the Thames) that you’d almost think his stuff was something else. Something bigger than stuff. Something totemic.
