The Stranger: Nobody wants to be the one who starts saying, "It was better in the '90s." But have you noticed '90s nostalgia beginning to emerge? At some point there's bound to be a film set in the '90s with a soundtrack of Pavement and Guided by Voices.

DCB: Right and people will be shown bad history like, "Sonic Youth told the PMRC to ... off on their Goo album!" Which was totally out of the blue at the time. They never mentioned the PMRC during the '80s. It was just like a play for the kids. And so kids'll get that bad history where Sonic Youth were the heroes. And they get a free pass for the Starbucks thing, as you notice on the web. Nobody talks about it or writes about it.

The Stranger: It seems like no one's critical of things like that because the answer is always built into the question—"Commercial radio is dead, MTV is dead, the music industry is dead, so Sonic Youth have to sell records at Starbucks." Like the writer's job is to head off any aesthetic or spiritual objection you could raise in advance.

DCB: It's kind of like Republican talking points, because it's so untrue that Sonic Youth have to do those things. I mean, you don't have to look at their tax statements or know where they live to know that they don't HAVE to do any of that. No one ever thought they were going to be on TV or the radio anyway, so why is it suddenly like a necessity that must be replaced? But nobody wants to make those arguments because you're also working against the market ideology that all these kids have grown up with: that entrepreneurs are the best and anything that gets in the way of business... it really ties in with Republicanism. Of course, just like the Baffler was writing so many years ago. This is a collaboration; this media economy, this entertainment economy is a collaboration with these times. These festivals exist because of a time of easy credit. All of this stuff is connected and nobody wants to say it. Just like maybe people don't want to admit that Obama really isn't going to come down on business the way we want him to.

The Stranger: You can't be remotely critical of Obama right now and expect anyone to even hear you.

DCB: Right, people would say, "Hey, that's not helpful." But I would say in the discussion of music, there's nothing at stake like there is with Obama, so to me it's kind of gluttony. It's closer to gluttony than anything I've experienced. The bigger shows freak me out. It's so hard to fight the asymmetry between the fan and the band. You have to do silly things. I'm not talking about stage diving or crowd surfing... The fans subject themselves to you and everybody seems to enjoy the way it's all divided up. I don't get it. The festivals are so creepy, and yet they're so lucrative that no one can say no to them. But they're just like the '70s, everything we were all supposed to be against: the fan down there and the stars up there. But that's really what everybody really wants, it seems like.


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