‘‘The [avant] Goodlife’’ starring the Gordon-Moores! On next week’s show, we dig Nico out of the ground and let her loose at the Cale’s family home! Gonghoy ahoy, till next time!

Kim is in the bathroom, under the sink. She’s somewhat irate today because she can’t find something. Downstairs, in the living room in front of a life-sized mannequin of John Cage, an absolute goliath of a manboy with a scooby doo kitchen-cut sits hunched on a big ersatz-leather divan.
‘‘Thurston, oh Thurston honeyboo, where’d ya put that cylindrically scratched copy of that Nicolas Slonimsky el pee, ‘Piece Enfantine’?’’ she hollers from under the sink.
The Dude looks up, one hand flicks his hair out of eyes in perturbation.
‘‘Dammit,’’ he mutters, surreptitious like. He’s just remembered.
‘‘Slonimsky LP, Slonims… o cherry pie, I know where I left it, Tommy V from that Television band came over for sushi and my haiku reading the other day an’ me and the kid were just ratchin’ up a little conceptualist sonic death, you remember that, don’t ya baby? We just used it for…’’
‘‘THUR-STON… that was a first-frigging-edition pressin’!! Honeyboo, I’ve told you before, you just CANNOT go welding my cds to your guitar for the sake of post-Reichian minimalism! Jeeze, Thurston, that’s just soo wrong.’’

AND CUT!!

Sonic Youth are prehistoric now. But you know that. You don’t fear it. You don’t give a spacemonkey’s udder that they might have ploughed a concatenated artistic furrow for an age, since the Jurassic era when pterodactyls and plesiosaurs took bites out of each other in the steaming tarpits where CGBGs now stands. No, you don’t mind cuz you’ve got seminal diamonds to treasure: ‘‘Sister’’, ‘‘Evol’’, ‘‘Bad Moon Rising’’ and you have sonic utopia in a time-capsule, ‘‘Daydream Nation.’’ It could be 1982 every day, any minute. You have the option to inundate and slake each one of your gaping, desiccated pores with a flood of supra-sounds in an instant. Drenching every twitching tendon and receptor cell in crashing waves and screeching yodanoize, avant psyche-swells and shadowy troughs, SY remain a triumphant thunder from the uteral wall of an insurgent youthdom. Your body has never been touched in this way before or since. It’s a chronicle of creation/obliteration. A sound like the deconstruction of your post-modern life. Sartre and you in a box. Flakes of skin settling on the asphalt as the big apple falls to pieces, atom by atom. You know you’ve got all this at the flick of button. L’histoire en diskette.

At the last, as ’Nurse’ fades out from the cosmic ‘‘Peace Attack’’, you can discern from what you’ve just heard that this was no trite protest drum, but dissenting panto, an art house matinee with a timely allusion to mankind’s quandaries all sonically capsule-wrapped in something called charm. Infiltrating the world order without screaming [too loud]. Talking nicely, respecting it’s elders [and, really, they haven't got too many of those]: it looks like they figured how to get heard. Sonic Youth have always been Neil Young’s far-out, No Wave cousins anyhoo, and ‘Nurse’, without ever, no, not ever suggesting middle-age spread and pot roast, is an expansive study into a pop-culture in effect as a demonstrative exposition of shiny-sequinned sexual vacuity, presidential warpigs, surrealist moderninity and your fake idols, come gently. It glides forth like a breeze whispering in your mind’s eye on Paradise Boulevard, senses spangled with acupulco shirts and fading purple sunsets.

Tropical calm has omnipresent menace, electrical daemons and village-razing monsoons, and just why d’ya think ‘Nurse’ should be any different? Sonic Youth desire to conduct the oceans of sound they extricate from our surrounds as demi-neptunes with guitars as tridents pushing and pulling at the tides, drifts and channels, a reflection of the humming continuum of urban life, banality at the subway loaded with celaxa pills and starched shirts. In the midst of this droning decay, the disintegration of the world every single second, they lose it. It’s now that Kim Gordon rages, hawking something wicked at movie directors and Justin Timberlake’s hand [dig ‘Pattern Recognition’ and the excellent Dirty-esque ‘Mariah Carey + Arthur Doyle Hand Creme’], it’s where the Moore/Ranaldo duo torture instruments like writhing serpents. It’s in this taut second that the Williamsburg commuter throws himself under an oncoming shuttle in sheer, despairing abandon. Frequently however, ‘Nurse’ shimmers like an opalescent galaxy where in the equanimity of space, remote satellites from ‘Murray Street’ beam down broken anthems [‘The Dripping Dream’], and somewhere, right up there, Yo La Tengo cruise in blissful halcyon [the opuses’ lurching, grandiose finale ‘Peace Attack’].

‘Nurse’ is the closest to creating a landmark on parallel with ‘Daydream Nation’ they’ve come since that particular record's nameday in ‘88, and in it’s dense textures it maybe signals the extinction of the antediluvian No Wave idyll; a Robert Zimmerman trip that somehow got mixed up with Joni Mitchell, Black Flag and a conceptualist oddball. It’s Sonic Youth being Sonic Youth, and it’s ART in the way that Rimbaud, Andre Breton, Jim Morrison, Dada and all that screamed in boundless ecstasy intended.