Bassist Kim Gordon’s response: Starbucks is “less evil than Universal.” Still, it’s no surprise that the responses to the news of this Sonic Youth/Starbucks release mostly ranged from confusion to anger, at least within the instant-alarm-bells world of the Internet music media. Yet as an underground-leaning, art-loving, experimental act working for a mega-corporation, they’ve held that status since they moved to the major label Geffen in 1990, or at least since Geffen became part of the massive Universal Music Group in 1995. Starbucks as a music label has been associated mostly with Baby Boomers like Paul McCartney, James Taylor, Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell. Your friend also unfortunately seems to have something against Lee Ranaldo, as none of these songs feature him on lead vocals. Your friend includes the songs you may have heard before as bait, holds off on the strangest songs until you’ve been sucked in, and avoids their most experimental side, for the sake of cohesion and immediacy. It’s more like a mix CD that your Sonic Youth-loving friend might make to lure you in. But it doesn’t try at the futile task of completism. Though it does end with a new, pleasantly vague track called “Slow Revolution” (perhaps a means of keeping the diehard fans interested), the CD plays out like an introduction to Sonic Youth. And one song from their debut LP Confusion Is Sex. But there are also glimpses of the band’s more recent rock albums, a track each from Murray Street and 2004’s Sonic Nurse. There are songs in the second half of the compilation that are just as iconic, just as “hit”-like for followers of the band: “Teenage Riot”, “Expressway to Yr Skull”. It takes until track seven to reach the ‘00s, track eight to reach the ‘80s, the decade where the band began. The fifth track is another one from Goo the sixth, the band’s cover of the Carpenters’ “Superstar”, released in 1994. Hits Are for Squares begins squarely in this era of Sonic Youth. These are iconic songs, songs that cemented the notion of Sonic Youth as the cooler, older siblings of Nirvana and their contemporaries. The same goes for 1990’s “Kool Thing”, the fourth track here. Were “Bull in the Heather”, off 1994’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, and “100%”, the first single off Dirty, official MTV “buzz clips”? If not, they might as well have been. As I remember, the video for the third track, “Sugar Kane”, off 1992’s Dirty, showed up on MTV only occasionally, late at night, but the first two got a fair share of airplay. Hits Are for Squares starts off with a series of undeniable “hits,” if having a hit means getting a video on MTV during the ‘90s “alternative rock” era. Since this is more or less a “hits” album, are the Starbucks-visiting music-buyers the squares? Is this a purposely “square” album cover, a contrast to the cool-ness of the rest of their catalogue? The title, though, seems a potential jab at the target audience: Hits Are for Squares. It looks like a Starbucks advertisement, though it could just as well be one for another commodity: a suit, a cell phone, an iPod, New York City, or about any other lifestyle product, pictured or not. But it doesn’t look like a Sonic Youth cover, even with the city’s presence. It’s a photo taken by a friend of the band, photographer Stefano Giovaninni, whose photos were used for the inner sleeve of the band’s 2002 album Murray Street. The city glimmers outside the window beside him. His coffee and cell phone sit silently on the table. A young man in a suit sits in a Starbucks store listening to music through white earbuds. The photo on the cover looks more Starbucks than Sonic Youth.
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