Intersection With My Murray Street
When places to write started to disappear in the early 21st century, I started a blog on the new website Blogger. It was called “Wayne’s Words,” never “Wayne’s World.” Initially it charged $35 a year, but when it was purchased by Google, in 2003, it became free. The founding company, Pyra Labs, was nice enough to send me a “Blogger” hoodie sweatshirt as compensation for my first year payment. There was no promotional element to Blogger, where I published intermittent commentary for the next 12 years, with no readership of which I am aware. This had to be one of the early posts, and it is only now I realize the obvious: that the Sonic Youth album Murray Street was heavily influenced by the incineration of the band’s downtown neighborhood on Sept. 11, 2001. What follow is a mashup of the original Blogger post and a fresh listen to that album. The original blog was published September 18, 2002.
I'm amused each day when I cross Murray Street, a miles-long, largely residential street that wends its way from downtown Flushing north through various small neighborhoods until it ends somewhere in the reaches of Whitestone, borough of Queens, New York. I keep thinking it would be cool if Sonic Youth lived and recorded around my turf. It is really an excellent place for families: Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore’s offspring might even go to school with my kids.
Murray Street closely or distantly parallels Utopia Parkway (northern Queens becomes a kind of triangle, the way that Sonic Youth’s Tribeca neighborhood is the triangle below Canal Street). The conceptual artist, collagist Joseph Cornell, lived on this Queens street, a life and work captured splendidly in Deborah Solomon’s biography Utopia Parkway. The name Utopia Parkway also inspired the alt-rock-pop group Fountains of Wayne (no relation) to record their best album. Utopia Parkway is also home to Utopia Bagels, a short walk from home, which I long asserted had the best bagels in Queens. (Yes, better than Slim’s on Horace Harding Expressway, aka the Long Island Expressway service road.) I’m no longer sure if that’s the case. Utopia Bagels is now available at Citi Field; the business seems a little overstretched, and the bialys are unquestionably smaller and less sturdy than they used to be.
Sonic Youth’s latest album is Murray Street, and is not about Queens, of course, but the street in lower Manhattan, the heart of Sonic Youth country. The band’s recording studio and clubhouse Echo Canyon was at 47 Murray Street in Tribeca, where this album was made. It is, and was, in the immediate vicinity of the World Trade Center – a five minute walk, perhaps – and the very sparse CD booklet says Murray Street was recorded from August 2001 to March 2002, meaning music was being made during the time when the Twin Towers of the WTC were demolished by hijacked passenger jets on September 11, 2001.
“The mood appears to be informed by 9/11 (the attack was their neighborhood),” I wrote then. How could it not be? Why would I take such a passive mode? Possibly because it was not greatly different than other Sonic Youth albums. In retrospect, more temperate, with more acoustic guitars on the first few tracks, but still distinctively Sonic Youth, bringing the noise. Ruefulness, resignation, and anger alternate, enhanced by a frequent tempestuous undertow. The edgy, scratchy scales of “The Empty Page” and the epic minimalism of “Disconnection Notice,” the first two of seven substantial tracks, recall an earlier downtown, the differently dangerous yet rhapsodic Bowery sounds of guitarists Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of Television more than 25 years earlier.
I was working for a trade magazine at Broadway and 9th Street, and I took the commuter express bus from my corner to Manhattan. 770 Broadway was not in the kill zone of Ground Zero, but it was a muted time for many months. If the wind was blowing north from Tribeca, one felt an uncomfortable, unthinkable odor one dare not think too hard about. Routines of daily life reminded one of the cover of Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man,” the epochal photograph of a hopeless death leap from the inferno of the WTC. We got used to the bus entering the Midtown Tunnel being stopped by uniformed soldiers or police officers, walking down the aisle and back, and waving us through. Thoughts of a suicide bomber in the Midtown Tunnel connecting Queens and Manhattan at 34th Street was not an irrational fear.
At the time, I thought SY’s album “a wonderful record.” It is not only recorded and mixed by Jim O’Rourke, the guitar playing Daniel Lanois of his alt-rock generation. It also features O’Rourke as a full member of the group, the first newcomer to be accorded such stature in the 20 years or so that Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley have been sending their musical postcards from the edge. (All songs are credited to the now five members). Double-checking the spelling of guitarist Ranaldo’s last name, I noted he has 112,000 Instagram followers. I have 103 as of April 5, 2025.
I like Murray Street for its seemingly incongruous soothing abrasiveness. The first song, “The Empty Page,” is mostly acoustic guitar; you expect it to ramp up into a fierce black hole, but it never does. It stays calm but edgy, like Lou Reed on Mandrax.
Their songwriting has displayed clarity for years, especially on their 1988 masterpiece Daydream Nation. Whatever harsh or irritable tack the guitars take are inevitably redeemed by the disciplined context in which the sound is placed. Structured jams, within a songwriting sensibility. “Disconnection Notice” is one samosa short of a raga.
The smallness of CD covers made me overlook the meaning of the photo of two little girls playing in a garden under a net. One of them appears to be holding a tambourine. The setting, and the haircuts (can I get away with saying “Mise-en-scène”? I don’t think so), are an homage to a famous political advertisement from 1964. The ad was called “Daisy” and in it is a little girl picking at flower petals, before the screen goes to the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb. It was used to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign to make his Republican opponent, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, look untrustworthy, a warmonger. LBJ won a landslide, with 61 per cent of the popular vote, and won every state except Goldwater’s home Arizona and five states of the old Confederacy, from Louisiana east through South Carolina. The attacks of 9/11 on New York’s downtown had a similar psychic impact. The photos of the One Way arrows beneath the Murray Street street sign are bent, in two directions, a likely result of the blast.
“Rain On Tin” makes full use of the enhanced wall of guitars: It’s got a dense yet jammy vibe that evokes distant memories of similar workouts by San Francisco’s Quicksilver Messenger Service. “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style” lives up to its delirious title, guitars, percussion and whatever sounding like a mix down of slowly-tuned analog shortwave radio signals during a vivid sunspot cycle. It’s a call for resilience, and prayer for peace: “gather round, gather friends, never fear, never again.” Then comes the squall, and a lyric: “Here comes something: you are Lou Reed/Transformer cracked by the backyard stream/Killer tunes, bubblegum disaster...” I am not here to interpret, but to bear witness.
“Karen Revisited“ may or may not be a variation on Sonic Youth’s earlier “Song for Karen“ (Carpenter), while ‘Sympathy for the Strawberry’ may or may not be a statement of support for former New York Mets and Yankees baseball slugger Darryl Strawberry. That was my take in 2002. Now, the Strawberry idea seems way too much of a stretch, and listening to “Karen Revisited” made me look up what the irrepressible danger artist Karen Finley was up to. (She is an Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.)
It may be a reach to say that the Straw Man is metaphorically comparable to Manhattan’s trauma.
Of course, this connection could be stimulated by the fact that I’m listening to this as we pass Shea Stadium [replaced by Citi Field] on the commuter bus from Manhattan to my home in Whitestone. As the disc concludes with the ghostly strings of “Sympathy for the Strawberry," we cross Murray Street, Queens, which means I am just a few blocks from being safe at home.
© 2002, 2026 Wayne Robins. This article is reprinted from Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins writes the Critical Conditions Substack: https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
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