Sonic Youth, Joe

Consider Spike Koopa.

Go ahead. You knew the review was going to start this way already, didn't you? It was obvious. There was no other way to start. So you've had time to prepare for this moment. Go on and pull the trigger. Consider Spike Koopa. The character portrayed by one-time Sonic Youth drummer Richard Edson in the CLASSIC 1993 cinematic masterpiece Super Mario Bros., and not... well shit, I was about to say not the video game character, but I forgot that "Spike" is a character completely made up for the film. As opposed to Iggy, his cousin in the movie, who at least borrowed the name from an actual video game character, Iggy Koopa, who is one of the Koopa Kids in the Super Mario video game franchise (and not, as Iggy is depicted in the film, a cousin, nor is he depicted in the video games of looking like Fisher Stevens). The thing about the movie is that you gotta play it fast and loose with the mythology. If you get bogged down with comparing movie to games, you're gonna get frustrated. The CLASSIC 1993 film was never meant to directly translate everything you loved about the NES or SNES games. It's its own separate thing, meant to elicit joy in completely different ways.

Anyways, consider Spike Koopa now in the context of the movie.

There's a bit in the movie when Spike and Iggy are meant to be punished by being de-evolved into goombas, but something happens with the machine, and instead the process reverses and the Koopa cousins are made to be smarter than they were (or "more evolved," I guess). And Spike and Iggy are elated at their newfound brain power, and they soon find themselves using critical thinking to discover that... uhhh, whoops, their cousin King Koopa is, um, sort of evil? They almost immediately team up with the Mario brothers. They are enlightened. They work together with our heroes and play an integral part in taking down Koopa and his evil reign of terror on the steampunk Mushroom Kingdom. (They also, in a deleted scene, perform a rap song at the Boom Boom Bar about how much they hate their cousin... ahhh, what could have been!)

Shit, I have to mention Sonic Youth at some point. Their drummer was, at least for a brief time, Spike Koopa! On their debut self-titled EP. I think what I'm trying to say here is that there is a throughline between the movie—and the idea of an enlightened Spike Koopa specifically—and the music. Something about Sonic Youth EP feeling liking enlightenment too. You can be suspicious about whether it's actually worthy of enlightened minds analyzing it (Spike's show-off-y math in the movie is faulty, remember), but nevertheless, there is a depth here that is totally worth plumbing, if your mind is up for the task.

And I guess I'm saying that if you don't feel the need to at least try and appreciate this little EP for what it is, then you're a goomba????

Alright, so what do we enlightened non-goombas make of this thing? At only five songs, there's not much breadth (only depth). "The Burning Spear" feels like it's trying to be artsy in a purposefully challenging way, with the discordant guitars and frankly baffling drumming decisions (Spike, wtf?). "I Dreamed a Dream" is kinda slow or sluggish, but Kim Gordon makes everything about 20 times cooler every time she shows up on anything (have you listened to her albums in the 2020s, where she's doing her Kim Gordon thing over trap beats? she is by far the coolest septuagenarian on earth). "She Is Not Alone" sees Spike Koopa doing something interesting (the rest of this EP from here on out adequately atones for the percussion sins of "The Burning Spear"), and Thurston Moore doing his best Lou Reed. "I Don't Want to Push It" proves the title wrong—they should want to push it. The tempo, I mean. "The Good and the Bad" has a shimmering breakdown at the two-minute mark that lasts for the majority of the song, before coming back around. It's an instrumental, but still feels like it's telling a story. I liked it. I liked the final minute of the song (and the EP) the best.

I liked it the best because it was the only time throughout the entirety of this album that I felt the Sonic Youth yet to come was poking through. It was a guidepost point to what would eventually be. What the fuck is No Wave, anyway? Basically, the late '70s saw artists attempting "anti-art," which was another way of saying that the art was atonal, aggressive, and experimental. The genius of Sonic Youth—and take this shit with a grain of salt, I only know like 10% of the story so far—was that they started in No Wave and managed to bend the scene backward so that the inaccessible became accessible again. Barely accessible sometimes, but arguable always baseline accessible. Like if you ever listen to their best and most famous song, "Teen Age Riot," you'll notice a hefty hook and memorable verse/chorus structures, but also a like two-minute intro of bullshit, which adds to the song, and the art (or anti-art, as it were), and doesn't really detract. It simply connects the No Wave scene to the post-No Wave scene, as constructed by Sonic Youth.

So in Sonic Youth EP, we have a precursor to all that. Add this album to the pile of RC albums that simply give a little taste of what was to come, the albums that sound like a band trying to figure it out (enhanced by our hindsight that these bands did indeed eventually figure it out). blink-182's Cheshire Cat comes to mind. Ducks Ltd.'s Get Bleak as well. I think eventually we'll look at Olivia Rodrigo's SOUR that way, and Snail Mail's Valentine. All those albums ranged from pretty okay to really good, but all of them don't give a sense of the heights that the artists could or would achieve. Sonic Youth is the same way here. Except for that final minute of "The Good and the Bad." Something about it feels like a radio signal from the future, like it could have been ripped right out of Daydream Nation, which doesn't arrive until six and a half years later.

Alright, that's enough of all that. I'm interested but only to an extent. This is an okay taste of what's to come but the album feels slight in that way too. I am happy that the band started and this led them on the path to where they'd end up, but I also just wish they'd get somewhere better soon. Enough dicking around! Write some generational jams already!

I'm happy that Spike Koopa is here, though. That's my main take away, because my brain has so thoroughly been changed by the CLASSIC 1993 cinematic masterpiece Super Mario Bros. Not every piece of art is going to change your brain that way. Not every album that comes across your desk is going to send you either up or down the evolutionary chain in the steampunk version of the Mushroom Kingdom. It's nice to view an album such as this as a vehicle for one of our generation's finest drummers-turned-actors, it's nice to view it as a harbinger of sounds to come, it's nice to view it as a quick little taste of a band who would evolve from inessential to very much essential.

It's nice sometimes to just type about some other bullshit too. Did you know that there actually two other Spikes in the Super Mario universe? The first is a little koopa guy who throws spiked balls at our plumber heroes. I guess I remember him? Although he doesn't appear in Super Mario World, the SNES game that I am most familiar with. He's in Super Mario Bros. 3. I don't doubt that the creators of the CLASSIC 1993 movie just took the name because it sounded distinct, the most like a B-level baddie henchman type. The other Spike I forgot about. There is a minor character named Foreman Spike in the 1985 game Wrecking Crew, a game in which Mario is scrambling around on a construction site, and Spike is his boss or the villain or something? I've never played that game, so I'm not sure. The reason I forgot about this Spike was because he is a character in........ oh god, I can't do it! I can't do it! He's *deep breath* a character in that INFERIOR, dogshit, cash-grab of an empty, soulless children's movie, Super Mario Bros. Movie [2023]. I fucking despise that movie, and I despise Sebastian Maniscaclo, who voices Spike in the movie. A loser voicing a loser in a loser film. Sebastian Maniscaclo could NEVER play drums in a massively influential noise-alt-rock band! Never!

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5