In 1929, Walt Disney began sending some of his animators to drawing classes at the Chouinard Arts Institute, dissatisfied with the lack of realism in their animations. By the end of 1932, Disney had installed Donald Graham, who had been teaching them, as the official instructor for all of the animators at his Hyperion Studio, Graham referring to his class as “the great Disney Art School.” Disney would still maintain a relationship with the Chouinard, sometimes going there to recruit animators when more hands were needed to meet a deadline, and would contribute financially, most notably when it had difficulties after Nelbert Chouinard suffered a stroke in the early 1950s and Disney’s company took over the running of the school. After this, when Disney began to think about his legacy at the end of the 1950s, he expanded on a proposal to move the Chouinard to a new campus into an idea for a multidisciplinary academy, along the lines of the Bauhaus, which continued to be influential long after it was closed down by the Nazis in 1933. When the Chouinard was subsequently merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, in 1962, he gave this ‘great Disney Art School’ a new name, the California Institute of the Arts.

The new campus was originally planned to be an ‘acropolis’ overlooking Hollywood from up in the hills, but Disney wasn’t keen on it paying taxes to the city, so the next plan was to use part of the Golden Oak Ranch, a filming location he owned further north. However, that proved geologically unsuitable so eventually a nearby site was secured, next to a planned housing development to be called Valencia, in what is now the city of Santa Clarita. In the meantime, the Chouinard continued to operate as it had, but an almost entirely new faculty would be assembled for the new institute, known informally as ‘CalArts,’ with an entirely different set of values. Walt Disney died at the end of 1966, before this recruitment process could begin however, so it was left to the Board to fulfil his vision, led by H.R. Haldeman (who became Richard Nixon’s chief of staff a couple of years later and was subsequently sent to prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up).

Disney had believed that overspecialisation led to a decline in creativity and originality, and so CalArts should be a space where experimentation and collaboration were encouraged and where ideas could overlap. To this end, Haldeman recruited Robert Corrigan from the Tisch School of the Arts in New York as president, who fired most of the Chouinard faculty and replaced them with figures from the avant garde, appointing Herbert Blau as dean of the School of Theatre and Dance, Paul Brach of the School of Art, Alexander MacKendrick of the School of Film, Mel Powell of the School of Music, Richard Farson of the School of Design, and Maurice R. Stein as director of Critical Studies. A number of this new staff came out of the Fluxus movement which promoted play and rejected fixed goals, most notably conceptual artist Allan Kaprow, who coined the term happening for an event which resisted traditional or formal disciplines, and sometimes even the idea of art itself. For Kaprow, a truly experimental artist was one who created something as far removed from what was considered art as possible, and by getting this ‘nonart’ accepted as art expanded the possibilities of what art could be. Or one who, by blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life, kept its possibilities permanently open.

When CalArts and its new faculty finally moved from a temporary location into its purpose-built campus in 1971, an example of the change in attitude could be seen in former Chouinard student and recent addition to the staff at the School of Art, John Baldessari. He had been hired based on his reputation as a painter but, as he explained to his new employers, he wanted to use this new position as an opportunity to try something different, and in the summer of 1970, before his first semester, he performed one of his earliest conceptual works, Cremation Project, in which he burned all of his paintings and baked their ashes into cookies which were then presented in a glass urn. Instead of teaching Studio Art he called his class ‘Post Studio,’ in which he might discuss a recent exhibition by an emerging artist, or invite the artist to speak to his students, sometimes in an informal environment away from the school, usually a bar. He would also take his students on outings and would give them oblique assignments like: to invent a game, to find a broken object and mend it, or to secretly follow someone and document everything they did. At the same time, the Feminist Art Program, instigated by Judy Chicago in 1971, avoided the oppressive formality of the campus building altogether, by setting up their Womanhouse project in a vacant domestic home back in Los Angeles. The Post Studio idea was then taken up by Michael Asher, who joined the faculty on Baldessari’s recommendation in 1976. Asher expanded Post Studio to include extended critical discussions of students’ own work, which they would present to the class. These seminars would examine the individual student’s work and their artistic process in great detail, over an extended period of time, and might also involve collective reading, watching films and other activities that helped the students explore the context for what they were producing.

The multidisciplinary ideal, the possibilities of ‘nonart,’ the desire for art to reflect life outside the institution, and the playful nature of Baldessari’s own work, combined with the intensity and depth of discussion of students’ work in the Post Studio class, led to an attitude to making art that would have a wide and lasting influence. Resisting fixed categories and narrow definitions, while simultaneously embracing academic research and intellectual rigour, became the standard of what might now be known as Postconceptual art. If a work of Conceptual art is one where the artist argues that the concept or idea behind it is what makes it art, then Postconceptual art expands this by proposing that the principle applies to any work of art. That a painting, a sculpture, a photograph, should have an intellectual foundation, but at the same time any mundane object or simple gesture might be considered art if it can be justified as such.

Arriving at CalArts the same year as Michael Asher was MFA student Mike Kelley. Born in 1954 and growing up in a working class suburb of Detroit, Kelley would later describe himself as having been one of the ‘TV generation,’ affected by the ‘postmodern condition,’ somewhat alienated from his parents, and even his older siblings, by the changing culture of the time. As a teenager in the late 1960s, he disliked the aspirational optimism of commercial pop music, and embraced more cynical and abrasive sounds. Acts like the Seeds, the Velvet Underground, the Mothers of Invention, and the Silver Apples, then led him to psychedelia, the counterculture, underground comics and poster art. As well as to figures like John Cage, La Monte Young, Karlheinz Stockhausen, musique concrète and the history of avant garde noise-making. At the same time, he discovered pop art and surrealism through visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he would often hang out with his schoolfriends, mainly smoking pot outside it. He grew his hair long and consciously rejected the normative masculinity imposed by his father and some of his teachers, along with its implied militarism, and instead was attracted to the creativity and street theatre of those resisting involvement in the war in Vietnam.

By this time Detroit had begun a process of deindustrialisation and economic decline. Increasing unemployment and a lack of investment were leading to social issues, as higher taxpayers moved out of the city to suburbia and beyond. Racial discrimination and hostile policing generated unrest in densely populated African American neighbourhoods, at one point provoking a street insurgency that continued over five days in the summer of 1967. Kelley discovered the civil rights movement and radical politics via local band the MC5, whose manager, John Sinclair, had cofounded the Detroit Artists Workshop in 1964, and then the anti-racist White Panther Party in the wake of the unrest of 1967. At the same time Kelly developed an interest in performance, from the political theatrics of groups like the White Panthers and the Yippies, to the stagecraft of some of the musical acts he would see playing live, most notably the confrontational provocations of another of Sinclair’s charges, the Stooges, and the cosmic theatricality of Sun Ra and his Arkestra.

Locally, the centre of much of this countercultural activity was the city of Ann Arbor, to the west of Detroit, so from high school Kelley enrolled in the art department of the University of Michigan there in 1972. On his first day he met a fellow student calling herself Niagara, who stood out as much for her disregard of student conventions like following assignments or showing up for class, as her appearance, which Kelley compared to that of a B movie star. Niagara introduced Kelley to Cary Loren, who wasn’t a student but would document everything around him in photographs, super 8 film and on a portable cassette recorder, making films and zines from the results, as well as art from objects he found in the street. Another student he quickly became friends with was Jim Shaw, Kelley appreciating Shaw’s eccentric, verging on outrageous, style of dress and his deliberately ugly or disturbing paintings, often using leftover paint that other students discarded. Although, like Shaw, Kelley initially considered himself a painter, he became increasingly interested in multimedia, performance and installation art. In what was intended to be a sculpture class, Jacqueline Rice, who mainly taught ceramics, allowed him to research the history of live art on his own instead.

Shaw shared Kelley’s interest in performance and experimental music, in their second year the two staged a performance of their own in the university auditorium, titled The Futurist Ballet, an attempt to recreate Fortunato Depero’s Balli Plastici from 1918, based only on a single black and white photograph, and featuring themselves in improvised costumes rather than the wooden puppets of the original. That same year, 1973, Shaw, Kelley, and several others, moved into a large Victorian house which they called ‘God’s Oasis,’ as it had a large sign nailed to the front porch which read ‘God’s Oasis Drive In Church.’ Kelley occupying the basement, which was large enough for him to also use as a studio.

Cary Loren had been creating flyers and posters advertising fake parties and events, and would film what happened when people showed up, Jim Shaw had been doing something similar, and the few people who attended The Futurist Ballet had walked out almost immediately. Hanging out together at a party, Loren, Niagara, Kelley and Shaw came up with the idea that a better way to get people to come to their events would be to start a band and promote that instead. Loren played the guitar, Niagara was a natural frontperson, Shaw got himself a cheap guitar and modified it in the manner that emulated the experimental music technique of prepared piano. Kelley was nominally the drummer, but used a rhythm box from an organ instead, so he could concentrate on making noises and sound effects from tape recorders, electronics and household items. His basement in God’s Oasis became their rehearsal space, and Shaw named the band ‘Destroy All Monsters’ after a Japanese B movie. Their free-form noise didn’t go down very well with audiences however, and they only played a handful of gigs in their two year existence. For Kelley, this confirmed his belief that the local scene was becoming increasingly conservative, and he and Shaw both moved to California in 1976 to study at CalArts. Remaining in Michigan, Destroy All Monsters continued without them, Niagara recruited new members, and they gradually built a following as a more conventional rock band.

Kelley had initially been drawn to CalArts through his interest in experimental music and went there hoping to study under Morton Subotnik, the pioneering electronic music composer. Unfortunately, his lack of musical training meant he wasn’t allowed to take any music courses, and he found the school wasn’t as interdisciplinary as he or Walt Disney might have hoped. Outside of the art school he formed another band, The Poetics, with fellow students John Miller and Tony Oursler, where he mostly played the drums, channelling his more experimental theatrical energies into developing performance work as an artist.

Much of the work being produced at CalArts at that time was presented in the dry, formal manner of conceptual art, often combining photographs and text in a way that might be seen to illustrate or imply some kind of narrative. Their acceptance as art relied on their adherence to the conventions and formats of the institution. Kelley engaged with this to an extent, but also wanted to subvert it, and like some of the artists in the Feminist Art Program before him, he looked to the techniques and subjects of craftmaking and making objects by hand. But where those artists attempted to reevaluate overlooked skills and traditions, Kelley was more interested in the ambiguity their existing status gave them. He produced subtly dysfunctional variations of practical items, and developed increasingly complex texts to accompany them, which he then worked up into scripted performances with the objects as props. The post studio discourse becoming a way of generating the discussion, stories and histories that formed the basis of these scripts. He was also collecting objects from the local swap meets he discovered in LA, outdoor flea markets which for Kelley were a treasure trove, and he delighted in the juxtapositions of random items laid out next to each other.

In 1977, art critic Douglas Crimp curated an exhibition at Artists Space in New York, titled Pictures. This, and his accompanying essay of the same name, led to a wider group of artists using appropriation, as well as images referencing mass media and consumerism, to become known as the ‘Pictures Generation.’ Many of the artists that would come to be included under that label were Kelley’s friends and peers, and when Douglas Eklund curated a retrospective of those artists decades later, he identified CalArts and John Baldessari as a foundational influence. But while he liked and admired many of the Pictures Generation artists, Kelley was not closely associated with them. To him, their rejection of the handmade and expressionistic, and engagement with the commercial and mechanised, only served to reify classical design and to reinforce existing assumptions about good taste and aesthetic judgement. In contrast, his images were hand drawn in the style of comics, zines and xeroxed flyers, his performances were theatrical and absurd, and they dealt with pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and the esoteric. Instead of obviously critiquing the culture industry and consumerist desire, his work evoked the psychology of social obligation, repression and sublimation.

In the mid 1980s Kelley began to focus on a specific type of craft item, hand made fabric toys for young children, which he collected from swap meets and thrift stores. While some of his peers were presenting consumer products as readymades, or attempting to evade commodification by referencing gift economies, Kelley was more interested in the unspoken emotional labour and indebtedness between parent and child he felt these toys represented, and which a gift economy might not acknowledge. He installed works where home made dolls and stuffed animals were, at first, piled together in haphazard assemblages, and then arranged in more considered layouts: in posed situations that could be read as human activities, or as taxonomic configurations of specimens. Aware that viewers would project narratives and human characteristics onto them, he deliberately selected toys that were soiled, worn, or broken, and placed them on dirty rugs or blankets, to draw attention to their materiality and their history as objects, and to make the viewer feel uncomfortable or self-conscious. However, Kelley was surprised to discover that, instead of the social class, domestic labour and emotional indebtedness he had in mind, audiences instead saw the stuffed animals as specifically representing children, and their damaged and soiled nature as indicating trauma or abuse. Unable to shake this interpretation he ultimately leant into it, his interest in pseudoscience and the uncanny led him to research repressed memory and False Memory Syndrome, and he would produce pseudo-autobiographical works implying sinister or traumatic events in his own past.

Around the time that CalArts had moved into its new campus, Kim Gordon had set her sights on studying there, having recently graduated from high school in Los Angeles. Unfortunately she couldn’t afford the fees, so instead she took a year out and then enrolled at Santa Monica College, near her high school, in 1972. Gordon had always wanted to be a visual artist but had also studied dance, and when she heard from a friend that York University in Toronto had a multidisciplinary programme that might allow her to do both, and had relatively low fees, she transferred there after her second year. At York, in addition to immersing herself in making art, Gordon went to contemporary and experimental music concerts programmed by the music department, and as an art project, started a band with some fellow students called ‘Below the Belt,’ which she later described as a “crazy noise band.” Canadian weather was not so enjoyable however, and after a year she returned to LA and to the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design).

At Otis, she studied under John Knight who directed her towards a more considered, conceptual approach, where she drew upon the language of lifestyle magazines and advertising, as well as architecture, interiors and design. In 1978, not long before she graduated, Knight recommended she go along to CalArts to see Dan Graham give a guest lecture. Mike Kelley was also at this talk, where Graham mainly spoke about music, about Malcolm McLaren, the origins of punk and the differences between how it emerged in the UK and the US, and when it was time for audience questions at the end Kelley got into an intense debate with him about the role of Detroit, and the Stooges in particular. Gordon got to know both of them, she was impressed by the way Graham applied the intellectual rigour of conceptual art to music and popular culture, and identified a similar impulse when she later saw some of Kelley’s performances. In 1980, Gordon and Kelley drove up to New York together, where Dan Graham had arranged for them to stay at artist Cindy Sherman’s apartment while she was away. Gordon had decided to move there permanently after spending a couple of months in the city the year before, and having been persuaded by Graham that New York was where everything was happening, Kelley had just come along for the road trip however, and immediately returned to California.

Gordon took some time to find her feet in New York but received encouragement from Graham, who suggested she write something for the art journal Real Life. In the resulting essay, ‘Trash Drugs and Male Bonding,’ Gordon describes a performance of Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, observing the behaviour of the musicians with the detachment of a sociologist, where the music combines structures and forms created out of pure technique, but through “tensions, timings and tones” begins to resemble rock music. Chatham, she concludes, is “a serious young composer who makes dirty music.” Graham also directed her towards making music herself, he wanted a band to accompany a performance he was giving in Boston, and put her together with Stanton Miranda, who had been in Rhys Chatham’s band Arsenal, and Christine Hahn, who had been playing with Glenn Branca in the Static. They initially called themselves ‘Introjection,’ before changing the name to ‘CKM.’

Chatham and Branca had been early collaborators, then rivals after going their separate ways, and were both exploring experimental and minimalist music using electric guitars. When the Pictures Generation of artists came to be historicised, they would both be included as musical representatives, and the artist Robert Longo, who had been included in the original Pictures exhibition, had taken part in the performance of Guitar Trio that Kim Gordon had written about, and would also collaborate with Branca. Like those artists, who might use an image to represent the idea of an image, Chatham and Branca could be seen to be presenting the idea of rock music rather than performing as a straightforward rock band. Branca was also good friends with Dan Graham, who had designed the sleeve for the Static’s debut single and had given Branca’s previous band, Theoretical Girls, their first gig as the support act to one of his performances. When the Static split up, Branca began taking a similar approach to Chatham, that of a composer or musical director who recruited individual musicians to perform his work with him. One such recruit, another art school graduate, was Lee Ranaldo, who also took part in a performance of Chatham’s Guitar Trio at one point, having been inspired himself by a performance of it that had included Branca, not long after arriving in the city in 1979. He and his friend David Linton had started a band while both were studying at the State University of New York at Binghamton, which they’d called the ‘Fluks,’ and then the ‘Flucts,’ but it had faltered after they moved to New York City. Linton became Chatham’s drummer, and then Ranaldo joined Branca’s ensemble, touring with him in the US and Europe from mid 1980 into 1981.

After the Static split, Christine Hahn moved to Germany and CKM came to an end. Meanwhile, Stanton Miranda had been jamming with Thurston Moore, guitarist in the Coachmen, who had played gigs with both the Static and the Fluks, and in an earlier incarnation under the name ‘Room Tone’ had briefly included John Miller, Mike Kelley’s bandmate in the Poetics. Miranda thought Gordon might like Moore, so the two went along to see the Coachmen play what turned out to be their final gig, and before long Moore and Gordon became romantically involved. After the Coachmen split, Moore began making music with another musician who would go on to work with Glenn Branca, Anne DeMarinis. Stanton Miranda was also meant to be involved, but had started her own project with future film composer Carter Burwell, so Moore invited Gordon to take her place and brought in former Coachmen drummer Dave Keay. They played under a few different band names and struggled to find an identity, being quite freeform and experimental until Keay left and was replaced by Richard Edson, who helped instil some structure to the music. This new line up then settled on the name ‘Sonic Youth’ and soon found themselves on the same bill as Glenn Branca’s ensemble, which included Lee Ranaldo, who by this time Gordon and Moore had befriended, having encountered him at many of the same gigs and events as both performers and members of the audience.

Kim Gordon was still making art as well as music, in January 1981 her conceptual art project Design Office had an exhibition in New York at non-profit gallery White Columns, and then in April had been included in a group show there, alongside Mike Kelley. Gallery director Josh Baer was also keen to support experimental music, and invited Moore to help curate an event at the gallery highlighting the parallels between the music and art scenes, which soon expanded to become a music festival taking place over the course of nine evenings in June 1981, with an accompanying exhibition curated by Gordon during the day. They named it ‘Noise Fest’ after Moore read an article where Robert Boykin claimed his club Hurrah was closing because audiences were put off by the increasingly abrasive music bands were playing, which he dismissed as just ‘noise.’ Sonic Youth played on an evening headlined by Rhys Chatham, and in addition to playing with Glenn Branca headlining another night, Lee Ranaldo also played with his old friend David Linton under the name ‘Avoidance Behavior.’

Before Noise Fest took place, both DeMarinis and Edson had let it be known they would be leaving Sonic Youth immediately afterwards, so Gordon and Moore took advantage of Ranaldo’s appearance there to ask him if he would consider joining them. The three quickly gelled and played a couple of informal shows without a drummer, but persuaded Richard Edson to come back in time to play their first ‘proper’ gig at Music for Millions, another New York music festival, in September 1981. By that point Glenn Branca’s album The Ascension, which Ranaldo had played on, was scheduled to be released on 99 Records, a small label based in a New York record store run by Ed Bahlman, and Branca had suggested he consider signing Sonic Youth. Bahlman refused, so when Josh Baer suggested to Branca that they start a label of their own, which Baer would fund, he agreed and proposed they call the label ‘Neutral’ and make their first release a Sonic Youth record.

In the early 1980s, Dan Graham continued his interest in punk and other rebellious forms of rock music, and would record gigs he went to on a portable cassette recorder, or occasionally on video. Much of this recording and research would be developed into a video essay film, Rock My Religion, which he continued to work on and re-edit even after it was first screened in 1983, and one of the bands he recorded was Sonic Youth, performing ‘Shaking Hell,’ which Kim Gordon had written with Graham’s project in mind. The video parallels the ‘Shakers,’ a religious movement founded in Manchester at the beginning of the British industrial revolution, with the performers and audiences at contemporary live music shows, where both defy individualist alienation, seeking transcendence in rituals of collective movement. Also in 1983, Gordon showed a video of her own, Making the Nature Scene, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, as part of their ‘Art and Architecture’ exhibition series, with an accompanying essay of the same title in the catalogue. Both video and essay discuss the role of nightclubs like Danceteria as meeting points for music and art scenes, particularly for video art, which doesn’t sit easily in a gallery environment and might find an audience here in the ‘real world.’ But while this lends the club cultural power and credibility, it’s ultimately at the expense of the art, which doesn’t get taken seriously in the “playground environment” of the video lounge. The Making the Nature Scene video was edited by Tony Oursler, another of Mike Kelley’s Poetics bandmates, who Gordon had first met back in California, and in 1986 Sonic Youth released an album named after Oursler’s colourful and surreal video EVOL, in which Kelley had performed the lead role. At the end of 1986 Sonic Youth continued their association with Kelley, taking part in his performance Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel at Artists Space in New York.

The previous year, Gordon had published an essay in Artforum, titled ‘American Prayers,’ where she discussed the work of Oursler, Kelley, and Raymond Pettibon. Much like Sonic Youth at that time, those three artists were all exploring the underside of 1960s hippy idealism, in the face of a glossy manufactured nostalgia for that period in the 1980s. For Gordon, all three had something of a pop sensibility but, in contrast to classic pop art’s embrace of technology and the mechanical, they employed a messy expressiveness and adolescent exaggeration, exposing the social control and manipulation behind popular culture and “America’s religion of optimism.” Gordon and Moore had met Raymond Pettibon at a house party in LA where Black Flag were playing, near the end of 1984, they were already familiar with his work as he had designed most of the artwork for SST, the label set up by Greg Ginn, the band’s founder and Pettibon’s brother. SST also distributed Pettibon’s self-published zines, which Thurston Moore, an avid zine collector, was a big fan of. Moore published his own zine, Killer, which helped spread the word about the band and connect with the wider independent music community, particularly the hardcore scene where SST loomed large, and it would be SST that released EVOL and its follow up, Sister, in the US. Kelley too had discovered Pettibon’s work through his posters, flyers, record sleeves and zines, and as the two became friends and Kelley’s career took off in the mid 1980s, Pettibon also began to be shown in galleries and gain a profile in the art world. Although mainly known for his drawings, Pettibon also wrote his own film scripts, and in 1988 and 89 he made a series of videos from some of them, one of which, The Whole World is Watching - Weatherman '69, featured Moore and Gordon as members of the Weather Underground, and another, Sir Drone, starred Mike Kelley alongside Mike Watt of the Minutemen, as aspiring musicians trying to start a punk band. When Sonic Youth made their major label debut in 1990, they used Pettibon’s artwork for the cover and named the album Goo after one of the characters in Sir Drone.

Part of the reason for using Pettibon’s artwork for Goo had been to signal that, despite signing to a major label, Sonic Youth were still part of the underground community they had emerged from, since Pettibon was so intrinsically linked to SST and the hardcore scene. They also championed other bands by wearing their t shirts, by taking them on tour as support acts, and talking them up in interviews or to anyone they worked with. One such band was Nirvana, who were then taken on by Sonic Youth’s management, Gold Mountain, and subsequently signed to the same label, DGC, a subsidiary of Geffen, which had just been bought by MCA. When Nirvana came to record their first album for DGC, they insisted on using Butch Vig as their producer, having recorded some early versions of the songs with him on the recommendation of Jonathan Poneman, co-founder of their previous label, Sub Pop. Sonic Youth were already aware of Vig, they had briefly met a couple of years earlier and Moore’s record collection contained several hardcore singles Vig had produced in his home studio in Wisconsin, so when Gary Gersh of Gold Mountain suggested him as a producer for the follow up to Goo it seemed like a good idea.

Once Nirvana’s Nevermind was recorded and mixed, Vig met up with Sonic Youth in New York, they admired the work he’d just done with Nirvana when they heard it, but more importantly found him easy to get along with. On the way to meet for dinner, Moore had bumped into Tom Verlaine, who recommended he check out a nearby recording studio, the Magic Shop, so after the meal they went along and booked it on the spot. When Vig went back home, they sent him some tapes of what they’d been working on, recorded in their rehearsal space. They wrote much of their material through jamming ideas and gradually developing them into songs, so these tapes were extended works in progress that, at first, Vig found difficult to make sense of. Meanwhile Nevermind was released that September and was an immediate sensation, raising expectations at DGC for what Vig and Sonic Youth might achieve with this next album.

Recording sessions began at the Magic Shop in March 1992. By now Vig had received more rehearsal room tapes from which structured songs began to emerge and he pushed the band to refine them further. He insisted they be much more precise with their guitar tunings than they usually were, and more disciplined in the recording process, running through multiple takes of each track until they were exactly right. Vig himself was patient and methodical, bringing out a richer and more clearly defined sound than they’d had until this point, but which didn’t so much smooth out the band’s rough edges as bring them into focus with depth and clarity. Lyrically too, there was a directness that wasn’t always present on previous albums. Many of Kim Gordon’s lyrics addressed sexism and misogyny, notably ‘Swimsuit Issue,’ which was inspired by events behind the scenes at the record label as they were preparing to record. In September 1991, DGC’s General Manager Marko Babineau had left the company after being sued by his female assistant for sexual harassment, with the LA Times reporting that Geffen Records had known about many other sexual harassment allegations against him dating back to 1984. The assistant reportedly received $500,000 from Geffen in an out-of-court settlement, and Babineau immediately started his own company which was soon hired by Geffen to do promotion work. Some of Moore’s lyrics were also informed by recent events, ‘Chapel Hill,’ referenced the February 1991 murder of Bob Sheldon, the owner of Internationalist Books, a progressive bookshop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Friends at the time believed he was killed as the result of his activism opposing the Gulf War, but the murder was never solved. Moore registered his own distaste for the Gulf War by referring to president George HW Bush as a “war pig fuck” in the lyrics to ‘Youth Against Fascism,’ a song which also expressed support for Anita Hill, whose testimony regarding sexual harassment by judge Clarence Thomas didn’t prevent him from becoming appointed to the US Supreme Court in October 1991.

There was another murder closer to home, which affected all of the band members and overshadowed the recording sessions. They had met Joe Cole through his association with SST, he was close friends with Henry Rollins and had roadied for Black Flag, and Gordon and Moore would hang out with him when they spent time in California. Cole had appeared in all of Raymond Pettibon’s videos from 1988/89 including Sir Drone, and had featured in the video for ‘My Friend Goo’ alongside Kim Gordon, filmed in Pettibon’s home. He was also good friends with Dave Markey, the filmmaker responsible for 1991: The Year Punk Broke, the tour film shot the previous summer, which Cole had assisted in the making of as well as appearing in it, on the tour alongside his girlfriend, Michelle Leon of Babes in Toyland, and working as a roadie for Hole. In December 1991 he and Rollins were robbed at gunpoint as they returned home one evening, and after Rollins was sent into the house to get more money, Cole was shot dead outside. Rollins managed to escape and raise the alarm but, again, the murder was never solved. 1991: The Year Punk Broke was subsequently dedicated to Cole’s memory, and his loss inspired both Thurston Moore’s lyrics for ‘100%’ and Kim Gordon’s for ‘JC.’

 They recorded so many tracks that the album was extended to double vinyl, and there was some tension after ‘Genetic,’ one of the two songs Lee Ranaldo contributed, was left off the album, ultimately appearing as the B side to ‘100%’ when it was released as the lead single. Drummer Steve Shelley also had some concerns about the way Andy Wallace, who mixed the album as he had with Nevermind, used samples to boost the drum sounds in a couple of places.

Before the band went into the studio, they had approached Mike Kelley about doing something for the album sleeve, and he sent them a copy of the first issue of XXIst Century, a New York based journal founded by Gini Alhadeff and published by Rizzoli at the end of 1991. In the journal, an interview with Kelley by curator Ralph Rugoff is illustrated with individual headshot portrait photographs, six of which are of stuffed animals, all appearing a little the worse for wear, and one is of Kelley himself aged 17, while the magazine’s cover features an additional stuffed animal portrait, a dazed looking monkey with an eye missing. Collectively, the eight portraits form a work titled Ah… Youth!, and the article is headed ‘Dirty Toys,’ where Kelley and Rugoff discuss the ‘dirtiness’ of the toys as representing dysfunctionality, repression and the fear of death, the inevitability of wear and tear contradicting the suggestion that life could be controlled and perfected through corporate consumption, and Kelley’s resistance to the idea that the value of culture could be defined in financial terms.

From this article, the album gained its title, Dirty, and the eight portraits that made up Ah… Youth! were incorporated into the cover art with Kevin Reagan, Geffen’s art director, handling the design and layout, as he had with Goo. The front cover featured a single portrait of a smiling orange creature, possibly an ant, looking off to the side a little nervously, while the rear and inner layouts varied by format, with some or all of the portraits making an appearance. Also included in the design were individual black and white photos of the four band members: Steve Shelley, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, taken by Richard Kern, a longtime associate of the band (the sleeve for EVOL had featured a still from his film Submit to Me). The photoshoot was styled by Daisy von Furth, who would cofound clothing company X-Girl with Kim Gordon a couple of years later, and with make-up by future photographer Mary Rozzi, then still a student at Parsons School of Design.

After the Poetics, Mike Kelley had been in a band with Jack Skelley and Bob Flanagan called Idiot Bliss, whose rule was that they didn’t write songs in advance but made them up on the spot, and which Flanagan would introduce by saying something like “we wrote this last year” or “you probably all know this one.” Flanagan was a poet and performance artist, he and his wife Sheree Rose engaged in BDSM, something Flanagan also incorporated into his performances, a few months after Dirty was released he would appear in a notorious Nine Inch Nails video being subjected to a torture device. Kelley provided images for some of Flanagan’s books and they occasionally collaborated artistically, and now that the album was to be called Dirty, he provided Sonic Youth with an additional image for it, a photograph titled Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood, where Flanagan and Rose nakedly cavort with some stuffed animals, Flanagan smeared with pigment, which could be perceived as blood or faeces since the photo is not in colour but sepia toned to reflect its title. DGC loved the stuffed animals but were not so keen on the image of Bob Flanagan, so it only appeared on a limited edition version of the CD, under the CD tray which was itself tinted orange to make the photo less visible.

The stuffed animals were also popular with the band’s audience, and they sold similar toys at gigs and through their fanclub, bought from local thrift stores as they toured and each with a button badge pinned to it reading “hug me I’m dirty.” A year after the album was released, an essay by Kim Gordon was published in the catalogue for a Mike Kelley exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York, where she suggests that becoming cover stars lent the stuffed animals a certain charisma or star quality. They, like rock stars, represent an idea of rebellion presented in a safe environment, where the viewer projects their own fantasy, and where, like rock stars, they can be ‘dirty’ but still be unthreatening. Rock music, for Gordon, is “all about repression.” In sleeve notes for a deluxe edition of the album released in 2002, Thurston Moore also relates Kelley’s work to the spirit of rock music, but he identifies it in Kelley’s capacity to rescue these “once-loved playthings” and give them new life, reflecting that the album’s title, Dirty, was inspired by Kelley and “these creatures of love, memory, loss and sentient rock and roll.”