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Thurston Moore Talks Black Metal and Who He'd Like To Jam With

12/24/2014
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(Radio.com) Thurston Moore, at 56, is hardly in the twilight of his career. After the indefinite hiatus of his legacy alt rock band Sonic Youth in 2011, it seemed his career could go either way.

But speaking to him now reveals as much confidence and curiosity with the world as at any other point you may have encountered him in his career. Having recently relocated to London, the experimental provocateur talks about the experimental improv music scene of London, his thoughts on the surveillance state, having a hard time learning the guitar part to 'This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both of Us," his new album The Best Day and the influence of anarchist literature.

Radio.com: I recently saw you perform with Ryan Sawyer. And given all the collaborations you do, from Ryan to Yoko Ono, my question for you is: Who would you be afraid of jumping on stage with?

Thurston: Oh god. Most people I'm afraid of jumping on stage with are people who play in a really locked-in technical style. Bands that I admire, a band like Devo or a band like Blondie, both bands who I've seen recently and are really friendly but are locked into this thing. There's no way you could just jump on stage and play that. I was asked recently to jump on stage and play 'This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both of Us" with Sparks, basically just Ron and Russel Mael. It was a real challenge for me. I had to figure out how to play the guitar part to that song with this really unorthodox tuning and way of playing that I have. It's not like I'm some sort of guitar maestro who can just plug in and start playing on these songs. It's a little bit of a fright for me to jump on with a band that's locked down with their compositions. I'm more at the ready to play something totally improvised, like with Yoko Ono or someone like Ryan [Sawyer]. And Ryan is great. He's been filling in for Steve Shelley. Steve wasn't feeling so well, so Ryan came down to South America and played drums with us. And he learned the songs on this album [The Best Day] very quickly.

Radio.com: I hesitate to ask this as you've had to talk about it so much. But in regard to what you said about black metal making you 'pussy" does that imply music should harden us against the world in some way?

Thurston: I don't invest any meaning in what I might have said about black metal. To me, it was a genre of music that was all about eradication. In a way it was about not really having any sort of defined state. A lot of it was behind a mask of corpse paint and smoke. By saying the word 'pussies" I just thought that was really cool, what a cool thing to be. I'm so anti machismo. I think a lot of machismo that goes on in black metal is false in a way. I think it has less to do with the more typical aspects of heavy metal, which are more macho. I think black metal is denuded. It's like it almost doesn't have gender. To me, I'd rather be a pussy than be a macho man. I was siding with it as opposed to berating it. I think it's kind of the culture we come out of anyway. You see Kurt Cobain talk about it when he was in Nirvana. He really hated that sh*t. When Kurt Cobain would do an interview with the Advocate Magazine where he says that he wishes he was gay, I thought that was the coolest thing.

Read the rest of the interview here.

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Copyright Radio.com/CBS Local - Excerpted here with permission.

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