She puts a sign out: out of order.
A lot of people have annual 9/11 rituals. My own is the song cycle Sonic Youth released in June of 2002, shortly after completion of recording they began in Manhattan’s TriBeCa in the month before the neighboring towers fell. The Murray St. album always feels so right for this part of the summer in this city. Haze, grind, the ineffable psychic stomachache. Tetchy, bewildered.
I don’t want to keep reliving the actual day of 9/11; I was in town and experienced it in real time. It was serious trauma, the way early Covid was serious trauma. But I still reflect back on the months following, the year following, and Murray St. is so evocative of that period, associatively and specifically.
I remember a power outage on a packed train with no a/c in August 2002, stalled there for an hour in the sweatiest grimiest nastiest days of summer, listening to Murray St. on my Discman. I remember their Central Park SummerStage show, also that August: how it felt reassuring, anchoring, like a beacon in the dark: we’re still here, you’re still here, your city’s still here. Live music has the power to heal and unify.
And Central Park has a special energy. I recently watched the video made of Diana Ross’s 1983 Great Lawn concert, rescheduled in great haste after lightning and heavy rain the night before had shut down the performance. When the audience gathered again under clearer skies, they seemed wonderfully recharged from the storm’s catharsis. The vibe at the Sonic Youth gig was more solemn, but collectively it felt very needed.
As an album though, Murray St. is a burrowing into the self, a protective netting similar to the cover image, where Coco Gordon Moore and friend appear to pick fruit in the thicket of a patch. To that end, Kim Gordon’s closing song “Sympathy for the Strawberry” is especially resonant in its vulnerability — the strawberry being a blood-red collection of exposed ovaries, susceptible to attacks from pestilence and disease — Kim’s lyrics in 2002 already hinting at the pain of a domestic discord that would break up the band in 2011.
Musically, the album reaches for the retreat of pop melody, of soft singing, discrete song structures that fall into the void when they run out of spoons or build and blossom on the better days of those minutes. The abbreviation in the title, Murray St. rather than Murray Street, is slightly anomic, dashed off like a task on a executive-dysfunctional list. Like David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. from the year before, the shortening can read as a perfunctory order of local business, a drift into dissociation, or in a more morbid scenario a full stop.
Lee Ranaldo’s “Karen Revisited,” allusive to a previous “Karen” lyric about the intrusive internal and external voices that can hold women’s personhood hostage, this time covers a new character who flamed out long ago, a zombie, a paranoid street character whose fate pierces the veil between the focused alt-bristle and a coda of vast distortion. As an (accidental) 9/11 song, not “about” 9/11 but of it, the paranoia in “Karen Revisited” helps set the stage for the culture of fear and distrust stoked by Fox News and other reactionary media of the aughts. Reading the track from right to left, end to beginning, you get the slow-rolling cloud of confusion first and then the narrative kicks up into a clockwork habit.
The sky on the cover is what the sky grew to look like that day. It was sunny and clear in the early morning, and even as the towers sent channels of inky smoke up in windborne diagonals just across New York Harbor, the teasing cusp of fall was cruel in its tranquility. Later, the sky was a dull pasty white, an old napkin fraying pulp into the lower atmosphere. It was hard to breathe. We were advised to take shelter inside and so we did, netted in our thickets but fragile like the Cronenbergian organs of the strawberry.
