2nd place

My favorite Sonic Youth album cover is Machine Washing because...

more than all other SY album covers, in a somewhat sad way, it is visually unforgettable. I wouldn’t say haunting, exactly, but there is something about that clipped picture of those two geeky young lads with their matching t-shirts. Faces shown incompletely, their smiles just visible: these were the semi-troubled youth of the day. They are the kids that picked up the viola in middle school, but always kinda liked the squeak more than the perfect notes. Sonic Youth’s position in the rock galaxy is at once encapsulated and made awkwardly real in these two young lads.

Sure, Goo features an amazing, and yes, haunting image, and of course Daydream’s candle is iconic, but there is something about the Washing Machine cover that captures the unpredictable nature of the band and their aesthetic. And I don’t pretend that Washing Machine is my favorite SY album. It really isn’t. I would take Daydream Nation any time. Sister is amazing; Goo has its moments; Murray Street was a lovely little surprise. I could continue with analysis of the picture and the album, but ultimately my appreciation of the Washing Machine cover is more rooted in the personal. Let me explain:

In the mid-nineties, I was a college student at a particularly nerdy university in the American Midwest. Sonic Youth had gotten their hooks into me many years earlier, with Daydream Nation and Sister serving as cornerstones to the soundtrack of my adolescence. They coexisted with such luminaries as NWA, Guns and Roses, Public Enemy, and Soundgarden in my cassette player, but were pretty much a personal affair. The recordings made their way to me via strange pathways, and were not something I felt comfortable sharing. During my teen years , I hid my Sonic Youth obsession from most. After a certain number of closed sessions, I was reluctant to ever share the experience of listening to all three sections of the Trilogy at full volume on the family car’s stereo. It was mine.

In college, I met a lot of smart people, most with way, way more cultural wherewithal than myself. I met kids from New Jersey who had never heard of Sonic Youth, and could’ve cared less about them. I met cool cats from Manhattan who knew of Sonic Youth, but were loath to ever demonstrate that they ever cared much about any particular band or show or play. And I met a dude from New Orleans who had been reared on the pop culture of the US, plus Schumann, Shostakovich, the Rebirth Brass Band, and Wynton Marsalis. He knew essentially nothing of the little, hidden-in-plain-sight indie culture that I had embraced.

Before Washing Machine came out, I had been working long and hard to get my New Orleans friend to accept Sonic Youth (along with the other jangly, deliberately strange music that I liked). I never liked most of Kim’s songs. Some of the Kim songs I really loved, but on the large I gravitated to the songs sung/composed by Lee or Thurston. My friend only really paid attention to Sonic Youth when I introduced him to Washing Machine. He seemed to find some sort of personal bliss in Kim’s line "here’s a quarter, go put it into a washing machine." It was a point of bonding between us; we had finally discovered a rich area of musical common ground. After that, it was much easier for us to share music that we loved.

After some time in college, as Washing Machine matured as a recording and we considered its influence on us, my friend came forward with something that, in retrospect, we should have acknowledged long before: The two dorky young fellows on the cover of Washing Machine resembled us. They really did. Especially us during the early years of our college experience, when I was the lanky, baby-faced tall kid and him the cherubic, more rotund counterpart. We have since endeavored to take pictures that would recreate that cover...but it will never really work, and we both know it. We’re both too old now. We’ve developed more facial hair and a tiny amount of gravitas. We can’t pass for these kids anymore.

But we don’t need to pass for the kids, and thankfully we can no longer pass for these kids. The album cover endures, immutable as we cannot be. The kids have aged, too, and we can amuse ourselves thinking about what they are up to. Do we share more than good looks? What kind of careers have they pursued? Do they marvel at what is perhaps the biggest tribute a band could possibly give to a pair of fans? Aw, who cares? I’ll take the nostalgia of that moment and enjoy it. Washing Machine’s art is good, oddly timeless, unforgettable in its own right. It stands for something all SY fans understand: it stands for the viola’s awkward yet occasionally beautiful squeak, it is Sonic Youth.

-Jordan (in Sri Lanka)