The Boy Who Cried Freebird by Mitch Myers Read Free Book Online Page B

that Sonic Youth were paying tribute to the conceptualist avant-garde, and most of the tunes were “composed” during the 1960s.
    I say “composed” because there’s a lot of noise involved, and if not for the electric guitars, you wouldn’t even know it was a rock band playing. Still, the night was passing slowly and I couldn’t sleep, so I listened to the (misguided) Youth perform compositions by eccentric artists like John Cage and Yoko Ono.
    Now here’s the thing. Sonic Youth display a succinct understanding of the abstract artistry that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century, and while the music doesn’t have a real backbeat, it does contain some interesting textures and effects.
    Using sampling, discordant guitar riffs, tape loops, and other electronic noises, Sonic Youth embrace the groundbreaking reconsiderations of the ’60s avant-garde by way of intangible atmospherics, repetition-of-sound-as-art, atonal colorings, and white-noise-as-entertainment.
    So, by the time Tower Records opened the following morning, I was a changed man.
    You can imagine the staff ’s surprise when their first customer of the day emerged from the classical section rather than the street. But there I was, standing at the checkout counter with a batch of CDs bycomposers like Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, Steve Reich, and James Tenney.
    Now, don’t tell anyone, but I kept a copy of Goodbye 20th Century in my pocket when I left the store. I mean, you’ve got to be a little bit of a rebel in this world, don’t you?

WHO WILL SAVE THE WORLD?
    It wasn’t just another terrorist threat; this one had the country completely in its clutches. Aliens indistinguishable from humans were unleashing deadly clones into the population. The White House had reverted to a shadow government, sequestered in bunkers and communicating to the nation from undisclosed locations.
    At first there was panic in the streets, but the president gave a speech insisting that people should go back to living their normal lives or else they’d be giving in to alien terrorism. The president reluctantly admitted that the nation’s security forces were baffled as to how to identify the new enemy, but he vowed to find and destroy the alien terrorists by any means necessary.
    The aliens’ weakness might never have been discovered if not for a chance coincidence. The big break came at Forest View High School’s reunion for the class of 1975 in Mount Prospect, a northwestern suburb of Chicago. A DJ was playing old vinyl albums at the reunion party.
    Everyone was having a good time until the DJ put the needle down on “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath. Suddenly, class president Terry Diferio began shaking violently and changed form, revealing his identity asa hideous alien before disintegrating into a bubbling mass of protoplasmic goo.
    Authorities were on the scene within minutes. The police were there as well as the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and several other secret service agencies. Witnesses were interviewed and media coverage was intense. It wasn’t until the same thing happened a month later at another class reunion in Spokane, Washington, that scientists determined it was the analog version of the song “Paranoid” that turned the aliens into mush.
    Despite the government’s efforts to control this information for the sake of their covert war on alien terrorism, news of the discovery leaked onto the Internet and was picked up by the mainstream press.
    People tried downloading “Paranoid” onto MP3s and began burning copies of Black Sabbath’s famous second album, only to find that digitized reproductions of the original vinyl record were useless against the aliens.
    It was then confirmed that first-generation analog copies recorded on old-fashioned audiocassettes could also be used to kill the alien enemy. The fading market for turntables and blank audiotapes