Sonic Youth, "Shadow of a Doubt" (1986)

(listen)

This fascinating sound sculpture is mysteriously focused on Alfred Hitchcock movies—named after one, with plot points from at least one more woven into the whisper-chant from Kim Gordon. In my YouTube travels I found a nice homemade video (here), made out of this song and scenes from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. It is an inspired mashup as indeed is this song itself, potent with popular culture imagery and currents. Yes, the strange tunings, it's always the strange tunings with Sonic Youth. I love them, they always sound evocative and insinuating and lovely to me. I'm convinced it's the basis more than anything else of where people fall on this band. Here it is distilled to one of its purest forms, jewel-hard and gleaming. Compare "Providence" on Daydream Nation. As musique concrete the open spaces are similar but the sense of a narrative is stronger in "Providence." In "Shadow of a Doubt" there is only the sense that a narrative might exist. Or narrative itself—the sense that narrative might exist. "I swear I didn't mean it / I swear it wasn't meant to be / Must a been a dream ... He said / 'You take me and I'll be you' / 'You kill him and I'll kill her' / Kiss me." This is a similar way of looking at things to what one finds in David Lynch movies, dreams and fragments and an idea that narrative might exist, which is probably why the video mashup works so nicely. To close the loop on this, you also find this way of looking at things in Alfred Hitchcock pictures, notably Vertigo, which doesn't so much eschew narrative as grow absent-minded about its existence, distracted by ... something. And Sonic Youth wraps it all up in a beautiful strange noise that goes down easy and lingers to effect. It's as if they knew, as I said once in another context (here). And that guy doing the mashup? Him too.