Sonic Youth Stick Up For Mariah Carey

A track on Sonic Youth’s new album ‘Sonic Nurse’, initially titled ‘Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream’, is sure to reinforce their viewpoint on the often ludicrous nature of the music industry. “We had to change the name of the track for the album, we’ve changed Mariah Carey to Kim Gordon for legal reasons,” guitarist Lee Ranaldo tells The New Zealand Herald. “The song came about at the time when Mariah was being dropped by her record company, Virgin, after they’d spent $80 million to sign her to the label. It’s a comment on her as a pop star, but also it has a lot to do with that situation where a label signs an artist that sells 15 million copies of an album, then if the next record only sells five million copies they think the artist is a failure all of a sudden and they give them the boot. It’s so ridiculous the way the labels think about this medium that is supposed to be art. It’s just so crassly commercial and commodified.”