0 Sonic Youth, "Titanium Expose" (1990)

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After Daydream Nation thoroughly crossed my wires, "Titanium Expose" took a while to sneak up on me. I didn't care either way about the major label thing but I was never a particular partisan of its home, Goo, aside from the fact it's square in the middle of their great years. So it's good. In fact, it's very fine. But it's also when it started becoming a matter of sorting out hits and misses. Always some of both in Sonic Youth albums for many years—still, actually. For the longest time "Titanium Expose" was one of those fine points, that song near the end. In the CD era of listening to one-sided or scrambled sequencing it seemed more work always to distinguish one from another, or they could blur. Anyway, this is where I get all rock star-crossed. Swoon, high as a kite, did that just happen? See also The Year Punk Broke, opening shot. What it felt like and what it was like. That's found nearly pure in scattered passages of the 6:25 "Titanium Expose," floating up for maybe a minute altogether, when it's wound up right, when the pounding suddenly turns sublime, ecstatic, throbbing, powerful, etc. Life force, alive. At about the 3:50 mark, and the best of it lasts 20 seconds there—20 seconds good for a lifetime's faith. Here's where the breaking bread happens. All the good adjectives. I've heard it so much I have a hard time hearing it any more. It's already over and done, and I missed again (at least on a conscious level) it. But it's part of my brain or psyche now anyway. "Titanium Expose" will always have a place.

Detail: Sonic Youth, "Titanium Expose" (1990)

0 Angelo Badalamenti, "Twin Peaks Theme" (1990)

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I have a lot of memories and associations with this, not least how much the Pacific Northwest has become my home. I remember how exciting and what a novelty it was at that time for something with such a high profile—and so interesting—to be explicitly set in this region. Then the TV show itself turned out to be such a sensation, so weird and freaky and funny all at once, and became associated with strangely high spirits and anticipation too (compare The X-Files). But my favorite moment with all this happened on a winter night many years later, in those bad Bush years, when I stepped into a late-night bookstore insomniac and bleary and they had just started playing the Twin Peaks soundtrack album. I could not figure out what it was. It was the most beautiful feeling, a prolonged extended déjà vu. I became acutely aware that it was raining outside and very dark, but the lights of the storefronts across the street were visible, bars and a pharmacy and a pizza takeout. And of things like how the rain streaked against the window and what that did to the lights and what it sounded like when cars or now and then a truck drove by. It changed the whole scene and mood and I surreptitiously watched the other patrons, who sometimes seemed to be moving and swaying to the music. I suspect, musicologically speaking, it's pretty primitive stuff. Yet so evocative too. I skulked around the bookstore some 20 minutes and finally gave up and had to ask the clerk what it was. The answer was not surprising.

Detail: Angelo Badalamenti, "Twin Peaks Theme" (1990)