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Sonic Nurse isn’t the culmination of that development — it’s simply another very good, very Sonic Youth album that seems to have come along at just the right time. It’s an album you can feel comfortable with, maybe even cozy up next to. Vaguely melancholy minor-key guitar melodies are layered over the sensual drive of Gordon’s bass and the simple swing of Shelley’s drums until the strings of Moore and Ranaldo erupt in brief firestorms of overdriven discord. Gordon whispers bittersweet nothings, as sinister as they are seductive, on "Dude Ranch Nurse" and every other song her voice touches. And Moore plays the part of the Beaten poet, chewing through the trash heap of history and spitting out bits and pieces of crumpled verse that recast the American Nightmare as a "Dripping Dream" on the disc’s longest (7:46) and most characteristically Sonic Youthian track. It all ends in a gently building hurricane of hope and horror called "Peace Attack," a song clouded by the current of both events and amplifiers.

Just how far a "Peace Attack" can penetrate the fabric of our culture is difficult to gauge. It’s hard to imagine its reaching even a tenth of the viewers who voted for the latest American Idol. But that’s not the point of Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse, or "Peace Attack." I don’t often pay much attention to music videos, but the Corporate Ghost DVD, perhaps unwittingly, reveals a lot about Sonic Youth and, in a somewhat circuitous way, gets at the point. In 1990, the year before punk broke, Sonic Youth commissioned Tamra Davis (who went on to have success as a mainstream filmmaker as the director of Billy Madison) to shoot a video for the first song ("Dirty Boots") on their first major-label album (Goo). As the band play a club on the Lower East Side, a grunge girl in a pre-Nevermind Nirvana T-shirt and a flannel-wearing slacker dude find true love in the mosh pit. The feel is that of an after-school special, and it comes off as a reflection of a romanticized idealism Sonic Youth have for indie/underground culture in general. In fact, the band took the unprecedented step of commissioning relatively low-budget videos for all of Goo’s 11 tracks instead of putting all the cash into one MTV-friendly cow, giving a number of then-aspiring film and video directors a nice boost in the process. And perhaps because so much of Sonic Youth’s music has such strong abstract instrumental leanings, their songs lend themselves to cinematic video treatments that support rather than undermine their artistic mission.

"The fact is, we started in a community that was heavy with visual artists," Moore offers. "I mean, Kim and Lee both came out of art schools. And the downtown New York music scene we were involved with included a lot of visual artists going to where the energy was, which was punk rock. It was a cross-cultural thing of performance, music, and visual art. Our first gig was in a gallery. Clubs wouldn’t book us because we didn’t know how to play regular rock. So when video first became some kind of medium, we were right there. Signing to a major label just gave us more resources for that. It can be expensive to do a video. But we never thought of it that way. I mean, the first manager we worked with after we signed to a major had, as one of his strictures, the idea that we needed to make an expensive video for MTV primarily to sell records. He didn’t want us to think of video as art. He thought that was a wise thing to say. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Fuck this bozo.’ I refused to go that route. So he was history."

Any great outfit is more than the sum of its individual parts. But when you watch the videos and the commentaries on Corporate Ghost, it becomes apparent that Sonic Youth have transcended even that measure by reaching beyond music to incorporate artists working in other media as part of a larger mission that succeeds in, as Hornby put it, "the increasingly tricky art of making us glad we’re alive." And though it offers only anecdotal evidence, "My Sonic Room," a bonus clip on the DVD filmed at home by teenage fan Patty Orsini in 1990, confirms that Sonic Youth aren’t merely preaching to the converted. Orsini traces and then paints the Raymond Pettibon cover of Goo onto her bedroom wall as she waxes poetic about her devotion to Sonic Youth while admitting that, like most kids of her era, she grew up listening to Michael Jackson, Ratt, and Tiffany. It’s heartening to think that, as Kim and Thurston prepare to confront the large crowds of Lollapalooza this summer, there are kids like Orsini in towns across the country who given the opportunity would make the transition from Britney Spears and Limp Bizkit to Sonic Youth, even if Ranaldo’s hair is a bit grayer than it was in 1990.

"You really can’t underestimate the intelligence of youth culture," Moore says. "I even think a lot of people in the mainstream music industry now have a desire to present authenticity rather than packaged material, be it Avril Lavigne or Justin Timberlake — that strata of superentertainment. Really, in a way, I don’t even think of that as music culture. It’s just another high-profile business/entertainment industry that doesn’t relate too much to what goes on in day-to-day music culture. It’s misleading, I think, culturally to represent that as the voice of youth culture. And I think that’s becoming apparent."

That optimism, in part, is what led Sonic Youth to accept the invitation to join this year’s two-day Lollapalooza festival (their previous appearance with the show was in 1995) as one of the first night’s headliners. "Lollapalooza was offered to us with the vibe that ‘Well, you guys aren’t going to want to do this, but, you know, it’s there if you want to.’ And I was like, ‘Let’s do it.’ I mean, it looks like this year they are trying to go for something that’s more akin to what they started out with, which is celebrating music that’s a bit more on the margin of the mainstream."