I did consider an index, but an index would have defined it more as a book dealing with this kind of historical data, which it certainly does, but I didn’t want to take away from it being a book that, for me, was primarily dealing with the act of writing. It was all about wanting to write something long-form. As a writer, my fantasy was not so much to make, like, a double album, but to actually publish a long-form book. To accomplish that was a big deal. So to put an index in there would have in some way gone against the purity of it being a writer’s statement. That was my own personal feeling, but I appreciate that critique.

Talking about somebody like Jeff Wall, MacKaye, and these connective tissues between subcultures that enter the history of what you’re trying to put across: I wish I could have written more about that. I realized as I got into editing, especially with my editor at Doubleday, that the more arcane that information was, the more difficult it was to keep. They were campaigning for a fairly digestible read. What are you going to do? I think the drummer of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band self-published a memoir that was like 1,800 pages. [The music journalist] Byron Coley was reviewing it, and he was like, I love every detail of what happened in the Magic Band, but my god, it was just like every day [laughs].

It’s a balance of both those things. It’s really about communitarianism. I realized early on that that was what interested me about being in a band and, by extension, being part of a scene of bands where that scene was like-minded yet very diverse. That was always very interesting to me early on: this community of dispossessed people. It was a microcommunity of people interested in these arcane ideas. These ideas have a history of informing mainstream culture — not always, but sometimes — and certainly they did with rock at the beginning of the 1990s, with Nirvana going supernova in mainstream culture. But that was never part of the agenda. It wasn’t even part of Nirvana’s agenda. To see something like that happen is both fascinating and harrowing.

I don’t think even Steve Albini disparaged the success of Nirvana because that initial blow up happened organically. The corporate label realized what was going on and was able to put all this investment into it, which probably wouldn’t have happened with Sub Pop, K Records, or SST. It was always celebrated, especially with the realization that it was not part of the band’s agenda at all. But it was very conflicting for them psychologically when they found themselves in this place.

In some ways. We never thought we were helping bands. It was a little more self-serving than that. We thought those bands were doing interesting work and that turned us on. It was this idea of: let’s have them be on the gigs. A lot of it was defined by personalities, too. There were certain bands that I liked, but probably shied away from asking to spend time with us on the road because they might have been difficult people to have around. With that scene of music, there were quite a few difficult personalities. It attracted a lot of spurious and odd-duck people, some more unpleasant than others. But most people in our scene were just great people to be around. We all sort of connected and had our debates and differences.

I read your piece, a great piece.

He had such a singular distinction in the community we coexisted in. I was very close to him in the ’80s. When things started changing from the ’90s onward, we didn’t see each other that much, and he was really caught up in what he was doing. He was definitely incensed by us signing off to a corporate label because he was so adamant about that being the wrong move for anybody coming out of our world. That’s a well-worn discussion and debate. My whole thing was bands should be able to make their own decisions.

There was always this thing of how bands get mistreated, are dehumanized by being on a major label. And I was just like, what is your model for this? With Sonic Youth, we knew enough, we were not going to let ourselves be abused in a situation like that. You have to take care of yourself and be smart about it. Steve refused to take into account our debate. It was always, no, they’re there to completely eviscerate that band. I get it. He would be very scatological about it.

He was hilarious, one of the funniest people. Hanging out with him in the ’80s with Byron Coley was just laughs. You could not argue with him because he was so set in stone with stuff. He was hyperintelligent, and it was always really curious to be around him. He reminded me of Mike Watt where it was this set of principles, these working-class principles. There was a certain personal glory in that, setting them apart. They saw this kind of socialist glory, and their intelligence quotient was extremely high.

Yes, but I never put the feeler out to him. I wanted to with this band I have in London with Debbie Googe, James Sedwards, Jem Doulton, and Steve Shelley. We were coming over to the States, and I had in my mind to get a hold of Steve and record at Electrical Audio but didn’t do it. I wish I had. Nobody saw this one coming. The day that I heard about it, I was doing a book event, and my wife, Eva, told me. I was like, are you sure you’re reading the right thing? I could not fathom it. It was so shocking. I immediately wrote to our mutual friends, what the fuck is going on? It just blindsided the universe, you know?

So count your blessings. [Albini’s death at age] sixty-one is just too young. We talk about the appreciation of community, whatever your vocation is: the world of music, the art world, or whatever the discipline. With him, it was all about community. He was rapacious in working with anybody and everybody, every day, every day making a record for years. There are so many people that he touched.

That brings a bit of joy to it. It’s the whole Jack Kerouac thing, like holy poverty. Embracing that canon, that lineage. To me, books, records . . . these are documents, and a lot of my book is predicated on talking about significant documents that become these connections between people within a community that inform, intrigue, and progress people further into the work that is happening. I wanted to write about these significant documents that were shared by people who didn’t know each other, like somebody in Melbourne like [JG] Thirlwell.

When I met him later, we realized we read and listened to the same things growing up, but we didn’t know each other. We lived on different parts of the planet. The Stooges and Patti Smith. He was like, you know, these are really, in the grand scheme of things, minor documents. Why did they connect with all these different people? This whole world of punk and post-punk and art punk sprang forward from it.

Those seeds were really interesting to me. I wanted at first just to talk about those signifiers. In editing, there was too much of it. A lot of the book was originally a lot of record reviewing. I just started writing about those things [laughs].

I also knew that books and records are perennials. They can become obscure, but they don’t ever really vanish, especially in the culture now where everything is transparent in the shared digital library of the world. You can’t really make anything invisible. Even things that were once completely obscure and arcane are now being rediscovered, and everybody has access to it. It’s kind of great. In fact, it’s amazing. I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to actually see footage of [the jazz guitarist] Sonny Sharrock playing in 1968 from French broadcasting. It’s like I finally lived long enough to see that.

I did not want Sonic Life to be something that contained negative energy. I know that’s a bit hippy-dippy-ish, but I took that seriously. I wanted this to have benign energy. I think that’s important right now, especially in resistance to so much negative energy that’s being parlayed in our culture. I really wanted it to stay as celebratory as possible.

I read something by Patti Smith once where she talked about herself as a music writer. It was about her being a writer who wrote these celebratory pieces that were very prosaic and very infatuated with the subject. They were never like what most male critics did, taking apart or analyzing the work. It was all about what the work did for her emotionally and how it informed her as a writer. I was always interested in that, this music writer who actually transitioned into being a musician, who crossed this threshold, this wall between the critic and the musician. It had been done before, but not to the extent that she had accomplished it. She has always remained a very good writer all throughout her music career. She has been the most significant model for me with this book. She represents something I find completely significant.

I participated in the zine culture in the ’80s and ’90s, which was a certain genre. Albini certainly fit into that. He was just brutal, you know? But it was funny brutal. It was hilarious brutal. But to be on the other side of that pen was just like, yikes. Byron was the same way. They had great fun. It was like tripping somebody and laughing. These guys were rock critic thugs. But they were also into this idea of an equal playing ground and trying to get a rise out of people because the music itself gets a rise out of people. Why can’t our writing get a rise out of people? The music is harsh and ugly sometimes. Let’s write something that’s really harsh and ugly about this music that is harsh and ugly and take it to task and be serious in our critique as well, coming right out and saying it.

He put his money where his mouth was. There was a true sense of anarchism, there. I always thought of him and Byron Coley the same way. Those two guys really were good friends. Ian MacKaye is a little bit like that, too. But Steve would always say, I am really going to express what I have on my mind; I’m going to have fun doing it, but it’s going to get me in trouble. Later in his life, he realized, it’s not my place to hurt other people. Hurting other people is not cool, from a place of white male comfort.

That kind of realization you wish you thought about when you were twenty-two. But nobody thinks about anything when they’re twenty-two. I get people asking me, can we do a compendium of your fanzine from the ’80s? I had a fanzine called Killer, and it was very typical of what was going on with Steve. When I went back to it, it was so puerile. There’s no way anybody’s ever going to read this again. I’m sorry. There are some copies out there on the fanzine market, but I don’t want that to represent me at all. That’s just the way it is when you’re twenty-two and you’re just being a loudmouth in a scene full of loudmouths, and you’re all showing off to each other.

It seems like every week there’s some anniversary for some record that I did [laughs].

There was no discussion to produce a record that had more “political” content to it. What was going on in the political landscape then was actually fairly calm. Today is much worse. With the [Ronald] Reagan years and the Soviet Union, it was [Mikhail] Gorbachev, so there was this softening of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. We had visited there. We did a bit of a tour there when Gorbachev was in power. We saw how harsh it was; whether that politicized us or not, I’m not quite sure.

In some ways, the record was more about our own selves. Getting older, we were in our thirties, but coming to terms more with the politics that we were seeing by traveling the world. Certainly, misogyny was a very big part of it. The feminism in Kim’s writing: it’s really significant on that record. Writing a song like “Teenage Riot” was about the complacency of slackerism that was coming into youth culture and being talked about. There was this thinking going on, but I don’t think we were ever thinking about writing a record that had more of a political bent to it. The fact that it’s called Daydream Nation, though, and the fact that it had this burning candle on the front, there is a lot of signaling going on there, I agree.

All of this was very happenstance. I think that record was in some ways like all Sonic Youth records. There was never any discussion about what a record was going to say, even when a record, in retrospect, could be looked at thematically. It never had a genesis of being thematic.

When we did Murray Street ( 2002), we had Byron Coley write our press kit release, and he came up with this idea that Murray Street was the second installment in a trilogy pertaining to the socioeconomic landscape of New York City. He came up with this whole, full-blown story, and we were like, what are you talking about? We published it, and as we went out and did our campaign for the record, everyone said, so this is the second album in a trilogy that you’re doing. It was just like, yes, it is. So there was this playful invention of history.

Music and art communicate ideas that are not articulated in any other way. That has always been interesting to me, that there’s this otherness that cannot really be defined. There is connective tissue that pulls things together and moves things around in ways that are metaphysical. I really love Philip K. Dick, and I like the kind of religiosity that is in his work because to me that is where the fiction of the science fiction comes in, you know? You start getting into this kind of metafiction, and it makes life that much more interesting. I would not want to think that everything has a scientific answer.

I realize that. We were a band that came to represent this kind of egghead culture. At first, I really wanted to be populist. I wanted to have one guitar and play hardcore with the hardcore bands because there was something in me that was about direct action. I found a lot of power in that. Things should have more clarity. There should be less experimentation. It would appeal to more people, which is always something you want. If I’m in a band, it’s all about attaining as much profile as you can, so more people respond to you. That’s part of the value system of being in a band. There was a realization of what that value was. I thought about that in a lot of ways.

Henry Rollins, in his inimitable way, referred to Sonic Youth with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche where he said something like, intellectuals muddy the waters to make them seem deep. I was like, what does that even mean? I had a realization that I’m really into intellectual concerns. I also think that rock and roll is all about being people’s music. Why can’t people’s music have intellectual rigor? To me, that’s all about being an experimental rock-and-roll band.