Seventh grade for most people is super-awkward.
I was no different.
While it’s tough to remember perfectly, I do recall it junior high to be a greatly uncomfortable time.
And yeah, looking back on it, I was a huge herb.
Sixth was cool: I wasn’t sexually aware yet, They Might Be Giants were my favorite band, I had my little brother do somersaults for my “Bring Your Pet to School Day”.
But seventh sticks out. Girls started getting boobs, voices started cracking, unwilling things started happening downstairs. (Sample thought: “Please Mrs. Hall, don’t don’t DON’T call on me to come to the board. Damn my pants are tight.”) Adding insult to injury, one of our gym teachers made a group of us come up with a choreographed dance to a song of our choice. Seriously. You imagine what that can do to a little guy’s self-esteem when he has to get in front of a group of his peers (read: girls) and dance. At the time, I was way into Nirvana and some of the bands that Kurt liked, including Sonic Youth. My friend Kenny started me and my buddies on them and Goo was pretty cool to me with its terrifying feedback squalls and occasional hot-chick vocals. Long story short, Kenny, my future high school bandmate Layton, and I did the hand jive (no shit) to “Mary-Christ”. It’s the first thing I think about every time I hear Goo, something so ingrained and irrepressible, no matter what I could have hoped to do. I just picture myself red-faced with the song blasting over the shitty gymnasium speakers adding another layer of weird grime due to the echo and a crusty tape dub. (I should note that I stopped listening to Goo until senior year in high-school out of sheer embarrassment every time I heard it. Yeah, I’m a wimp, I know.)
Listening back now, it’s not all that hard to see why an inexperienced, Nirvana-loving teenager would like a band like Sonic Youth, particularly Dirty and Goo’s version. The songs here are skewed pop, angry enough to communicate on that level, groovy enough to make the listener feel cool and arranged in a way that made the kid dreamer think this type of thing might be possible even with his untalented self. The songs can be punky (“Titanium Expose”), aggressive (the second half of “Dirty Boots”) and definitely hip (“Kool Thing”), all things that angst-y suburbanites want in music as a replacement for their dull, monotone lives. I guess being honest, it’s kind of what I still want from music every once and a while.
On a grander scale, while it never hit the wide range audience that it was supposed to, SY’s Goo still stands tall as an accessible moment in a sometimes impenetrable and difficult discography. Goo is something of a leaping point for getting into high art-rock and the avant-garde due to its feedback swirls and hardscrabble noise elements tempered by grunge-era melody. And if it isn’t for you, well – just play it for your pimply 13-year old cousin with the Staind t-shirt. Maybe they’ll understand.
Seventh grade for most people is super-awkward. I was no different. While it’s tough to remember perfectly, I do recall it junior high to be a greatly uncomfortable time. And yeah, looking back on it, I was a huge herb. Sixth was cool: I wasn’t sexually aware yet, They Might Be Giants were my favorite band, I had my little brother do somersaults for my “Bring Your Pet to School Day”. 
From the first icy cool bass drum and oxygen deprived vocal snippet that graces From Here We Go Sublime, it’s clear that minimalism is at play here. I’m going to take that a step further and be honest: minimalism in house, (tech-house, whatever) in and of itself, is flat out boring. Electronic dance music was made for ecstatic moments. So when close to the 2:00 mark during this record, a weird vocal breakdown plus wave-em-like-you-just-don’t-care synth starts pumping, it’s damn near perfect. You have the backbone of minimal house, with its well sculpted drums and the flamboyance of regular old dance music in all its neon glory.