Sundays make Listening Post want to talk about Sundays. Earlier, we wondered if The Velvet Underground’s "Sunday Morning" was the greatest wake-up tune ever. Today, we’re wondering if Sonic Youth and Macaulay Culkin are the strangest video pairing ever.
"Sunday" was the loudest, most conventional rock track on Sonic Youth’s 1998 effort A Thousand Leaves, but it was the second version of the tune to be released. The first landed on the soundtrack of Richard Linklater’s 1996 film subUrbia, which itself was an adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s play. It starred Giovanni Ribisi, Parker Posey and Nick Zahn, but by the time 1998 rolled around, it was director Harmony Korine and Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin who were repping doomed hipsters. It still skews strange, ten years later, watching Culkin and Thurston Moore bang their heads in slow-motion.
Especially since there is nothing slow about the track: It rocks holy hell. It’s an odd juxtaposition, but Harmony Korine is all about that, which is one reason why he was able to coax Jason Pierce back into the studio to finish off Spiritualized’s recent effort Songs in A&E. Pierce returned the favor by scoring Korine’s newest film Mister Lonely, which is about a Michael Jackson lookalike lost in Paris. The gloved one? Currently lost in the Middle East, and a one-time friend of…Macaulay Culkin.
The circularity is powerful, kind of like Sonic Youth’s "Sunday." Got more tangential video pairings? Hit us below, daydream nation.
