Mondegreen Youth


                                                       On Late Night With David Letterman, 1992 (NBC)
On the cusp of twenty years after the release of Dirty (July 21, 1992), I checked to see if my belief all that time was correct to the effect that on "100%" Thurston Moore is singing "the zoftig chick is mine".

NOTES:
  • Written about the shooting death of band friend Joe Cole.
  • "100%" was the first single from Dirty. Its video features SY performing at a house party of sorts, interspersed w/ some skateboarding footage.
  • Performed on Late Night w/ David Letterman on September 4th, 1992. Paul Shaffer and the house band backed SY on a high-spirited, explosive rendition. Thurston attacked his guitar with a drumstick while Lee went one further and mawled his guitar with a baseball bat. Even Paul joined in, pushing his keyboard off its stand at the end of the song. Not to be outdone, Thurston ends up falling flat on his ass, then hopping away while Letterman comes to greet them.
  • Jim O'Rourke played guitar on this song while he was in the band.
First, I ran into numerous lyrics sites, and a few message boards, rendering it as "he's off to check his mind" (31,900 results at Google).

Then at SonicYouth.com I saw the official word confirming that the "zoftig chick" version is correct after all (97 results).

Safety in numbers, "mind"-"check"ers? 329 to 1 - but with the Zoftig One composed of 1/4 Thurston, 1/4 Kim, 1/4 Lee and 1/4 Steve, a mere 329 couldn't stand a chance. 

100% indeed.

But against such otherwise Goliath odds, what would we expect in leveraged, branched-Davidian victory from a band that, responding nine years earlier to the early pans of a famous New York rock critic (and, after their first four years and throughout the succeeding twenty-four, all but consistently A-/A/A+-granting reviewer of their work), renamed the live version of "Kill Yr Idols" "I Killed Christgau With My Big Fucking Dick"?*

*For another essay in the gen(i)t(all)y humorous side of 1980s Christgauviana, see the capsule review of the Great White album Twice Shy to which the self-anointed "dean of American rock critics", in the annual late-fall Turkey Shoot edition for 1989 of his monthly "Consumer Guide", gave ... (Village) Voice.

My two favorite SY tracks, from Goo (1990) and Dirty, respectively.

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