Sonic Youth

The lust in Macaulay Culkin’s eyes and on his rosy-red lips was moist and palpable. … I never believed I would write such a sentence, but if you’ve seen the Harmony (Julien Donkey Boy) Korine-directed Sonic Youth video “Sunday,” featuring the guy voted most likely to be left home alone, you understand. Corporate Ghost compiles the band’s videos since signing to Geffen in the early ’90s. The directors include A-List filmmakers like Mark Romanek, Spike Jonze, Tamara Davis and Todd Haynes, as well as a Sofia Coppola acting cameo wherein she plays Joan Crawford. In the fascinating DVD commentary, Lee Renaldo remarks that Nick Egan’s videos (“Sugar Kane,” starring a pixie-haired Chloë Sevigny, and “Youth Against Fascism”) were the band’s closest concession to MTV-style clips. Oddly, it’s Egan’s contributions—replete with magazine clippings and photocopied shreds—that best reflect the band’s cut-and-paste obsessions with pop culture. The world would be much less fun were it not for this band rabidly shoving drumsticks and screwdrivers between detuned guitar strings and bending the once rigid pop song into an experimental, new, spooky frontier.