The story goes that both Sonic Youth and the entire No Wave scene they emerged from were largely ignored by the local New York press, right up until Sonic Youth performed a disastrous London show in October of ’83–their guitars out of tune, their equipment malfunctioning, the band visibly frustrated on stage–that the British press misinterpreted as intentional and genius and wrote rave reviews about, such that by the time Sonic Youth landed back in New York, there were lines around the block for their next show.

The pressure was on them, then, to repeat that same self-destructive, feedback-heavy performance every night, which swiftly burned them out. So when they reconvened to record their next album in the Fall of ‘84, they re-tuned their guitars and changed their equipment so they would be unable to play their old songs, and thus force themselves to write something different. The result was 1985’s Bad Moon Rising, the first of four “classic” ‘80s releases^[1]Along with EVOL, Sister, and Daydream Nation. that made them alt-rock legends, transcended their No Wave origins, and set them on the eventual path to a major label contract (which in turn convinced Nirvana to sign with Geffen Records in 1991, and the rest is history).

However, this narrative has always slightly confused me, because 1) they kept on doing self-destructive, feedback-heavy performances for the rest of their long career (here’s one they did in 1998); and 2) to my untrained ears, Bad Moon Rising sounds more like a doubling-down on the dissonant dread of No Wave, not a departure. Frankly, it sounds harsher than their self-titled 1982 debut (where the guitars, if still atonal and menacing, actually have a very clean sound to them), and is at least as abrasive as their second record Confusion Is Sex (the one they played at that career-making London show). It would be on all their later albums where they would finally commit to traditional Pop-song structures–e.g. verse-chorus-bridge, recognizable guitar-riffs, etc.–not this one.

Of course, you can also choose to just ignore all this inside-baseball nonsense, because Bad Moon Rising, as both its title and Wicker-Man/Jack-O-Lantern cover art indicates, is a wonderfully haunting album on its own merits, one perfectly suited for the Halloween season, irrespective of how it supposedly fits in the band’s larger chronology or self-mythology.

Yet it’s also important to emphasize that their initial goal with Bad Moon Rising was not to make a Halloween album at all (they only included their U.K. “Hallowe’en” single on the CD reissues, not the original vinyl pressing),^[2]Of which there’s also a fun Mudhoney cover. but a protest one. It was written and recorded during Election ’84, when Ronald Reagan barnstormed to the biggest landslide victory in U.S. history–winning 49 out of 50 states–this, despite presiding over the Recession of ’82, slashing taxes for the rich (accurately termed “Voodoo economics” by his own running-mate George Bush during the 1980 GOP primaries), quadrupling the national debt, cutting Social Security, deregulating banks and causing the massive savings-and-loan crisis, suppressing unions, ignoring the AIDS epidemic, tearing out the solar panels from the White House roof and defunding the EPA, building neutron bombs and expanding the military-industrial complex, and openly supporting dictatorships, death-squads, and terrorist groups across El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iraq, and Afghanistan; all that, and his worst crimes—Iran-Contra, flooding the inner-cities with crack to fund the same, abolishing the Fairness Doctrine, Operation Ill Wind, and the HUD, EPA, Wedtech, and Lobbying corruption scandals—were still to come in the immediate future.

But then, once someone wins a clear majority vote like that, they naturally feel like they have carte blanch to do whatever they want, legal or no, don’t they (as we have again observed very recently). Sonic Youth were certainly under no illusions that Reagan would be any better behaved after that landslide victory, and Bad Moon Rising reflects that ominous mood. The fact that so many of their fellow Americans failed to see the looming danger^[3]And would not only never hold him accountable for his crimes, but later name a freaking airport after him did nothing to improve their humor.

Of course compared to nowadays, the scandals of the Reagan administration feel downright quaint, even trivial! Reagan after all, whatever his other numerous faults, also actually stood up to Russian aggression, was welcoming of Mexican immigrants in his rhetoric, signed into law MLK Day, mostly avoided tariffs, didn’t alienate every single one of our allies, never raped a minor, never raped anyone, never visited a sex-trafficker’s island, never sent Federal troops to invade U.S. cities, never tried to violently overthrow U.S. democracy, never used the FCC to cancel late-night talk-show hosts who made fun of him, was thick-skinned and an articulate speaker, and had a warm, charming persona over all.^[4]Also never shit into his Depends constantly. If I must have an ex-actor Republican president who continually flouts the law, explodes the deficit, and cuts taxes on the rich for no good reason, at least give me Reagan! He at least seemed competent. The dark vibes of Bad Moon Rising almost seem wasted on 1985, since they far better match the vibes of 2025.

But then again, Reagan was the canary in the coalmine, wasn’t he, for how much criminality these so-called “conservative” and “independent” and “moderate” voters were willing to swallow further down the line. Just in the one decade from Nixon’s resignation to Reagan’s re-election, these voters demonstrated a drastically increased tolerance for the number of scandals they could excuse and ignore, and that trend has only worsened exponentially down to the present moment. Indeed, Sonic Youth doesn’t even bother mentioning Reagan or any specific GOP policy anywhere on this album, because these election results for them were but a symptom of something far larger and more sinister.

No, the true object of their ire was the members of their own generation, who notoriously went from aligning with the free-spirited young hippies of the ’60s, to the self-centered “Me-Generation” yuppies of the ’80s, all without any apparent introspection or self-reflection in the interim. This shift especially infuriated the band, because unlike their Gen X peers in the ’80s American underground, the core members of Sonic Youth were actually Baby Boomers themselves (Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, and Thurston Moore were born in 1953, 1956, and 1958 respectively; the “Youth” in their name was always semi-ironic). Hence, they had real childhood memories of the 1967 “Summer of Love,” when the romance of the “Peace, Love, and Joy” hippie movement hit its zenith.

As such, they also grew up to watch the dream of the Summer of Love go sour in real-time. The name Bad Moon Rising is itself an allusion to the old Creedence Clearwater Revival^[5]As a sidebar, it is certainly worth noting how much influence CCR had on early U.S. Punk; the Minutemen, for example, also covered a CCR song on ‘84’s Double Nickels on the Dime. hit of the same name, released just two years later in 1969–the same year that the hippie-derived Manson Family committed the Tate-LaBianca murders in southern California. Indeed, the album’s lead single, “Death Valley ’69,”^[6]And arguably the only normalish song on the record. is a direct reference to Charles Manson himself, who marked the moment when the “positive vibes” of the counter-culture curdled for good.^[7]And my word, that wild Banshee cry from guest-singer Lydia Lunch at the end! The fact that the band’s vocals are normally so deadpan makes it all the more frightening.

For the members of Sonic Youth, the murder-spree of the Manson Family was not a creepy one-off on the margins of an otherwise well-meaning hippie scene, but the true harbingers of what was soon to come.^[8]The title of their next album EVOL—LOVE spelt backwards—is also about the failures and betrayals of the hippie dream. The robber barons of Silicon Valley today—those faux-libertarians now openly supporting government surveillance, algorithmic censorship, AI replacing humans, and fostering cults-of-personality—also arose out of the same Bay Area as the hippies (were often ex-hippies themselves), and that not by accident: those self-aggrandizing hippies were always going to turn out to be monsters. Just look at how the majority of their generation voted less than 20 years later.

And again at how they voted another 40 years after that. It was ultimately not the “good vibrations” hippies that took over America, but the Manson ones: large swaths of the American electorate today now display Charles Manson’s same neo-Nazi^[9]Remember that what Manson claimed to hear in The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” was a looming apocalyptic race war between black and white people—and the swastika Manson carved into his forehead … Continue reading contempt for minorities^[10]It has most certainly not been white illegal aliens that ICE has been targeting for mass deportations to Salvadoran and Floridian prison camps. and human life in general^[11]e.g. cutting cancer research funding, slashing USAID, opposing free lunches for poor children, basically doing the exact opposite of everything Christ commands in Matt. 25:34-46, etc., his same toxic narcissism, and that same fanatical adoration for a sociopathic sex-fiend^[12]Release the Epstein files. they are more than willing to kill for (just ask Melissa and Mark Hortman, John Hoffman, Josh Shapiro, Paul Pelosi, Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, Gaige Grosskreutz, all those cops assaulted by the January 6 rioters, etc., etc.). We are all in the Manson Family now.^[13]Nor was Sonic Youth alone in these sentiments: the Dead Kennedys‘ very first single in 1978 was “California Uber Alles,” a tongue-in-cheek satire of then-governor Jerry Brown, … Continue reading

Moreover, Bad Moon Rising‘s cover art is I argue a subtle allusion to the 1973 British horror film The Wicker Man, about the denizens of an isolated Scottish island heavily coded to seem like sympathetic, free-spirited hippies, only to be revealed in the end as members of a murderous fertility cult practicing human sacrifice (the fact that this film came out only four years after the Manson murders doesn’t feel coincidental). Except here on Bad Moon Rising, the wicker man has now been superimposed onto a city skyline at dusk, because the cult has now infiltrated our very metropoles and darkened the nation entire. The death-cultists have moved from the fringes to the mainstream—in fact even worse. The cultists in The Wicker Man only sacrificed one person for the harvest, while during COVID these same voters were willing to sacrifice at least a million lives for the “economy”.^[14]Don’t @ me about this, the official total U.S. death toll from COVID-19 is 1.1 million, which is almost certainly an under counting. From 2017-2019, the annual death count in America was … Continue reading Again, we are all in the death cult now. All this was prophesied from the beginning.

And I do mean from the beginning. For of course none of these evils are remotely new–nor did they begin with Reagan or Nixon or Manson or anything as laughably recent as that–which the band acknowledges via the album’s most challenging, haunting, and atmospheric track of all, “Ghost Bitch.”^[15]Also, don’t ever @ me about swearing again, not after the vulgarity so many of you voted for. The penultimate verse features a reminder that the United States entire was founded on the original sin of Native American conquest, theft, and genocide. Kim Gordon murmurs:

“And the sweat on my skin
Our founding fathers laid right down
An Indian ghost from long ago
They gave birth to my bastard kin…”

But the problem is that the dead were never properly buried; that “Indian ghost” continues to haunt us, despite all our vile attempts to erase and silence it. Our country was founded on white-supremacist violence, from African slavery to Native American genocide, which is why white-supremacist violence continues to endlessly reassert itself today; our mass failure to acknowledge the same continues to haunt and oppress us today.

D&C 58:43 reads, “By this ye may know if a man repenteth of his sins—behold, he will confess them and forsake them.” That is, if we want to put that vicious ghost to rest, then we must finally and collectively confess our sins, repent, and forsake them^[16]We had a chance to do so after the George Floyd protests of 2020, but utterly failed to rise to the occasion.—which is of course the one thing we stubbornly refuse to do. But we must repent, collectively and individually; otherwise, this same bad moon will continue to rise over us, again and again and again.