Hot List Hits and Misses: Sonic Youth and Texas Hotel Records

The Hot List has been a Rolling Stone tradition since 1986. All this week, Rock Daily takes a look back at the people and trends that stayed smoking and the ones that cooled off. Today, we visit 1989.

Hot Hit: Sonic Youth. 1989 was an interesting year which, according to Rolling Stone was ga-ga for the cast of Heathers, spandex fashion and fax machines in cars. But that year's hot band was Sonic Youth, who had already wowed the music world with Daydream Nation and were about to sign on to a major label. This year, the band celebrated the 20th anniversary of Daydream and are currently prepping their new album. In between, they have remained an indie cornerstone, bringing morphing, jagged noise to the populace at large.

Hot Miss: Texas Hotel Records. The little label that started as a record store and morphed into a label, the company did distribute some early Rollins Band records and was the company of choice for cultish singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt. But the tiny profile in 1989 talked about two projects that never took shape: a Michael Stipe solo project (which never came to fruition) and the buzz around Texas Hotel band Poi Dog Pondering (who eventually signed to Columbia, then never got any bigger). Texas Hotel Records closed in 1996.

Related Stories:
• Thurston Moore at All Tomorrow's Parties
• Album Review: Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation
• Album Review: Poi Dog Pondering, Poi Dog Pondering

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Song Stories

“Too Close”

Next | 1998

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'" 

More Song Stories entries »

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