Cool Thing would be a great special name for a Frappacino

Thurston Moore has - perhaps unsurprisingly - decided it's wrong to have a pop at Sonic Youth for tying up with Starbucks:

The Starbucks thing was our idea. It was born of frustration, trying to get our label to sell our records. When you're in a band like Sonic Youth that's not on the radio or on TV, you want to try to get your record out there. I saw Beck's record [in Starbucks] and other adult-contemporary CDs that aren't, like, No. 1 pop records, and I just thought there's a large part of our catalog that would be accessible to people. I thought, "Why don't we get some of the people in the media who name-check Sonic Youth to choose their favorite songs, and then put them on a CD?"

Sorry... did he just say "other adult-contemporary CDs"? Did we miss some sort of reclassification of Daydream Nation?

There's no difference between working with Starbucks and working with record labels like Universal and Geffen. It's a knee-jerk reaction from PC watchdogs. I mean, really, which long-distance company do you use for your cellphone? Are you on the grid? If you're off the grid, I'll listen to you.

But... if you're off the grid, you won't be able to contact him! Ha! He's beaten you.

While it's not that disappointing to see the Youth working with Starbucks, it's almost heartbreaking to see Thurston Moore throwing "PC watchdogs" around with a note of contempt, like he was Little Richardjohn.

After all, it's not exactly right to draw parallels between the majors and Starbucks; while the record labels tended to grow by buying out competitors, Starbucks' growth came at the expense of smaller operators, run out of town by the dual challenge of a company able to swamp cities with branches and the economies of scale just not available to small shops, and evil though most major labels are, they've not actively sort to screw the Ethiopian economy out of about ninety million dollars.