It was only a matter of time before Sonic Youth got the full-on rock bio treatment. They’ve been one of the most important forces in underground music for the past 25 years and they inspired a generation of alternative rock bands in the ’90s. Also, their fans are intellectual (read: they like to read). Enter “Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth,” by David Browne, a former music critic at Entertainment Weekly, who has penned previous volumes on Jeff and Tim Buckley (”Dream Brother”), as well as the rise of extreme sports (”Amped”). His current book grew out of a series of interviews he’d done with Sonic Youth over the course of several years, plus an intense bit of research for a 2002 Entertainment Weekly article.

Here’s some info on the book:

In a recent interview with the Washington Post, guitarist Thurston Moore said this about the book:

I read the galleys but I haven’t gotten the real book yet. I did see it in the bookstore and saw the photos; that was amusing, to see the way we looked in 1980. I’m flattered that anybody would do a book on us in any capacity. When David Browne approached us with the fact that he had a deal to do this book, we were like: “Cool.” He seemed like a nice enough guy; we’d done interviews with him before. He really wanted to do a very detailed book on us and we gave him many, many hours.

But it’s a little hard for me to read about our history, because there will always be these kind of episodic gaps. “This happened and that happened.” But I have yet to read anything about us that talks about the kind of intellectual atmosphere, the intellectual life that we have with each other, that connects with the contemporaneous culture that we involve ourselves in. It’s sort of there in that book, which gives some perspective to it. But it doesn’t really. It’s hard to capture something like that, which is such an abstract.

You can order the book and preview a few pages from Amazon.

RELATED: Organic Anti-Beat Box Man | Her Name Was Bullwinkle