Flower (Sonic Youth song)
single by Sonic Youth
"Flower" is a song by American alternative rock band Sonic Youth. It was originally released as a 12" single (listed as "Flower (Use the Word)") in 1985 by UK record label Blast First, with "Satan Is Boring" as the B-side. This version was quickly withdrawn at the band's request. In January 1986, Blast First and the band's American label, Homestead Records, both released "Flower" as a 12" backed by "Halloween"; the first run of the UK edition was on yellow/orange vinyl. Blast First also issued the song as a 7" single in edited form, retitled "Flower (Anti-Fuckword Radio Edit)", with a backwards version, "Rewolf (Special Natas Mix)", on the flipside.
"Flower", "Halloween" and the studio version of "Satan Is Boring" were all later included on the Geffen Records CD reissue of Sonic Youth's 1985 album Bad Moon Rising.
Background
"Flower" and "Halloween" were recorded and mixed at Radio Tokyo in Venice, California in January 1985. "Satan Is Boring" was a collage of live material recorded at concerts in Rotterdam and Aylesbury in April 1985.
Cover controversy
The cover of the January 1986 Blast First 12", a "smudged black-and-white photocopy of a topless model in a downward-gazing pose" taken from a calendar and previously used in Thurston Moore's fanzine Killer, caused a major controversy with Blast First's distributor, Rough Trade Records. In a section on Blast First from his book How Soon Is Now?, Richard King said of the "Flower" cover,The sleeve was a copy-shop approximation of the kind of sleeves Raymond Pettibon was producing for the SST label in California: illustrations of blank-eyed characters of SoCal suburbia inhabiting empty spaces, both physical and mental, that despite their best efforts, consumerism and sex couldn't fill.
“Flower (Sonic Youth song)” enters the record as single by Sonic Youth. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Flower, Sonic and Youth can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3394612. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Flower (Sonic Youth song)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.